Loup Ventures is a research-driven venture capital firm based in Minneapolis and New York investing in frontier technology. They just wrote an article on Medium titled Is VR Dead or Just Getting Started?
Here’s a quote:
VR’s Killer App, the Metaverse
Everyone is searching for the killer app for VR, the application or experience that will be a system seller like Wii Sports for the Wii or VisiCalc for the Apple II. VR’s killer app, we believe, is already in development and should be ready for mainstream adoption in the next five years.
The Metaverse, a term coined in the 1992 sci-fi classic, Snow Crash, is a virtual universe similar in many ways to reality. Players can be anyone, do anything, or go anywhere, regardless of their real life circumstances. The Metaverse will be a place where all of what VR has to offer branches off from. A place where you can socialize, do business, shop, go on outerworld adventures, watch esports tournaments, and more. The limits lie in the imagination of users and developers who will compete for prime real estate in the Metaverse. We will take an in-depth look into the potential of the Metaverse in a future note, but for now, just picture The Oasis from Ready Player One.
High Fidelity raised $35 million in June, with the goal of bringing VR to a billion people through their new VR world. Linden Labs, maker of the popular online role-playing game, Second Life, is also working on bringing a Metaverse to the mainstream with Project Sansar. It remains to be seen who will become the real-life Gregarious Games, but one thing is certain — the Metaverse will play a critical role in the future of VR.
And I do agree with this. VR’s “killer app” will be the metaverse. Sansar and High Fidelity are just two of dozens of platforms which are in various early stages of development, and which could potentially transform the way we use computers and communicate with each other. It’s a major paradigm shift, similar to the one where we moved away from command-line MS-DOS and towards using a mouse with graphical user interfaces like Windows and the Mac.
One day (just not as quickly as the most enthusiastic forecasters predicted), we will all be in a form of virtual reality/augmented reality/mixed reality, both for work and personal use. It’s just going to take time, maybe another decade. In the meantime, enjoy the ride!
Will first helped craft a definition in 2008, inspired by Neal Stephenson’s original description in Snow Crash, which IEEE adapted in 2013. “Now, if you type the word Metaverse into Google, it pops up with that definition from Wikipedia, which in turn cites the IEEE Virtual Worlds Standard group for it.”
In Will’s opinion, a currently-in-alpha MMORPG/MMO called Dual Universe (which I have also written about) comes the closest to being a “true” metaverse. He is quoted in Wagner’s blogpost:
“As you can see,” says Will, “they not only have 1200+ concurrency and able to scale, they also have a persistent universe with planets. I have to reiterate that last point — an actual virtual universe that is persistent.”
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“Not that I want to disparage Philip Rosedale and his team, or even Ebbe Altberg and Linden Lab, whether this is Second Life, High Fidelity, etc,” Will went on. “But the honest truth is, 300 or 500+ concurrency isn’t very impressive to me when I know what is possible, and generally how it is made possible two years ago. It’s not very impressive when a hybrid decentralization method would ultimately shatter those paltry numbers.”
However: “[H]ere’s the problem: that platform and others, who all call themselves a Metaverse, are all off on the wrong foot, and locked into their particular paradigms. Unless we’re taking things like Dual Universe into account, it’s just an echo chamber among the pretenders about their accomplishments and milestones. Lots of nice virtual worlds, but that’s about it. While everyone else is waving around the ‘Metaverse’ title and debating who is better, or who is going to be the Metaverse, it’s the shallow end of the kiddie pool by comparison to Dual Universe or even No Man’s Sky.”
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“It comes across like I’m salty or disparaging,” he says, “when I’m really not intending it like that. But it has to be said that we are amid a VR hype where nobody wants to look at things with a critical eye. I see a large group of virtual worlds crowning themselves as a Metaverse because it’s marketing hype. But ‘a’ Metaverse sounds as silly to me as saying ‘We are an Internet’. What we have are very impressive (or in some cases less impressive) virtual worlds:
“Second Life comes out as a MetaWorld at best, but even struggles there. Sansar took the Worlds Inc. model, just like Blue Mars, so they are a MetaWorld at best, but isolated non-connected spaces perceptually. High Fidelity follows that same route and comes across like Cybertown or Worlds Inc back in the 90s. It’s like we’ve all taken a large step backwards and harbored collective amnesia about the past while declaring our current progress as top of the line when in reality we’re retreading old ground. Rehashing the past approaches with maybe a technical twist.”
Then compare the capacities of these new worlds with what’s happening technically with Dual Universe:
“[T]o me, watching things from the sidelines, despite spending twenty or so years helping to better define the Metaverse with a great amount of awesome people… it’s like watching used car salespeople trying to tell the public that their Honda Civic is a Bugatti Veyron or the Millennium Falcon. It does a disservice to call every virtual world a Metaverse because it deliberately waters down what it actually is and could/should be. It comes down to: I expect better, and so should everyone who even remotely gives a damn about the future of The Metaverse.”
I think that Will is being overly critical here, which perhaps is understandable when you realize that he was part of a team of academics who worked on a carefully crafted definition of the word “metaverse”, and the social VR/virtual world marketplace has essentially ignored this definition and come up with their own, slightly different, version. Here is the definition of metaverse from Wikipedia, which is on my definitions of terms page:
The metaverse is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the internet. The word metaverse is a portmanteau of the prefix “meta” (meaning “beyond”) and “universe” and is typically used to describe the concept of a future iteration of the internet, made up of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces linked into a perceived virtual universe. The term was coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, where humans, as avatars, interact with each other and software agents, in a three-dimensional space that uses the metaphor of the real world. (Source: Wikipedia).
The Wikipedia page goes on to state:
Conceptually, the Metaverse describes a future internet of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces linked into a perceived virtual universe.
My take on all this? I think that the definitions of all words tend to slowly evolve over time, and I believe that the term “metaverse” is not necessarily so strictly or formally defined as it was back when the IEEE Virtual Worlds Standards Group was doing their work. The term is still very useful as an umbrella term when referring to virtual world and social VR platforms, even MMOs, whether or not they are “an actual virtual universe that is persistent”, which Will Burns seems to feel is an essential requirement of a “true” metaverse.
