From two to three
The Metaverse is a persistent virtual reality space. It can be considered a combination of a virtual reality and a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG).
In this virtual world, many users can exist simultaneously and interact in infinite ways. People can play games, work, meet, collaborate, shop, walk, watch movies and concerts, and do everything they could do in the real world, and crucially, the Metaverse interacts with the real world in countless and unpredictable ways.
The Metaverse is viewed by futurists as the next step in the evolution of the Internet from a two-dimensional interactive experience to a three-dimensional immersive experience.
How far we are from the Metaverse
It will still take years for the Metaverse to become a reality. It requires infrastructure and computing power that does not yet exist, as it must be able to handle the countless connections of people engaged in a shared, simultaneous and synchronous experience.
It will also take many specific new technologies, protocols, innovations and discoveries for it to work at its best.
For example, enormous computing power must be incorporated into a tiny eyeglass frame. It takes graphics and networking chips, holographic waveguide generators, sensors, batteries and speakers, and it all has to fit in a miniaturized space.
Where are we now
There are already several companies developing hardware for virtual, augmented and mixed reality, such as headsets and glasses.
Silicon Valley dreamers, convinced that this immersive, networked, three-dimensional world will eventually replace the two-dimensional internet that exists today, are already investing financial and human resources in this project.
The Metaverse is closer to reality than one might think. Just look around: Fortnite or Facebook's Horizon — a virtual reality game in beta-testing — and other projects of large technology companies in similar products. Not to mention the way the pandemic has encouraged millions of people to spend their days immersed in cyberspace.
There are already some MMOGs that have already shown multiversal trends. Reporters Without Borders, an NGO, has built a library in Minecraft, an MMOG, containing works that are censored in the real world. A clip from the latest film by Star Wars had its preview in Fortnite. In many MMOGs, people spend real money to buy stuff from the metaverse world.
The Metaverse in Neal Stephenson's novel
The term comes from Snow crash, published in 1992, the third, and probably the best, novel by Neal Stephenson, an American science fiction writer. In Italian in the translation by Paola Bertante it is in the BUR of Rizzoli, unfortunately out of stock. There is a good supply of second hand copies, for example on eBay.
The main character of the book, Hiro Protagonist, delivers pizza for the mafia, who have taken over the territory of what used to be the United States.
When not working, Hiro connects to the Metaverse: a virtual reality, networked, in which people appear with their "avatar" engaging in activities both mundane (conversation, flirting) and martial (sword fights, espionage, etc.) .
Like the Internet, Stephenson's Metaverse represents a collective, interactive world that is always online and beyond the control of any person or institution. As in a video game, it is the people who inhabit it and control the characters who determine its dynamics.
Here's how in the novel Snow crash, Neal Neal Stephenson introduces the Metaverse:
Inside the computer are lasers, one red, one green, and one blue. They're powerful enough to emit a bright light, but not powerful enough to burn his optic disc, cook his brain, fry his frontal bones, and melt his lobes.
As you learn in elementary school, lights of these three colors can be combined at different intensities to produce all the hues Hiro sees.
In this way, from inside the computer, a small beam of the desired color can be emitted through the fisheye lens in any direction. Electronic mirrors housed inside the machine cause the beam to dart back and forth across the lenses of Hiro's goggles, much like an electronic beam inside a television sets colors the inner surface of the eponymous Tube.
The resulting image hangs in the space between Hiro and Reality. By drawing a slightly different image in front of each of the eyes you can create a three-dimensional effect.
Changing the image seventy-two times per second creates the impression of movement. By drawing the three-dimensional moving image at a resolution of 2K pixels per side, the maximum degree of sharpness perceptible to the naked eye is achieved and by pumping the sound of a digital stereo into the small earphones it is possible to equip the three-dimensional moving images with a perfect soundtrack .
So, Hiro isn't where he is at all, but in a computer-generated universe that the machine is marking on his goggles and pumping into earphones. In industry parlance, this imaginary place is called the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. He helps him forget the shitty life of the container.
There will be only one Metaverse
Excerpts from a Vanity Fair interview with Neal Stephenson
Vanity Fair: As Silicon Valley competes to build the best Metaverse, do you think consumers will be more drawn to immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences, like the one Mark Zuckerberg is marketing with the headset Oculus of Facebook, or from augmented reality (AR) devices, as Apple's Tim Cook is interested in developing?
Neal stephenson: I think these two options differ from each other much more than many realize. Two people, one wearing a VR device and the other wearing AR gear instead, regardless of the product now on the market, could appear to be doing the same thing. But what they see and experience is quite different. In a VR simulation, every frame that your eye sees and that you perceive is a virtual object built from scratch by a computer graphics system. In an AR application, you stay where you are, in your physical environment: you see everything around you naturally, even if there are "things" added. VR is capable of taking you to a completely different and new fictitious place compared to the reality you come from: it is the type of reality described in the Metaverse of Snow crash. When you migrate to the Metaverse, you're on the road, you're in the Black Sun, and your surroundings disappear. In the book, Hiro lives in a run-down shipping container, but when he goes to the Metaverse, he's "someone" and has access to high-end real estate. AR is another thing altogether.
