What will the internet of tomorrow look like?
Over the past two years, a word has emerged at the center of that discussion: metaverse. It’s an ambiguous term—one freighted with connotations—but broadly speaking it refers to an imagined future state of the web characterized by immersive virtual experiences.
Here’s the pitch. Extended reality devices—a catch-all term for virtual reality, augmented reality, and everything in between—will eventually achieve mass market global penetration. Extended reality will become one of the ways, or possibly the only way, that billions of people access the web. As a consequence, the web will remake itself around those devices, much like it reinvented itself for mobiles, and the user experience will shift to three dimensions. The internet of the future, therefore, will come to comprise a network of interconnected virtual experiences where people can meet in potentially limitless numbers to socialize, work, and play.
Will it happen? As with any prediction, it’s impossible to say. But those that subscribe to this forecast—the companies working on metaverse devices, software, and infrastructure—are under no illusions about the challenges that would need to be solved to make it reality. Here are three…
Many believe that for the metaverse to become the next iteration of the internet, it will need to be “interoperable”. That is to say, the virtual worlds that constitute the metaverse must be able to freely exchange data.
Perhaps the most widely discussed rationale is for digital assets, which are seen as foundational to the metaverse economy. If you buy an item in one virtual world, perhaps a sweatshirt for your avatar, you should be able to use that in another virtual world—if you can’t, then it has limited value. But other forms of interoperability are also viewed as important, such as being able to take your identity, history, and payment methods with you on your travels around the metaverse.
“I think you need interoperability so the experiences we’re having together aren’t just contained to a single walled garden,” says Dan Moller, a creative strategist at Meta, which is investing heavily in XR. “And also there’s this idea that the metaverse should be stateful—changes I make should move with me. I don’t want to have to make a new avatar every time I want to use a new experience.”
The reason interoperability is difficult is that it would require standards and norms to be agreed between a vast multiplicity of companies. The web as we know it today was forged collaboratively from the ground up by the likes of government departments and scientists—not corporations—meaning that agreed-upon standards such as HTML and TCP/IP were its very foundation.
Many of the virtual environments considered to be potential building blocks of the metaverse, however, operate in different ways, using different rendering engines, say, and file formats. It’s much harder to create standards after the fact.
Moller believes that market forces will spur companies to reach the required agreements, and says that efforts to create standards are already underway. “This is why open source is so, so important. At Meta we do a lot of open source and we’re in a lot of consortiums for different open source standards, because we really believe that this won’t work if it’s not interoperable.”
But what about the practical issues: how should a virtual item from a digital world with a distinct look and feel be reimagined for another one where that item may be tonally inappropriate?
Moller says these problems arise from thinking of interoperability as an absolute value when in fact it may operate by degrees. “There’s this idea of ‘I want to be able to take everything with me just like I do in the real world’, but that's not the way it works in the real world,” says Moller. “Just because gold bullion has value doesn’t mean I can take it down to the shop and buy my groceries with it.”
If you had believed much of the tech rhetoric a decade ago, you would have expected XR to be everywhere by now. Sure, today there are a number of headsets on the market—and, yes, these are considerably more advanced than anything that was available when XR re-emerged as a hot topic in the early 2010s. But despite billions of investment dollars and exponential advances in computing, XR has still not yet been “solved”.
One of the reasons for that disconnect, is that creating high-performing, convenient, affordable XR hardware is more difficult than it might intuitively seem. In a Meta earnings call in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg reflected on what he saw as the main challenge: miniaturization. “In augmented reality, you’re going to really need a pair of glasses that look like normal looking glasses in order for that to hit a mainstream acceptance. And that, I think, is going to be one of the hardest technical challenges of the decade. It’s basically fitting a supercomputer in the frame of glasses.”
Moore’s Law, the observation that computing power roughly doubles every one to two years, suggests that, given enough time, the onward march of technological progress should resolve these challenges. “Moore’s law is slowing down,” cautions Moller, “but in many ways we are displacing compute with things like AI—using AI to ‘fill in the gaps’ where computing power falls short.”
What’s more, he points out, current-generation headsets are already seeing adoption—for games, for social experiences. “You can deliver meaning with this technology right now.”
Technology is not deterministic. No matter how hard the industry tries to will something into existence, it will ultimately be down to consumers to decide whether it adds value to their lives.
From a psychological and technological point of view, the leap from 2D to 3D is much greater than the jump from desktop to mobiles. For the metaverse to take off, the added value would have to justify the leap.
Moller agrees that finding those impactful apps is crucial. “If the metaverse is meant to be a social space, you need to have a critical mass of people, and give those people enough of a reason to be in there.”
The issue to his mind is less that clear use cases are thin on the ground, and more that many commentators have too narrow a view of the metaverse to see the potential. “I’m not dissing gamers here—I game—but when all the attention is going towards that it just makes virtual reality seem fanciful, and indulgent, and unnecessary,” he says.
He believes that one truly transformative use case is education. The web in its current form has disrupted multiple areas of our lives, but traditional models of learning still dominate. XR can not only enable remote students to have equivalent experiences to on-site students—perhaps by emulating the experience of sitting in a lecture hall—but can usher in new forms of teaching altogether. Rather than learn about space from a textbook, why not experience a VR moonwalk, or a virtual stay on the International Space Station?
“What if we can use these technologies to disrupt education in a substantially different way for the first time since the Industrial Revolution?” says Moller. “From that point of view, you can clearly start to draw those lines between where we are now and what we would hope the future will look like. And what we dream it can be.”
Learn more about marketing in the metaverse on meta.com.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
