What Is the Metaverse? A Beginner’s Guide to Tech’s Latest Obsession – Singularity Hub

A couple months ago, friends and business contacts started asking me for a crash course on my professional research studying virtual environments. Their interest reflects an explosionwhich youve probably noticedof noise and hype surrounding something called the metaverse.

This article is an introduction for a complete or almost beginner. Theres plenty of mainstream coverage on the topic, but it often conflates concepts: virtual reality is not the metaverse (though its related), and crypto/Web3 by itself is not the metaverse (though also related). Confusing, I know. Whether youre a businessperson or bystander, this is my best effort to lay everything out.

In 99.99% of cases, provided the term is used correctly, you could replace the word metaverse with internet and the sentence will mean the same thing. So why is everyone using this fancy new word? I think analyst Doug Thompson said it very well when he noted that were using the term as a proxy for a sense that everything is about to change.

So if the metaverse is just the internetwhat about the internet is about to change? To answer that question, Ive broken this article into four parts:

For those that want my definition of the metaverse up front, Id say: The metaverse is the internet, but its also a spatial (and often 3D), game-engine-driven collection of virtual environments. There is a lot missing from this definition (like avatars), but if youre like many people, that will already sound like a made-up buzzword salad.

Lets explore.

To understand the changes coming to life online, you have to start with the seemingly obvious way we currently access the internet: computers.

And to understand where were headed, you have to look at the history of computer interfaces. By computer interface, Im referring to the way that humans interact with digital machines to get them to do what we want.

We take for granted how easy and intuitive working with computers has become in our lifetimes, but it wasnt always so easy.

In the middle of the 20th century, the programming language engineers used to get a computer to do things involved sticking their hands into the actual machines to wire cables. (Also, most early computer programmers were women.)

Then engineers invented a new interface using punch cards, which allowed us to keep our hands to ourselves.

After punch cards came command lines (like MS-DOS), which were a breakthrough because you could interact by typing words. But the real mainstream moment for computers was the invention of the graphical user interface (GUI). This is when working with computers came to involve clicking pictures and is what most of us take for granted as just how they work today. GUIs are now used in everything from ATMs to ticketing machines, and theyre the reason ordinary, non-programmer people like us can use them.

Why go through this history?

The point is that at every stage in the development just described, working with computers became easier, more accessible, and more people could use them.

Clay Bavor, at Google, whose description of this history and insights I am borrowing here, puts it this way:

Over the past several decades, every time people made computers work more like we doevery time we removed a layer of abstraction between us and themcomputers became more broadly accessible, useful, and valuable to us. We, in turn, became more capable and productive.

Today, the next great computing interface is emergingit just doesnt have a good name yet. You may have heard about concepts like augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, immersive computing, or whatever two-letter acronym.

What all of these concepts share is that they involve the use of three-dimensional space. That is a very big deal.

My colleague at Singularity University, interface designer Jody Medich, taught me just how important 3D space is for the human brain. Which makes sense. We are born into 3D space. We grow up living in 3D space. It would make sense that our brains and bodies are built to interact in 3D space.

So this term spatial computing is becoming a commonly used way to refer to these interfaces. Be careful not to conflate this with the metaverse, since many spatial computing people dont consider themselves to be involved with, or a part of, all this metaverse nonsense. But it is related, and well come to that.

One other way to think of this is to consider why we dont typically see grandparents playing video game consoles. It takes time to develop the motor skills to smash buttons on a controller in the right way. Similarly, we take for granted that at some point we had to learn the motor skills to type.

We do, however, see more grandparents playing systems like the Nintendo Wii. You pick up a controller and swing your arms. Intuitive, easy, and anyone can do it. Thats a spatial interface. The big deal is that more people, including many more grandparents, could become comfortable using computers.

Generally, you should also think of spatial things as having the properties of moving around in space. In this sense, though not controlled using a spatial interface, a traditional video game like Fortnite is spatial (you move around), whereas a Zoom call is not. I dont want to complicate things, but spatial audio is another thing too.

To explain why this matters, I often use the example of Protectwise (now a Verizon company). They build tools to help cybersecurity professionals detect threats to their computer systems. Typically, a cybersecurity person lives life inside dashboards looking at log files to sense whats happening. What if that data could be turned into a spatial environment? Now patrolling your companys computer system is like playing a video game. More people could do that since its more intuitive. Take a look:

Spatial computing like this is coming to life online.

Game engines may be one of the most consequential technologies of the next decade. I know that might sound a little crazy. But hear me out.