Vanity Fair: Are VR and AR competitors, like VHS and Betamax, or are they distinct technology platforms?
Neal stephenson: Totally separate. Almost unrelated. The purpose of VR is to take you to a completely invented place. The purpose of AR is to change the experience of where you are. It's something completely different both in terms of how content is conceived and stories are told, and in terms of what can actually be done with these devices.
Vanity Fair: One of the things that has been interesting to observe with the rise of social media is how the same technologies that initially seemed to bring us together have actually pulled us further apart. Do you think VR also contributes to the political polarization we've seen on Twitter and Facebook?
Neal stephenson: Well, firstly, I have to confess that I really wasn't expecting it. I failed to recognize the advent of the "bubble" that social media has become even a few years ago, let alone 25 years ago. And even when I consciously realized it I didn't really understand the meaning…until November 8, 2016. So, I missed that. The way the Metaverse has been designed is such that — taking into account that it happened in the pre-Internet and pre-Worldwide Web era (no, I'm the only one who made this shit up) — there is only one Metaverse. That's where you need to go - you can't make your own.
I'm tempted to say that if it really existed, it would be less likely to form the social bubbles we know now, where anyone can create their own web page or social media feed. The unintuitive thing that makes social media bubbles so deceptive is that you don't see what you don't see. Then, invisibly, behind the scenes, everything that you would rather not see is filtered out, and you are unaware that a filtering is taking place. This is what causes bubbles. It's not so much the filtering as the fact that it happens invisibly.
The Metaverse according to Mark Zuckerberg
Excerpt from a conversation between CEO Casey Newton and Mark Zuckerberg
Newton: You've told your employees that your future vision of Facebook isn't the two-dimensional version you're using today, but something different, something called the metaverse. What is a metaverse and what parts of it is Facebook planning to build?
Zuckerberg: This is a great theme. The metaverse is a technology that spans many companies, indeed the entire industry. It can be said that it is the successor of the mobile internet. And it's certainly not something that any one company will build, but I think a big part of our next chapter will be to help build it, in partnership with many other companies, creators and developers. You can think of the metaverse as an immersive, embodied internet, where, instead of simply viewing the content, you're right inside it. And you're there with other people as if you were in another place, where you have different experiences that you wouldn't be able to do on a 2D app or on a web page, such as dancing, for example, or practicing different types of fitness.
I think a lot of people, when they think of the metaverse, only think of virtual reality — which will definitely be a big part of this phenomenon. And it's clearly a very immersive part, because it's technology that offers the clearest form of virtual presence. But the metaverse isn't just virtual reality. It will be accessible across all of our different IT platforms; VR and AR, but also PC, and even mobile devices and game consoles. In this regard, many people think of the metaverse as something primarily about gaming. And I think entertainment is clearly going to be a big part of it, but I don't think this is just entertainment. In reality it is a persistent and synchronous environment where we can stay and act together. It will probably give some kind of hybrid between current social platforms and virtual reality, it will be above all an environment of one's own incarnation.
The metaverse according to Matthew Ball
Matthew Ball. Matthew Ball is the Managing Partner of EpyllionCo, an early stage venture fund. EpyllionCo's portfolio also includes One More Multiverse, and many other companies committed to Multiverse technology.
The key difference between the Internet and the metaverse is the idea of "presence." Matthew Ball, who has carried out extensive reflections on the concept of Metaverse, collected in a publication entitled Metaverse Primer , elaborated on the definition of Metaverse which consists of seven particularities:
1) Persist — i.e. it doesn't "reset" or "pause" or "finish", but continues indefinitely.
2) Be synchronous and live — pre-programmed and self-contained events will also happen, just like in “real life”; the Metaverse will be a living experience that exists constantly for everyone and in real time.
3) Have no limit for users, and simultaneously provide each participant with an individual sense of “presence” — everyone can be part of the Metaverse and participate in a specific event/place/activity together with others, at the same time and with an individual stamp
4) To be a fully functioning economy — individuals and businesses will be able to create, own, invest, sell and be rewarded for an incredibly wide range of "activities" that produce "value" recognized by others.
5) To be an experience that crosses both the digital and physical worlds, networks/, private and public experiences, and open and closed platforms.
6) Deliver unprecedented interoperability of data, digital objects, assets, content, etc. across each of these experiences — your Counter-Strike gun skin, for example, could also be used to decorate a gun in Fortnite, or be gifted to a friend on or through Facebook. Likewise, a car designed for Rocket League (or even Porsche's site) could be ported to operate in Roblox. Today, the digital world basically behaves like a mall where each store uses its own currency, requires proprietary ID cards, has proprietary units of measure for things like shoes or calories, and different dress codes, etc.
7) Being populated by “content” and “experiences” created and managed by an incredibly wide range of contributors, some of whom are independent individuals, while others may be informally organized groups or commercially focused enterprises.
