Primer on ‘the metaverse’
The buzziest term in tech, explained with movies
Thank you to WarwickTECH alum/community members Arthur Safaryan, Elizabeth Lam, Duncan MacMillan and Sam Carter for helping me refine the metaverse definition.
What is the metaverse?
The metaverse is all about virtual spaces and how they’ve evolved over time. A great analogy is Hermione Granger’s beaded handbag in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.
To jog your memories, Harry, Ron and Hermione go on a long adventure and need to store a lot of stuff easily. Hermione uses some charms to make the bag (much) larger on the inside than on the outside, and to make the bag weightless. Just like a virtual space.
In one particular scene, Ron gets himself badly injured and Hermione instructs Harry to get the potion from the bag she needs to help Ron. He can’t dig all the way through the bag with his hands, so he uses his wand (and the right spell) to get the potion.
Think of the bag as infinitely large. Hermione can fit an infinite amount of stuff in the bag, but she can’t fit everything in the bag. She can’t put a tree, forest, or planet in there. Even though she can fit an infinite amount of stuff in the bag, she’d still need a ‘bigger’ bag — just like aleph numbers for the mathematically inclined.
So, we’ve been on a journey making virtual spaces as large and as rich as possible for quite some time now. I think of this as three distinct phases:
- Amazon: Bag — Store, Wand — Recommendation Engine, Tech — Internet
- Metaverse: Bag — Augmented and virtual reality (enhanced by Customuse), Wand — Superlinked, Tech — Blockchain/Tokens/AI/ML etc
- Simulation Theory: Bag — The Multiverse, Wand — TBD, Tech — Quantum computing, for simulating quantum events?
There’s a question here, can we make the virtual space so large and so rich that we can’t tell whether we’re inside the bag or outside it? Let’s leave that to Nick Bostrom for now 👇
How should we think about the metaverse?
So, when we think about the metaverse, we’re really thinking about how convergent emerging technologies can increase the size and richness of virtual worlds. But we already have virtual worlds in a sense, dreams. And this brings us to our next analogy, one of my favourite movies — Inception.
In the movie, DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb and clan use technology to induce shared biological dreams in their targets. The team uses sedatives to make time go slower in the dream state. Time doesn’t actually pass slower in dreams, but it’s a great analogy and an even better movie — so let’s use it.
In the real world, we’re using convergent emerging technologies to induce shared technological dreams. We can think of each of our technologies as sedatives that take us into the ‘dream’ state. They can be used individually or together.
The dream-sharing process is powered by sedatives. The stronger the sedative, the less time you need to spend in the dream to get the same amount done. The first sedative we’re told about is 12x — ‘5 minutes in the real world equals an hour in the dream’. The second sedative, used for the final mission, is 20x.
Technologies act as sedatives. VR is more experiential (i.e. larger and richer) than the AR experience — the sedative is stronger. As such, you should require less time in VR than AR to get the same amount done. The comparison between AR and screens goes the same way.
Where do we go from here?
Sedatives compound. In Inception, the team end up participating in ‘a dream, within a dream, within a dream’ on a 20x sedative. Their 10 flight from Sydney to LA turns into over 9 years spent within ‘limbo’ — the third dream layer.
In our world, we already combine different compounds together. We drink caffeine and then spend our days scrolling through social feeds on screens. As both non-caffeine drinker and someone who doesn’t use social apps, my daily life is markedly different to most others — and I don’t think that using these drugs all day long is sustainable. But that’s a subject for another day.
Now, we’ve been given a new set of sedatives ready to compound. Done right, we’ll be like Hermione Granger, using charms to elevate what we can do with virtual worlds and to solve real problems. But, we need to make sure that we don’t lose ourselves in these virtual worlds first. Dom Cobb got around this with a totem, I expect we’ll need a real world equivalent soon.
This is all just a taste of how we think at WarwickTECH 👀 If you’re an idea-stage startup who’s founding CEO is a Warwick alum then tell us more about yourselves here 👈 If you (or your portfolio companies if you’re a vc) would like to get involved with our annual flagship hackathon WarwickHACK then get in touch with me. Take a look at some of our other portfolio companies including Amica, powering social travel ✈️ (and jet lag — driving our need for caffeine 😅) and Flow Bio, helping the athletic consumer to optimise drug intake for peak human performance 💦