A game engine is the software tool developers use to build (and run) video games. In these software programs you can upload 3D objects, apply rules for how those objects can move, add sounds, etc. The Protectwise thing shown above was made using the Unity game engine.

In business, the term video game is also misleading, since it suggests something recreational or non-serious. But as the world becomes more digital, game engines are powering the computing interfaces for all sorts of industries.

Aaron Lewis nicely points out, game engines are basically eating the world. Urban planning, architecture, automotive engineering firms, live music and events, filmmaking, etc. have all shifted a lot of their workflows/design processes to Unreal Engine and Unity.

Take the new electric Hummer as an example; the first car to have an Unreal-Engine-based interface. The vehicle takes information from its sensors and visualizes it in 3D on the dashboard. This is spatial computing in the real world.

Another jargon-y term you might start to hear is digital twin, which is the idea that physical things (like a Hummer) can use its sensor data to create a software copy of itself inside a computer. This lets humans interact with simulated industrial objects as if theyre computers.

A famous example is Hong Kong International Airports Terminal 1 which uses a digital twin in the Unity game engine to give facilities managers a real-time view of passenger activity and equipment that might need repairs. Think of it like the terminals 3D selfie.

While theres more happening in the world of game engines than I can go into, there are two engines to know: Unreal and Unity. Unreal is owned by Epic Games, the publisher who owns Fortnite, and Unity is a large publicly traded company. (Personally, Ive only ever used Unity since its designed to be somewhat beginner-friendly.)

The last thing you should know about game engines is that they are going to see mind-bending levels of improvement this decade. You might not have seen the internet lose its collective mind over the demo release of the newest Unreal Engine 5, but everyone went nuts. For an approachable summary of why its a big deal, Estella Tse gave me a really clear explanation.

And if you have 20 minutes to spare, my classmate sent me this, and it blew my mind:

The takeaway is that this decade, graphics will stop looking like graphics. The limit for how high game resolution can be is falling away, and well see photorealistic virtual environments that look like real life. This means you should try to see past the cartoonish aesthetic todays metaverse coverage will put in your mind.

For example, imagine what that means for something like Beyond Sports, a Dutch company that uses Unity and real-time positional data taken from sports to render live events as they are happening inside virtual reality. Picture this in 10 yearswalking around inside a game live with your friendsand now were approaching what we might be doing in the metaverse.

And here we can introduce the first part of a good definition of what the term metaverse is pointing toward:

If you start paying attention to it, youll notice game engines everywhere, which is especially true for.

Now that weve introduced spatial computing and game engines, weve arrived where most mainstream coverage of the metaverse picks as its starting point.

Virtual environments are the places well be logging into in tomorrows internet. They are also a tricky thing to define. In many ways, Twitter and Discord (an online messaging platform) are already virtual environments where people meet and exchange messages and information.

The virtual environments Im exploring here, however, are the spatial ones built in game engines, and there are two kinds to explore. First is real-world augmented reality (think Pokmon Go).

The other is the more traditional online or purely digital virtual environments you have to sit down at a computer (or put on a VR headset) to access, though this distinction is arbitrary and already falling away.

Pokmon Go is a helpful example of AR in the real world. Its a spatial game, built using Unity, that overlays 3D characters on the physical world. Does that mean we can consider Pokmon Go to be part of the metaverse? Well yeah, sort of I guess, sure, whos to say (I guess Im saying). The current definition is slippery. Were still in the define your terms stage, so be careful of that in the media.

In the future, it wont just be gamesthe entire physical world will be like a canvas we can paint with data.

To make this all happen, technology companies are scrambling to build whats referred to as the mirrorworld or AR cloud. These words mean the same thing as digital twin from earlier. Just extend the airport terminal concept to the entire Earth, and you have a tool to build virtual stuff on top of our everyday world. If you want to go deeper on this, I wrote this article exploring its impact on society.

This is all another way of saying the internet is spilling out of our phones and computers and merging with physical realityand its why that Hummer might be part of the metaverse. See, for example, how Niantic (the company who publishes Pokmon Go), market their technology to developers.

So, the metaverse wont just be random cartoon game worlds built by developers. It will also be digital replicas of very real spaces, likely the whole planet, and digital twins of industrial stuff like your car. It will eventually come to include sitting in your backyard with family members beamed in as avatars or putting on a VR headset to walk around other cities in real time.

Next, lets explore more traditional virtual worlds. Perhaps the most well-known example is a platform called Second Life, which was a huge phenomenon roughly 15 years ago and is still big today.

If youre not familiar, Second Life is a collection of virtual worlds built by users that you can explore as an avatar. Millions of users signed up, and lots of stuff happens there. Its also a good reminder that anytime you see the media claim that something is the first virtual-based whatever, thats very likely not true.

