OK, I guess it’s time to ask (and of course, try to answer) the question “How many metaverses are there, anyway?” It’s clear when you read about the metaverse concept, and also watch a growing number of metaverse-related commercials, that the answer is greater than one. How much greater, and what’s creating both the diversity of metaverses and the confusion over how many there are? Let’s get to the answer part and see what emerges.
The “original” metaverse was the invention of Meta, but only in the sense that Meta created an application for virtual reality technology that had been around for quite a while, particularly in gaming. What Meta envisioned was a virtual-reality successor to Facebook, a virtual world that was even more immersive, even more entertaining, and even more profitable. This metaverse, which I called the “social metaverse” is still IMHO what Meta sees, but the technology that it would depend on isn’t being revealed in detail.
We know from gaming that it’s possible to create a virtual world that can be represented in VR glasses. We know that in this virtual world, a player has a “character” or avatar, and that the behavior of the avatar is at least in part responsible for what the player sees. The player is represented, in short, by the avatar. We also know that multi-player games allow for multiple players with their own avatars, and that means that what each player sees is dependent not only on the behavior of their own avatar, but that of other players. Meta’s social metaverse, then, is an extension and expansion of this basic model, and that has both a business and technical challenge.
The business challenge is getting massive-scale buy-in by the same people that made Facebook a success. Early experiences have been disappointing to many, probably most, because they lack the kind of realism that any virtual world has to offer to be comfortable. Gaming, you may realize, is enormously resource-intensive at the GPU level, to the point where some advanced games can’t be played on anything but the most modern and powerful systems. You cannot have that sort of power as a condition of metaverse adoption or you’ll disqualify most users and all mobile users, yet without it you face the lack-of-realism problem.
That’s part of the technical problem, but not all of it. The other part is that a broad community like a social metaverse will likely have to present users with a virtual world that has to be synchronized to the behavior of users who are literally scattered to the ends of the earth. How is the composite view of a specific area of the metaverse, what I’ve been calling a “locale” constructed, given the differences in latency between that place and the location of each of the users? This challenge means that the “first cost” of metaverse deployment would likely have to be quite high even when the number of users was low.
Meta seems to have caught on to this, and their recent commercials have been emphasizing what’s almost a metaverse of one, or at least one of “not-very-many”. That takes out of the realm of social metaverse to what could be called an “educational” or “limited” metaverse. School children interact with woolly mammoths, doctors visualize a patent’s innards, and so forth. These applications are much easier to coordinate and implement, one reason being that you could assume that users were co-located and even that there might be some central “locale” processor that would do a lot of the heavy lifting on visualization, allowing client devices to be simpler. This is our “second metaverse”.
In parallel with this, we have our third metaverse, emerging from a totally different mission and set of backers. The “industrial metaverse” is something that’s intended not to create a virtual world but an accurate model of a part of the real world. In the industrial metaverse, the elements are not a mixture of a computer-generated place or places in which some user-controlled avatars interact, but rather a “digital twin”, a representation of real things. That elevates the question of how those things are synchronized to what they represent in the real world. I’ve had a number of conversations with vendors on the industrial metaverse, and a few with enterprises who realize that their “IoT applications” are necessarily creeping into the industrial metaverse space.
All of these metaverses have two common elements, the synchronization piece and the visualization piece. Sometimes visualization means exactly what the term usually connotes, as it would in the first two metaverses, and sometimes it means “exploiting” or “realizing” the model of the virtual world in some other way, like controlling a process or moving something rather than knowing it moved. Sometimes synchronization means modeling relatively simple behavioral movements of many users or a few users, and sometimes it means taking a complex manufacturing process and making a computer model of it. It’s been my view that this commonality means that we could consider all metaverses to be products of a common architecture, perhaps even of a common toolkit.
This is the thing I’m afraid we’re missing, the thing I think hurts us most if we do miss it. Three models, how many vendors and approaches, and where do we have a real, provable, opportunity? Talk about silo problems; metaverse could generate them in spades. And that doesn’t even consider what a unified metaverse might be essential for.
Do you like the idea of smart cities? Without a metaverse concept behind them, what we have is a bunch of autonomous cells and not a brain. Do you believe in robotics on a large scale? How will they behave in a real world that can’t be represented in a way AI can interpret? Speech to text, text to speech, chatbots, image processing, and a lot of other leading-edge stuff can only progress so far without having a means of using each technology within the context of a real-world model. I think we’re focusing too much on the virtual-reality part of the metaverse concept. Even Meta, trying to bring its own concept forward, is still obsessed with the metaverse as a virtual world for humans to inhabit. It is a virtual world, but the best and most valuable metaverse applications may not have any humans in it, and may not even require visualization.