Metaverse-wise, I’ve got good news and bad news, and they’re actually the same news. We seem to have gotten some momentum up for an open metaverse concept, and there’s both a Linux Foundation and World Economic Forum framework being put into place. That’s good because we need an open metaverse, but bad because collective processes like these tend to advance glacially, and because I don’t see clear signs that either initiative has really grasped the essential piece of the metaverse concept.
The WEF initiative is part of their “Global Collaboration Village”, which it says is “the first global, purpose-driven metaverse platform to enhance sustained multi-stakeholder cooperation and action at scale”. While the metaverse focus is explicit, the details suggest that what’s really being established is an ad hoc group that will be working to create an open metaverse model. That, to me, suggests that there’s little chance of near-term results being created.
The press release I’ve cited suggests that what’s really happening here is the creation of an “extension of the World Economic Forum’s public private platforms and in-person meetings and will provide a more open, more sustained and more comprehensive process for coming together”. In other words, this is an application of the metaverse concept to the specific mission of collaborative support. That’s a valid application, but it’s not the foundation of what we need, which is a general model of metaverse-as-a-platform.
Not to mention the question of how open the concept will be. Accenture and Microsoft are the partners of the WEF in building this, and both these companies are tech giants who have their own profit motives to consider. One has to wonder in particular whether Microsoft Teams, which is a key collaborative platform already, might either be integrated into the approach, or whether the metaverse collaboration might end up as a Teams enhancement.
To me, this particular initiative is perhaps an early example of “metaverse-washing”. Collaboration isn’t the metaverse, just a small application that in fact is largely related to the “social-metaverse” concept that frankly I doubt has much near-term utility. There are just too many pieces needed for it, and those pieces are somewhat disconnected from the more general metaverse platform requirements. This will likely raise metaverse visibility but not advance it in a meaningful way.
The Linux Foundation initiative, called the Open Metaverse Foundation, addresses at least the openness requirement. The OMF is “home to an open, vendor-neutral community dedicated to creating open standards and software to support the open, global, scalable Metaverse.” There are eight Foundational Interest Groups (FIGs) defined at present, and while all of this is (if anything) more in the embryonic than even the infancy stage, they seem to be more related to requirements-gathering than to architecture creation.
That raises the big question that any metaverse collective is going to have to address, explicitly or implicitly. Have we accepted the notion that the “social metaverse” model, meaning a virtual reality space in which users “live” and “work” is the sole objective for the metaverse? It seems to me that question has to be addressed explicitly, and neither of these initiatives really seem to be doing that, though both seem to come down on the “Yes, that’s the metaverse” position with respect to the virtual reality model. I think that’s a big mistake, or at least a big and risky assumption.
“Virtual reality” is fine as a metaverse foundation, if we relax what we mean by “reality”. To me, a metaverse first and foremost is a digital twin, a virtual, software-managed, model of some real-world system. There is no need for a metaverse to represent humans at all, and surely no need for the virtual reality to be user/human-centric. A virtual world and a virtual reality are different; the former is a subset of the latter despite the more inclusive-sounding name. A factory assembly line is a virtual reality, and so is a warehouse, a building or home, a road or intersection, a conference room or a totally artificial structure, city, or even world.
Architecturally, then, a metaverse is a model that is synchronized in some way with elements of the real world. Those Elements (let’s call them that for now) are “objects” in the traditional sense of software objects. They’re also “intent models” or “black boxes”, which means that they assert a set of properties that allow them to be manipulated and visualized, but their contents are opaque from the outside. Thus, an Element might be a singular something tied to sensor/control technology, or it might be a digital-twin metaverse in itself. The OMF metaverse foundational interest groups include the “Digital Assets” group, but rather than focusing on things like animation as the example on the OMF website does, the group should be working on the metadata and APIs that represent the properties and interfaces that are exposed.
The reason I’m raising this point is that it’s fundamental to preventing the problem that seems to plague, and eventually stymie, all these collective efforts at open standards. You have to constrain the problem or it’s unsolvable. The platform architecture of the metaverse, the presumption that it’s a model populated by digital twinning and manipulated through a set of APIs and parameters/metadata, is a constraint. Accept it explicitly and you can then populate those FIGs with meaningful goals that add up to the creation of a generalized model. Constrain architecture properly and you can un-constrain mission and application.
The opposite is also true, of course. If we don’t constrain architecture properly, meaning base the notion of a metaverse platform on the most general vision of “virtual reality” which is the digital twin concept, then we are going to end up constraining the mission set because everyone’s view of what “reality” is will color their contribution and create, in some way, a consensus direction.
If you look at the Discord group dedicated to the OMF, you see what I think is an example of this. There are gamers, programmers, etc. but the dominant interest is VR, which means a social-metaverse slant. I see that in the FIG selection too. Given that, there is a visible risk that what we could classify as “assumption inertia” will lead us to a metaverse model that’s not going to cover the real scope of metaverse applications. That’s not as bad as an explicit turn in the wrong direction, but it’s still bad if our goal is an optimum metaverse future.