The metaverse seems to be one of those topics you can’t stop blogging about. There’s a lot going on for sure, the concept is important for sure, and others keep writing about it and raising issues. For example, Light Reading talks about how telcos “marvel at the metaverse”. CNBC says that the metaverse is “off to an ominous start” because VR headset sales shrank in 2022. There have been many other tales, too, and another piece in Light Reading on SASE seems to invite some parallels. Can we navigate this mess?
Let’s start our journey with the SASE angle. According to the LR article, “The telecom industry could certainly benefit from resolving to clear up confusion surrounding SASE.” Darn straight; any industry in fact could benefit from resolving to clear up confusion in almost any new-ish tech concept. That’s surely true of the metaverse, and you have to wonder why concepts like these end up having confused definitions in the first place. PR and analyst firms, I think.
For a decade or more, a product manager or marketeer’s idea of nirvana was “creating a new product category”. If you announced a box or piece of software that fit into an existing category, you ended up being a slave to those who got there earlier and were able to define the category first. Analysts loved the notion too because it let them write another set of reports on the new category. For the media, a nice category name (like “metaverse” or “SASE”) made covering stuff easier. The problem is that haste makes waste, and with everyone jumping out to define stuff it’s no surprise that you end up with definitions in search of clarification.
At a deeper level, these new and loose terms are what I’ve been calling “UFOs”. A UFO is great because, since one isn’t likely to land in your yard and present itself for inspection, you’re free to assign one any characteristics you like. Telcos marvel at the metaverse, of course, because everyone is supposed to, but why in particular should telcos be doing that? Because they see 5G/6 G connections and a long-sought-after driver for new revenue from those services. Who guarantees that will happen? Nobody, but a metaverse is a UFO, so you can say what you like.
The CNBC story says that because artificial or virtual reality headsets have seen a sales dip, the metaverse is in trouble. Well, that could be true depending on what UFO-like characteristics a given vendor or provider happens to have assigned to it. CNBC is apparently taking Meta’s social-metaverse view, and that’s pretty clearly linked to VR headsets. But remember the “industrial metaverse” I blogged about earlier this week? You don’t need VR headsets for that, and it may well be a bigger contributor to the future of the metaverse concept than Meta’s own vision.
The problem with meta-fuzziness is that it risks a loss of credibility for a whole universe of concepts that might, in fact, not even belong together. Remember that we have another concept called the “Internet of Things” or IoT, and our industrial metaverse might be an IoT application. We also have the concept of “digital twin”, and that could be what industrial IoT is based on. Or maybe the metaverse is a digital twin and we shouldn’t be using a different name for it. Or maybe it’s virtual reality. We have at least three or four concepts that are kind of rolled into the “metaverse” term, and none of them are precisely defined either. Most of the “things” in our IoT reality, for example, aren’t on the Internet.
There are legitimate reasons for adopting collective terms, and they boil down to the question of whether the collection is actually a functional whole. Read Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” and you’re introduced to the concepts of kakrasses and granfalloons. The former refers to a group of people who are meaningfully if not always obviously collected, and the latter to groups that have no significance, only a name. The metaverse concept is valuable if it’s a karass, a significant grouping of functional elements that generate a higher-level something. All the current confusion over metaverse definitions, elements, or features is proof we haven’t achieved that yet. Today’s metaverse is a granfalloon. If that’s the case, then we either need to firm up our metaverse concept or stop using a collective term for something we can’t define as a real collection of stuff. In software terms, if we can create a metaverse architecture, then metaverses are meaningful.
Why do we have a term that we can’t really make into a karass? It goes back to the marketing angle. In today’s world, it’s common to announce things before they’re real, often even before we know how to make them real. Another thing I told consulting clients over the last couple decades applies here; “The truth is a convenient place from which you launch a good marketing fable.” Suppose you forget the launch pad and just concentrate on the fable part?
I think that a metaverse architecture can be defined in such a way as to include the missions that we normally assign to a metaverse, and also some missions I believe are related. A metaverse is first a collection of digital twins that represent semi-autonomous pieces of a real-world system. Second, it’s a model of models that describe the nature of that collection. Third, it’s a telemetry and control framework that synchronizes the model with the real world, taking data from the real world to alter the model state into correspondence, and taking changes to the model and communicating them to control elements that then bring the real world into synchrony with the mode. Finally, it’s a visualization framework that allows the model to be externalized, including making it or an abstraction of it visible to people.
You could visualize an implementation as a collection of “black boxes” or objects, each representing something, linked by APIs. If we were to define the objects and APIs, we could allow any implementation that met the specifications as being a conformant piece. Thus, a full specification of the architecture would allow people to build on an open framework and would not demand all implementations of each object be open-source.
The challenge we face, metaverse-wise, for 2023 is who might define the architecture. I don’t think that a working approach would be difficult to create, one that handled what we can visualize in the way of missions now, and that can be extended if we missed something. But who spends the effort? Meta, maybe, if it does spin out of Facebook overall, but would they just focus on the social angle and miss the rest? The cloud providers are probably a better hope, and I hear that all of them are at least exploring the question.
It’s tempting to see the metaverse as an evolution of a failing social-media-ad-sponsored past, and while that still may be an option it’s not likely to generate enough revenue in the near term to sustain technical investment. That would be short-sighted in my view, because the metaverse is the way forward for IoT and digital-twin concepts overall, and it’s those areas that hold near-term promise. We might see progress, even convincing progress, in 2023, and if we do then the metaverse could be one of the year’s most important developments.