Welcome to The Metaverse is Open
Preparing for immersive 3D environments
This is The Metaverse is Open, a newsletter about what the metaverse means for your life and career. Alternatively, I considered the subtitle: skills for thriving in the mid-21st century.
Why am I writing this newsletter?
Advances in artificial intelligence and computer graphics will result in monumental shifts in our lives over the coming decades. These challenges and opportunities present questions I want to explore. As the father of an eleven year-old kid, I feel that these are matters I must explore.
As an academic, my approach to understanding this topic is grounded in scholarly practices. While I will share newsworthy links, my analysis will examine reports emerging from research labs and the implications of current research for future product development and trends.
What is the metaverse?
By the metaverse, I’m mostly interested in immersive virtual reality where you experience a sense of presence indistinguishable from the reality of the physical world. I must emphasize that VR is only a subset of the metaverse.
An essential aspect of any metaverse definition: interactive, real-time 3D content. The phrase “real-time 3D content” might sound foreign to most people. I’ll be breaking down that concept in future issues.
The metaverse is a buzzword. Eventually, the term metaverse will seep into daily usage just as the Internet and the Web have done. Technology seeps into our lives. Many aspects exist within the metaverse. The metaverse is not one thing. And the metaverse is not one company. The metaverse is not necessarily Web3 (a useful term unnecessarily limited to crypto); the metaverse is not necessarily facilitated by crypto and the blockchain, though there are many components of the metaverse that will utilize those technologies. Cryptocurrency without real-time 3D content is not the metaverse.
Immersive VR provides a frame through which I will examine the metaverse. Throughout my future postings, I’ll touch on other aspects, such as augmented reality, that intersects with this frame.
The Metaverse is Open for Business
The rebranding of Facebook into Meta catapulted the metaverse into the public consciousness in the Fall of 2021. But many companies have been hard at work developing software and hardware that power any metaverse experience. There are game engines that are used for much more than developing games: Unreal Engine by Epic Games (the maker of Fortnite) and Unity are the two big players in the game engine space. There’s also an open source game engine: Godot.
On the hardware side, huge advances are being made by NVIDIA with their GPUs that are powering not just advanced graphics but breakthroughs in machine learning.
Meta is placing a huge bet on augmented and virtual reality with not just a name change but with a massive budget towards developing next generation headsets for augmented and virtual reality. Building on the success of the acquisition of Oculus, Meta intends to dominate the consumer headset market.
Other major tech corporations such as HP and Microsoft also have offerings in the headset market. Other players may emerge eventually (Apple?, Samsung?).
Ultimately, the experiences created by startups and even very small teams will determine the extent that the metaverse gains popularity. This 3D variation of the creator economy holds the most opportunity for many people by creating not just games but interactive experiences that craft a new form of storytelling. Within the creation of these interactive stories will be companies offering services to the creators, such as Marvelous Designer for creating 3D clothing. An entire economy will emerge in the 3D social medium known as the metaverse and that’s likely where cryptocurrency (in some form) will come into play.
The metaverse is open for you to start forming a small business (potentially a big business).
The Metaverse is Interoperable
The Internet and the Web are built on open standards designed for interoperability. The development of open standards for the metaverse are well underway.
The Khronos Group is the major consortium in the tech industry developing “royalty-free open standards for 3D graphics, virtual and augmented reality, parallel computing, machine learning, and vision processing”. Their OpenXR standard already has been widely adopted.
Essentially, the metaverse is a 3D social medium. Universal Scene Description (USD), developed by Pixar, has been broadly adopted.
I’ll be taking deep dives into explaining aspects of open standards, the work of standard organizations, and opportunities for participating in the standards process.
Variations on reality: the online and offline worlds
If you’ve never used a VR system, it’s easy to scoff and dismiss the possibility that technology can provide a sensation equivalent to the physical world.
Or, without knowledge of advances in computing and and engineering, you might assume that truly immersive VR is decades away.
But think about that: even decades away is still well within the adult lives of today’s college students.
The virtual environment I am examining is largely within reach of this decade. Some technical matters are still 10 - 15 year problems. People are working on engineering solutions to those problems. In this newsletter, I’ll be taking deep dives into the near-term and long-term challenges in developing consumer-oriented immersive VR experiences.
For the past 30 years our lives have been changed by the rise of the Internet and advances in telecommunications. Web technologies and mobile computing have changed society. The changes are not done. The next 30 years will witness an even greater change than the last few decades. At some point, we will re-evaluate what is meant by reality as we sway between our online identities and our experiences in the offline world (aka, what once was known as the “real world”). Indeed, much of our experiences today are already online, and we consider those experiences as real as anything. When we talk with a friend via a video call, we consider that a real world interaction; the same will be true when we communicate and interact with others in virtual environments.
Obviously, there are a lot of ethical and mental health issues that merit deep consideration. An entire profession will emerge around mental health in these digitally immersive environments.
The journey to 2050
The year 2050 is less than 30 years away. For many of you, that’s an unfathomable amount of time. For anyone over, say, 45 years old, then you realize that 30 years is a frightening short amount of time.
With good health and luck, I’ll make it to 2050; that year, I will turn 85. Then, as an old man, I could probably safely ignore most technology. That same year, my daughter will be only 39. The impact of further technological change on her life, on her generation, is inescapable.
Indeed, it’s those now younger than 40 that form the generations that will shape what life and the world is like in 2050. Much work is to be done. The best I can do is share what I know, to serve as a guide by shining a bit of light towards what’s coming ahead in hopes that those younger than myself enter the barely lit caverns of the future with the skills and preparation for the many challenges that they will face.
We’ve seen many new careers and forms of livelihood emerge over the last 30 years. Through this newsletter, I want to surface the opportunities that will arise as we enter a new computing paradigm.
Any talk of the middle of this century requires addressing the non-technological matters as well. Unless our billionaire overlords ship us all off to another planet, climate change is an extremely serious threat to how we live our lives in the communities on the planet we call home. And we’re seeing changes to the world order and the resurgent possibilities of nuclear war.
The year 2050 may find us in a setting where we don VR headsets to experience life as it was once. I hope that’s not the case.
Education in the 21st century
I’m an academic librarian, college professor, and software developer. Educational administrators now do a lot of hand waving about providing a 21st century education but courses largely look like the past. I’m expecting higher ed to implode under rising costs that don’t help students succeed in their lives.
Online learning still has far to go but all educators know that learning to learn is the most important skill. As far as tech goes, everything you need to know about the Internet is on the Internet. That’s always been the case. You just need to know how to teach yourself. A drastic change in academic credentialing will emerge as learning in virtual environments changes expectations of students, parents, and employers.
Structure of this newsletter
A challenge in writing about the metaverse is to write about specifics and not generalities. Otherwise, one ends up writing about the metaverse by referring to the metaverse. Going forward, I will strive not to use the word metaverse more than once in any issue of this newsletter.
Expect this newsletter to come out once a week with an in-depth analysis. From time-to-time, I may put out a shorter commentary on what’s happening in the metaverse space and relevant links.
I also want to get to know you. Drop me a message and introduce yourself. What aspects most interest you? What most concerns you? What would you like to learn more about? You can find me at several places on the net, like LinkedIn and Twitter.