Any fortune-teller loves it when their predictions come true, but they also love it when others begin to agree with some of their early-stage prognostications. So it is for me (being an analyst isn’t far from being a fortune teller) with the future of the metaverse. A VC-centric publication has picked up on many of the things I’ve said about the metaverse’s future, not necessarily because I said them but based on the view of another of those analyst/fortune-tellers. Could awareness be growing for some of the issues I noted yesterday? Let’s look at what was said and what it might mean.
The basic theme of the piece is one my readers will surely find familiar; the “metaverse” of the future is really about digital twin technology, applied to things other than social media. Since I’ve been blogging about this slant from the start of the metaverse hype (including just yesterday), it shouldn’t be a surprise that I agree with these points. The same can’t be said for everything in the rest of the piece, and my objections there may seem familiar too.
Let’s start with a positive, which is that the article divides the metaverse into three segments, “consumer” (what I’ve been calling the “social metaverse”), enterprise, and industrial. I’m not totally comfortable with the latter pair being different enough to consider them as independent segments, but there is a justification, which I’ll get into in a minute.
OK, let’s now look at some issues I have, starting with the definition. The article offers the following: The metaverse is a confluence of interconnected open platforms bringing the virtual world and the physical space together under a single technology ecosystem.” I’m far from sure that we could call the metaverse a confluence, interconnected, or open. To me, the metaverse is a model of elements of a real-world system, synchronized with that real-world system and used to facilitate control of aspects of that system through control of the model.
You can see from my definition that I believe that the essential element of a metaverse is the digital-twin notion. All metaverse applications will have to synchronize with aspects of the real world and model the relationships of the selected elements. The scope, in a distributed/interconnected sense, of a metaverse then depends on the scope of the real-world things it represents. For wide-scope metaverses, the property of interconnectivity is surely important, and there may be a value to open technology, depending on just what real-world systems the metaverse represents.
In truth, many industrial and enterprise metaverses, and maybe even many consumer metaverses, gain little from openness at the metaverse level. An industrial process is localized, and just as much of the industrial IoT today is linked to the machines used, we could expect the metaverse to be bound to the equipment. To require openness here would be to mandate standardization on which the interconnectivity and digital twinning could be based, and we don’t have that. Our industry has proven fairly ineffective in creating anticipatory standards; we do better trying to harmonize things once we have exemplars from which we can determine requirements and properties.
Even distributed metaverses don’t necessarily have to be open, as long as they can interconnect. We built almost every network today from devices that can interconnect and cooperate but are proprietary. There might actually be a benefit, particularly in “social” and “enterprise” metaverse models, of creating a metaverse by interconnecting proprietary components in a standard way. Competition among implementations could advance the process overall.
The next issue I want to raise with the article is the focus on visualization. At one level, any metaverse is a digital twin process and a model-representation process, but the latter doesn’t necessarily mean visualization is the key element in the representation, or is even present at all. A model of the real world (the digital twin) that, when it’s manipulated, reflects the manipulation results back to the real world depends on the reflection piece, and that in turn depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. If, for example, we had an industrial process we were looking to control via AI, visually representing the model wouldn’t facilitate the control, and it might be more work to visualize it than it’s worth if all you gain is letting a human watch what’s supposed to be a fully automated process.
This point illustrates my issue with separating “enterprise” and “industrial” metaverses. The way that a model is reflected back into the real world, for missions like education or process management, depends on the goal, and it’s a bit elastic. Might a warehouse metaverse, for example, provide a means of visualization given that workers in a warehouse might need to see what a given container looked like in order to ensure they have the right thing? On the other hand, the same application could require that an AI system route a forklift to the place where the thing is supposed to be, taking into account other forklifts in motion, optimum routes, etc.
This now raises the question of the “social” metaverse. Is it really justifiably separate from the enterprise/industrial metaverses? There is, I think, a major difference, and that is that creating a realistic visual experience from a distributed set of digital twins is central to the social metaverse. This is perhaps the clearest application of augmented reality to metaverse thinking, because absent a truly realistic rendering of the distributed model, the whole thing falls apart.
Even here, though, we can find other AR applications in the enterprise/industrial space, most significantly in health care specifically and robot control in general. Remote surgery demands good visualization, and you could say the same thing with remote repair. These applications could demand multiple synchronized AR visualizations and also model-driven process controls, so they may be hybrids of the other possible metaverse opportunity segments. Thus, we could rightfully say that there are three elements to a metaverse: 1) the digital twin model, 2) the process control interplay with the model, and 2) the AR visualization. It’s possible that the latter two may range from being minimal to being highly critical, and the mission frames the relative importance of each. Whatever opportunity segments exist, we can address them with a uniform technology.
Which, according to the article, involves Web3. I highly doubt that Web3 is actually a required element, and in most cases I’m not even convinced it’s a useful element. Unless we redefine Web3 to make it a success retrospectively, the concept is about a distributed form of validation/authentication. Obviously, only highly distributed metaverses would have any need for validation; it’s not a requirement for “industrial” metaverses. It also seems obvious to me that simple ID/password validation would be sufficient for most of those applications. Where a metaverse is created by “federating” different digital-twin instances, it’s hard to see how any would really benefit from Web3 blockchain-based authentication.
So, given my points, why did I bother to highlight this piece in a blog? The answer is that the startup community is all about exit strategies, and so it’s not surprising for it to validate thinking that led to some of the current startups, who will shortly need exits. However, that same community may be essential if we’re to make the metaverse, the realistic metaverse, a reality. It may be a good sign that it’s trying to wrestle some sanity out of the concept, and merge it with some healthy opportunism. As long as it doesn’t get stuck on the thorns of older concepts, that merging could lead to a good outcome.