A very real economy exists in Second Life, where users buy and sell virtual goods and services, and it has its own currency; the Linden Dollar.

Today, theres a whole suite of platforms that could be thought of as successors to Second Life. One of these, Rec Room, just raised $145 million at a $3.5 billion valuation; this stuff is getting serious. Other platforms include VRChat, Altspace, Decentraland, and Somnium Space, among many others.

Another trendy thing to do in metaverse-speak is talk about how games like Fortnite and Roblox are fledgling metaverse experiences (which is true). On the surface, they come masked as games, but underneath they are spatial environments where people meet up and increasingly go to Travis Scott or Lil Nas X concerts.

The ultimate vision of the metaverse is that all of these experiences (Beyond Sports, Pokmon Go, Fortnite, Roblox) will become an interconnected network of virtual environmentsin other words, the internet, but for experiencing stuff.

My own journey into all this started several years ago on a platform called Sansar, originally launched by the same company behind Second Life. Here, my friend Sam is showing me around a space built by one of their users; Fnatic (one of the biggest eSports teams in the world). Im in a VR headset at home in San Francisco while Sam is in Los Angeles:

What struck me is that I was walking around with Sam inside the internet. Also, here was a retail e-commerce site to buy clothes online. Just like the world wide web must have struck CEOs in the mid-90s as an oddity that may (or may not) be relevant for their business, todays CEOs are probably scratching their heads observing all this metaverse noise.

I will say that just as most companies today have a website, at some point most companies will have a 3D virtual environment of some kind.

With spatial computing, game engines, and virtual environments like these, were closing the gap between experiences you have in real life (going to a concert, hanging out with friends, etc.) and experiences mediated by a computer online. This is what concepts like Ready Player One (a book by Ernest Cline adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg) are pointing toward.

And here we get our next helpful description of the metaverse:

To tie it all back together the metaverse is the internet, but also a spatial (and often 3D), game-engine-driven collection of virtual environments.

And just as todays internet has absorbed vast portions of our economic activity, tomorrows metaverse will consist of massiveoh no, please not NFTshere it comes

One of my favorite statistics is that Second Life still supports an annual economy worth roughly $500 million (that number has grown during the pandemic). The GDP of Second Life is larger than the economies of some real-world countries.

Fortnite, a game that doesnt cost a penny to play, still earned $9 billion in 2018 and 2019. How? They sell in-game stuff for players to express themselves in a variety of ways including virtual clothing, dance moves, and other items. In some ways the metaverse is just a giant virtual fashion industry.

If that sounds silly or weird, just think about how someone carefully plans what clothes to wear or what profile picture to use on LinkedIn. We care about how we express ourselves in the world. If were going to spend an increased portion of our time online, its not so silly to expect people will want to buy expensive Gucci bags to carry around Roblox.

So where do NFTs fit into all of this? Among other uses, NFTs offer the infrastructure to let people take custody of this virtual stuff.

I hate to do this, but its worth taking one giant step back to unpack what an NFT actually is.

The first thing to note is that NFTs run on blockchains. A blockchain is really just a fancy Excel spreadsheet that keeps track of who owns what (like what a bank does to keep track of who owns what money). Today, we rely on centralized authorities like banks to keep track of how much money is in which accounts as cash is shuffled between people and businesses. The idea behind a blockchain is that everyone just gets a copy of the same spreadsheet, and the big deal/breakthrough is that through complicated cryptography (which is where the crypto in cryptocurrency comes from) all those spreadsheets communicate and agree about which transactions are legitimate.

No more needing central trusted authorities. No way to hack, change, or mess around with what the spreadsheet says.

NFT stands for non-fungible token. The key word is fungible which just means you can exchange something for an equivalent version, and it will be equally valuable (bitcoin is fungible because it doesnt matter which bitcoin you have they are all equally valuable). Non-fungible is the opposite: each item is unique. This is why were seeing a lot of digital art being bought and sold using NFTs. NFTs use blockchains to determine who owns what.

This shift toward a decentralized way of managing life online is called Web3 (a word youll hear more and more and is worth getting to know).

Lets use a real example. Maybe you saw the front page of The Wall Street Journal this summer when an NFT for a digital image sold for $69 million.

Let me save you $69 million and share the link where that images file lives online. You can save it to your computer, and now you also own the file. Right? Well, kind of, but not in the sense everyone cares about.

Most media coverage doesnt explain this, but most NFTs are not the thing itself; in this case the JPEG file. The NFT is the token associated with the metadata that points at the thing. Heres the metadata for that NFT, by the way. There is something called an on-chain NFT, but we wont go there.

