Fantastic Worlds Coming Our Way: How Metaverses Will Evolve
By Janet Stilson
The cascading crises that the world is facing tear me in two directions. I pay attention to it in a pretty big way. But at the end of the day, escaping into far-flung fictional worlds is even more vital to my state of mind than before. If there were a bookstore version of a deli, where you could order novels instead of sandwiches, I’d be yelling: “Hold the futuristic disasters and smear on something fantastic.”
In a similar vein, I’m fascinated by how super smart people in the real world are building out the future. I got a taste of that, not too long ago, by listening to some brainiacs speaking on a panel session hosted by MIT Media Lab. They chatted about the vast changes in store for metaverses — a term that’s like a shiny new toy that a lot of people seem to be talking about. It’s especially intriguing to me, as I build out my new sci-fi novel about media and technology, which is a sequel to my novel The Juice.
What the heck does metaverse mean? It refers to a convergence of our physical reality with augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and other digital technologies. The virtual worlds experienced today are almost primitive, compared with what metaverses are likely to become.
There are several large enterprises that are actively pursuing metaverse businesses. Companies like Apple, Meta (i.e., Facebook), Epic Games, Microsoft, the computing company Vidia, Snapchat, and gaming platform Roblox. Another company, Spatial, which was represented on the panel by its Cofounder and Chief Product Officer Jinha Lee, has created a free AR app that allows avatars to show up in environments that replicate actual places.
What could that be like? Consider that Sotheby’s has opened a virtual gallery in a metaverse that essentially duplicates its London galleries.
One of the big questions hovering over the metaverse space relates to what companies might come to control it. Will Meta, for example, gain such an early advantage in the metaverse “race,” that it will eventually serve as a gatekeeper, providing experiences that are so immersive, so popular, that it shuts other players out?
Don’t think of the metaverse as just one alternate reality. There may be several of them, and if all goes as hoped, the avatars that people create will glide between the various metaverses effortlessly. In other words, it will give you “the ability to bring your assets, bring your identity, bring your avatar, across a lot of different experiences,” explained Savannah Niles, a product and design leader involved with AR and VR.
That will require certain universal standards so that there is data interoperability. “[It’s a matter of] how this is federated and how it comes together so you can scale beyond any individual view of it [and users can] extend across many different realms,” said Joe Paradiso, a Professor at MIT Media Lab.
The panelists also talked about something that I found a little hard to wrap my mind around: computer files may completely go away in the process of creating these connected realms. “For the metaverse to work, we can’t think on the file level. We have to think on the 3D platform level,” said Valentin Heun, VP of Innovation Engineering at PTC, which creates AR experiences in the industrial field.
“We have to think about how we collide these worlds and create one service storefront next to another one, and how we have a true distributed metaverse that is overlaying the physical world and has deep roots in the physical world,” Huen added.
While game-engine desktop concepts have been used in early versions of the metaverse, they can only take developers so far, explained said, Heun. “We have to build a world engine, something that’s scaled into the world, that’s like the internet but 3D. Probably in another 10 years, we can meet up and talk about that.”
Avatars will become much more sophisticated as well. For example, their facial expressions. That begs a big question: “How do we translate all the cues that we have as human beings when we’re actually with each other — the way that you can take a look and people can read it?” asked Mary Lou Jepsen, founder of Openwater, whose goal is to see deep into the body with the detail of a high-resolution 3D camera.
And there are ways headsets will change, not only in what they’re like, but probably how much they cost. Today, “it’s incredible what they can do; incredible how small they are; incredible the computation that happens,” Paradiso said. However, they can be expensive. “They still come at a sacrifice.”
There are other cost issues as well. Right now, there are only a limited number of 3D artists and developers capable of building all the metaverse experiences. (If you know any tech-savvy young people trying to figure out the best career move, here’s one!) And because they’re in short supply, people with those skill sets are expensive to hire.
That’s according to Dave Meeker, Global Chief Innovation Officer at the Isobar unit within the huge ad agency conglomerate Dentsu International. “There’s a lot of competition for them. So how do we keep moving the concept forward beyond the hype that we’re experiencing now into reality with content creation tools?” Meeker said. “You know what’s going to fund all that? The business model. It can’t just be ad-supported.”
The lack of a viable business model (so far), and enough talent, isn’t stopping a lot of companies. At least a hundred companies are developing metaverse platforms, Meeker noted. He expects that in the next three years the industry will start to pick the winners. In 10 years, he predicts that the interoperability problems should be resolved, and the type of device one uses to access a metaverse — for example, perhaps it might be a contact lens — won’t be that much of an issue.
The hurdles faced today by those involved with metaverse development seem gargantuan, to me. But no one seemed daunted on the panel. Instead, they seem to relish the brain teasers. It’s what they’re all about.
