The metaverse took a step (in some direction or another) with the formation of a standards body called “The Metaverse Standards Forum” (a more technical view can be found HERE). Meta is unsurprisingly initiating the move, with Microsoft support, and other tech giants like Adobe and Nvidia have joined. The body offers the potential benefit of broad engagement, essential if the pieces of the metaverse ecosystem are to be made available. It also creates risks, some immediately obvious and some more subtle. Let’s look at both.
According to the prevalent definition, the metaverse concept is a virtual-reality framework within which people interact through avatars. I’ve proposed that the term be extended to cover “metaverse-of-things” applications which use virtual reality concepts to model real-world processes and systems. Whatever definition you like, it’s clear that metaverse success depends on creating an immersive VR experience that’s tightly and accurately coupled to the people, processes, and things it represents.
Meta, as I’ve noted in the past, likely has the resources to do, or induce, the necessary things, but that would surely exacerbate political and anti-trust pressure. The notion of a standards group is smart, because it defuses any claims that Meta is pushing proprietary technology to close off the metaverse market. Even if many companies decline to join (Apple and Google have done that already), the offer is still a powerful tool against complaints or legal action.
Meta, of course, is still primus inter pares as they apparently said once in Rome (first among equals) because they represent the largest, most credible, early metaverse deployment and the one most likely to become the centerpiece of the whole movement. That affords them to frame a model that at least meets their social-metaverse requirements. Many other players with goals that are limited to pieces of metaverse technology or to peripheral metaverse applications will be happy to fall in line. Most who aren’t will likely follow Apple and Google, and probably won’t join.
Truth be told, the arguments that Wall Street favors to justify a view that Apple’s failure to join is an issue seem specious to me. The fact that an Apple VR headset would compete with one from Meta is an issue only if we assume that a broad VR success wouldn’t end up building a market large enough that both players would benefit. However, it does raise the question of the value of openness, a question Apple and Meta both have every reason to think about.
When personal computers first emerged, there was at first an explosion of different proprietary models, including Apple’s. IBM introduced its PC in the early ‘80s, and they took the unusual step of not patenting the architecture. The IBM PC exploded in corporate personal computing, and other companies created compatible systems to take advantage of the growing software base for IBM’s system. The “PC” won out in the market.
Apple created a closed system, with a proprietary architecture they defended against copycats like Franklin. They didn’t win the architecture battle, but there are still Apple PCs sold today and IBM doesn’t sell one any longer. Apple won the Street-value war.
The first question that the metaverse standards concept creates is whether Meta is trying to build a PC or a Mac, whether they’re actually trying to create standards and an ecosystem, or trying to feather their own nest more effectively. We’re not going to know that for a while, since the answer will likely come from the specific direction the body takes.
Which generates the second question, which is “how long is a while?” Standards processes have historically been boat anchors on progress. A camel, so it’s said, is a horse designed by committee, which reflects the challenge of consensus, but there’s an equally important question of how long it takes to create the camel, and what’s been going on in the transport-animal space while the process was advancing. If metaverse standards take a while, then they either stall market progress or they’re bypassed by reality.
A better question for the Street to ask regarding the metaverse standard is whether Meta intends it as a means of advancing an open metaverse architecture, or freezing many players in place while they develop their own approach to maturity, in private. It seems to me that’s one of only two possible Meta-motives, the other being that they really want to accelerate things and will pay nearly any price to advance the open metaverse model quickly. Which is it?
The latter, I think. Meta needs metaverse because the social-media space is fickle. How many alternatives have evolved since Facebook? The value of social media is social, and social value is transient. Meta needs a next big thing that it has anticipated, and whose architecture it will play a major role in defining, because the alternative is another startup that stumbles on the Next Big Social Thing.
The risk, of course, is that Meta manages to define open metaverse and then manages not to profit from it in the longer term. IBM PC, remember? The problem is that not defining an open metaverse may not be a good choice either, because Meta had to raise the concept to keep Wall Street happy, and having done that they’ve created the risk of a competitor. The metaverse standards process at least gives Meta an opportunity to shape the metaverse architecture, and that may be key.
Because? Because, in part, of my “metaverse-of-things” notion. As I said in the two-faced definition at the start of this blog, we could view the social metaverse as a subset of the broader metaverse, one based on digital-twinning any real-world elements and then using the digital twin to do something useful. MoT could revolutionize IoT, for example. Same with collaboration, with worker productivity enhancement. I’ve argued that it would be relatively easy for a big player to define an MoT architecture, and such an architecture would have to be broad and open to be useful because of the scope of things to digital-twin. Digitally twinning humans for social interaction would surely fall within MoT scope. If social metaverses are just an MoT application, then meta has far less chance of controlling how they’re built and how they evolve.
One reason for that is that MoT is likely to focus on “local” metaverses, representing processes, industrial facilities, warehouses, and similar things. Many of the challenges of Meta’s social-metaverse vision, like highly distributed users expecting realistic relationships with their avatars, aren’t significant in these limited-scope missions. Since they’re difficult to address, there’s an incentive for MoT work to conveniently set them aside to make progress. That might then impact Meta’s social-metaverse ambitions.
The real question, then, may be whether a metaverse standard spawned by a social-media giant will support the general MoT model. If it does, then Meta may play an enormous role in defining the whole spectrum of MoT. If it does not, then might Meta’s initiative pave the way for that hypothetical big player to launch an MoT standards group? Might that make it a lot easier for competing social-media metaverses to develop? Wouldn’t Meta support for MoT within its metaverse standard end up doing the same thing?
Meta has set a difficult course for itself here, I think, because they almost have to take the largest possible slice out of metaverse opportunity to ensure that they don’t lose control, but doing that may facilitate market entry by competitors, which means that Meta has to drive its own metaverse investment and progress at breathtaking speed or they’ve blown the whole opportunity. Are they smart enough to see that? We may find out as early as this year.