The reason NFTs and the metaverse are conflated so often is that theres an expectation that they may power these virtual economies by acting as the infrastructure mediating the exchange of information and assets online.

To be clear, this is not yet a universally agreed upon idea. Second Life, Fortnite, and plenty of other platforms have been doing just fine without NFTs. But one reason NFT/crypto is one of the noisiest places on the internet is because its fast-paced, novel, and supported by an absurd amount of money.

I dont mean that in a negative way; but this area is the unmapped, build-it-as-we-go, unsettled frontier of life online. There are some fascinating projects at the front end of this, but whether NFTs do or dont power some dematerialized system of capitalism misses the point that NFTs are likely more important than just owning stuff.

Now we can tie together everything weve learned about the metaverse and review a recent scene from an online event to explore the way NFTs might play a role.

Here is the Metaverse Festival (yes, a real thing) that was headlined by performances from global stars like Deadmau5. It happened in the browser-based Decentraland (a spatial, game-engine-driven, virtual environment).

Its Friday night, and you head to the nightlife district of Decentraland (a plot of land which is an NFT). To get in you must be of age. You carry an identity token (which could be an NFT), to verify your eligibility for entrance.

You notice someone wearing a hoodie (an NFT) from RTFKT, a virtual apparel company recently acquired by Nike. Those are expensive, Im told.

Its free to enter, because the event is sponsored by Kraken, who wants to be the cryptobank of the metaverse. By attending, youre issued whats called a proof of attendance protocol token, or POAP (that is an NFT).

Later, when you sign up at Kraken, they offer a discount to those who can show, with that token, they attended the event.

Metaverse or no metaverse, as John Palmer explains, NFTs mean the internet becomes a place where everyone has an inventory. Earlier we mentioned the metaverse is an interconnected collection of experiences, and if thats the case, you might want to carry your single identity, history, and inventory of assets around with you. If that sounds familiar its basically giving users back their own cookies and personal data from big companies. I dont want to go there; but its why a lot of people are worried about Facebook/Meta building a centralized metaverse instead of one that is open and decentralized.

Ive gone way down an NFT rabbit hole here, but its worth stitching together the spatial computing/virtual world developments with whats been happening in crypto/Web3. When I started this research seven-ish years ago, crypto people were far away and somewhere else. Today, I now have to explore Web3 stuff too, since these areas are merging.

If youre still herethank youyou might still be wondering: So, what? How does any of this meaningfully improve anything about the world, or even the internet? How is any of this better than what we have today? Honestly, fair point.

Lots of people will have points of view, and I wont advocate one perspective or another. But I do have a personal anecdote.

At the start of my MBA program, the UK government had implemented a rule that no more than six people could be together indoors. For 300 zero-chill/connect on LinkedIn business students, thats a tough start to the year.

We even tried a full Zoom call with all of us.

My classmates will remember me as that kid who threw some weird internet house party using a platform called High Fidelity. It employs spatial audio, so you only hear the people clumped around you. It took some getting used to but was a reasonable way to get 150 of us, as basic 2D avatars, moving around in a shared online space.

What the metaverse enables, through dimensional space, is a way to replicate some but not all natural human behaviors, which you cant replicate in existing online spaces such as Slack, Discord, or Zoom. There are times you want the magical chaos of unplanned social interaction mediated by personal space.

In the professional world, Im endlessly fascinated by this company which runs a 60,000-person organization from inside a virtual world built in Unity. The founder of that software company tells me that when you have to actually walk your avatar from meeting to meeting, theres opportunities for chance encounters youd never get jumping from Zoom to Zoom.

Ive also used that same software to run learning programs, and likewise, there are moving around the room type learning activities I could never run using Zoom.

Additionally, the metaverse might grow to become a more intuitive internet. Just like spatial computing interfaces are easier to use, websites may become like walking into physical stores, something our brains and bodies might better understand.

But it goes without saying, we wont replace real-world experiences nor should we want to. We also wont stop using todays platforms, like video-conferencing. The metaverse is just the evolutionary next stage of the internet, and offers a new suite of communication tools that will be more helpful for some things and less for others.

To conclude: this is all a long-winded way of saying the metaverse is the internet. But spatial. And built with game engines. And probably NFTs. And who knows where that takes us

This article is republished with permission from the authors Medium page. Read the original article.

Image Credit: The first selfie the author ever took as an avatar.

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What Is the Metaverse? A Beginner's Guide to Tech's Latest Obsession - Singularity Hub