The Metaverse vs. Metaverse(s)
When most of us think about the Metaverse, we envision of a single, interconnected 3D network much like we have with the 2D Web as originally portrayed in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash novel. Unfortunately, the mega-companies are each creating their own inoperable metaverses with their own avatars, ecosystems, and currencies. Remember Facebook’s Libra coin? See my previous “Metaverse v1.0 is Already Here” article for more details.
Today, our metaverse conversations seem to be centered around Meta (formerly known as Facebook), Microsoft, Epic Games’ Fortnite, and Roblox metaverses. Tomorrow, we’ll be talking about the Disneyverse, Magicverse, Walmartverse, and every major brand trying to control their own experience. In fact, Rony Abovitz (MagicLeap’s founder) refers to this metaverse instancing phenomenon as XVerses.
How do we get our vision of a single metaverse back on track?
We need engineers working on the Gravatar version of 3D metaverse avatars. This effort should be conducted as an open source project and should probably be based on blockchain technologies and open APIs for allowing users to setup their metaverse avatar once and bring it with them to any open metaverse space that participates like we did with gravatars based on email addresses in the Web 2.0 days. In addition to a user’s avatar, this open platform should allow the user to bring their inventory of NFTs with them into any space. This would include wearables for their avatars, swords and inventories, art, etc.
With respect to avatars and identities, we will need the ability to have many personas. For instance, we may need one (or more) for our professional lives i.e. work and a few for our personal lives, hobbies, and projects as well as the ability to be 100% anonymous like the Web offers today.
We need a common currency for the metaverse. My initial thought is to use an ERC-20 Ethereum token since they are widely accepted but the gas prices (transaction fees) on Ethereum are currently too expensive. Perhaps there is a good open source “sidechain” that could be used without taking sides or creating yet another mega-company in the process.
We need a common ecosystem for the metaverse. This reminds me of the “open plugin architecture” that we built for Octoblu back in the day for interconnecting disparate IoT devices. Think of an open API for the existing Web-based metaverse.
It would be even more amazing if we could build the metaverse as a decentralized platform from the very beginning — no mega-company owned clouds or databases — maybe even a new interlinking TLD domain i.e. “.verse”
We either need the W3C to get involved with guidelines and standards or we (collectively) need to setup a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) with publicly agreed upon smart contracts that govern the World Wide Metaverse (WWM) publicly.
Sooner or later the virtual reality (VR) version of the metaverse will extend into the real world via augmented reality (AR). With respect to the metaverse.ar or real world metaverse or spatial web, we will need platforms like XRPA.NET and the Open AR Cloud to develop decentralized XR Browsers and XR Cloud platforms for “pinning” Web content in the real world. Note: I’ll write a few articles on this topic in the near future.
Like The Internet, The Metaverse will create millions of new jobs first building it and then working in it and then playing in it. Like The Internet, I for one don’t want it to be owned or controlled by a mega-company. Feel free to join my metaverses Discord channel to participate in this conversation.
