I think it’s pretty clear that Meta knows its “social metaverse” concept has a few too many moving parts to be available quickly, and so to help their bottom line. I think that competitors like Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon know that, which is why gaming companies are getting M&A attention. I think that a different set of metaverse applications are going to lead in its adoption, and the question is whether these applications will tap off so much value that the ultimate social-metaverse vision won’t arrive at all. The technical question is what differentiates social metaverse from multi-player games.
The short answer, as I pointed out in THIS blog, is the concept of “locale”, the term I used to describe a virtual “place” where avatars representing people can assemble to interact. The essential concept of locale is what the name suggests, which is localization. We see a slice of the world around us, limited by the features that bound our visual field and our ability to recognize and communicate. We might see people a half-mile away, but we can’t recognize them or talk with them. My locale is a zone of interaction, and those whose avatars are within it can interact with my avatar.
What I’m calling a “social metaverse” is a translation of social-media “friends” into a form of locale. The problem that can create is that people have a lot of social-media friends and if a mass of them assemble in some virtual place, the behaviors of each of their avatars have to be maintained in synchrony or the result won’t be realistic for some, most, or perhaps all.
What differentiates multiplayer games from social metaverses is that the game framework defines the locales, and can (and usually does) limit the number of players who can inhabit one. In addition, games typically impose behavioral constraints on the avatars, and the players are made to work within them. The game sets the framework of interaction, and players have to follow it, limiting their behavior to it. In social metaverses, the presumption is that the players have fairly unlimited interaction potential. You can see that by the fact that Meta releases guidelines on how closely avatars could approach each other, presumably to prevent inappropriate interactions in the metaverse. All this means that games are easier to synchronize than social metaverses.
Meta’s recent focus on educational aspects of the metaverse have the same effect as multiplayer games have on limiting interactions. A simple educational metaverse, like the example of learning about dinosaurs, is really like a one-player game, something I described as a “metaverse of one”. Here there is no issue with interaction because only one player has a representative in a locale, everything else is generated.
But not all multiplayer game models dodge the potential issues of realism and synchronization. If we imagine a player in New York and one in Japan, it’s easy to see that the latency accumulated by the combination of the connections and the processing of the shared locale appearance would be significant enough to mean that even simple interactions (shaking hands, helping to move something) could be rendered awkward and unrealistic by latency.
All this seems to be leading to a shifting of priorities with regard to metaverse. Rather than creating a virtual world (which some, particularly startups, have indeed done), the bigger players are working on making virtual reality more realistic. Think for a moment about mirrorless cameras, which are sweeping the market even in the prosumer and professional levels. If the viewfinder doesn’t render a fairly realistic image, with no significant lag when the camera or the object moves, the photographer will value the camera less, likely enough less to consider staying with the direct-optics system of DSLRs. The same thing is true with virtual reality glasses; if you don’t get a realistic sense of presence with them, then the whole experience is compromised. And VR glasses are thus essential for even metaverse-of-one experiences and surely for multiplayer games. Everyone is now working on a VR strategy.
And no one is working, really working, on the issue of synchronization realism within a locale. They’re defining applications whose locales are limited naturally so they don’t have to. The question is whether that’s a limitation that will eventually evolve away over time, or whether the real value of the metaverse doesn’t and won’t lie in the social-metaverse model at all.
The problems with creating a realistic social metaverse with minimal limitations on the number of users who might populate a locale relate both to the assembly of a “reference model” for the locale and the synchronization of the views and behaviors of each user with that model. Each user has control over their respective avatars, which can move about subject to any behavior constraints the metaverse might impose. If there is no reference model shared by all users, then there is no way of obtaining per-user views that will be consistent, which means users could not interact because they didn’t see the same things.
It is possible that where users were distributed regionally, “sub-models” for each region might be used to aggregate the synchronization of all users within the region with a reference model. However, this could increase the latency associated with updates to the reference model, and also potentially with the distribution of user views. I think it’s clear that in the optimum approach, each user would interact with the reference model to update the user’s avatar representation (location, motion, aspect, gestures, etc.) and to receive current views of the locale based on the avatar’s representation within it (if the avatar is facing north, it can only see what’s north, for example, and it could not see someone or something behind an opaque object).
The problem of the reference model and interaction with it relates to a combination of processing resources and message latency. The more populous the locale, the more complex the reference model and the derivation of per-user views would be. This alone would impact the cost of hosting the reference model. The more geographically diverse the user base is, the more latency and latency variation would be experienced, making synchronizing behavior within the locale more problematic.
My conclusion based on these points is that a social-metaverse system that does not limit the population of locales, the range of behavior within each locale, and the geographic distribution of the users whose avatars make up the population would require highly meshed sites with a low latency between any given point in the service area and the hosting point for the reference model. Providing this mesh networking is obviously beyond the power of a metaverse provider, or even a single ISP, so it would come about only through a general modernization of global network connectivity. That could likely arise only because each operator saw an opportunity associated with the modernization, either from the evolution of “local-to-them” metaverse activity or through broadening acceptance of a social metaverse.
That raises the biggest question for the social metaverse, which is whether the concept has any real value. Meta’s Facebook application has suffered from competition generated by platforms like TikTok, which are considerably less immersive. Facebook, as some of my young friends tell me, is almost a commitment unto itself. Twitter and TikTok are more episodic, meaning they’re well-suited for casual and occasional interactions. It’s hard to imagine a metaverse that’s not immersive, so can a social metaverse compete? Is a social metaverse, even if technically possible, likely to create any advertising payback? Finally, is any form of social networking that can generate ad payback going to end up having to be immersive, which will then make it eventually fall prey to less immersive alternatives?
Shades of biological systems, but it sure seems like the only path forward for the social metaverse is evolution. Emergence of metaverses with limited locales could gradually expand within the footprint of an operator, and in that limited application could perhaps encourage improvements in latency and deployment of edge resources. That could lead to federation among operators, much as the Internet has, and an eventual network/compute framework suitable for even the most extravagant social metaverse.
If anyone wants to live there.