Tag: Book Review

Book Review: The Metaverse, and How It Will Revolutionize Everything, by Matthew Ball

I am on holidays this week, and today I decided to set aside a couple of days to read through—and write a review of—a recently published book by the venture capitalist Matthew Ball, author of the Metaverse Primer and lead creator of the Ball Metaverse Index (whom I have written about before on this blog). The title of his new book is The Metaverse: and How It Will Revolutionize Everything.

Matthew Ball’s new metaverse book (image source)

As Matthew Ball writes in the introduction to his book:

In 2018, I began writing a series of online essays on the Metaverse, then an obscure and fringe concept. In the years since, these essays have been read by millions of people as the Metaverse has transitioned from the world of paperback science fiction to the front page of the New York Times and corporate strategy reports around the world.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything updates, expands, and recasts everything I’ve previously written on the Metaverse. The book’s core purpose is to offer a clear, comprehensive, and authoritative definition of this still inchoate idea. Yet my ambitions are broader: I hope to help you understand what’s required to realize the Metaverse, why entire generations will eventually move to and live inside it, and how it will forever alter our daily lives, our work, and how we think.

Yes, Ball capitalizes “Metaverse” throughout his book, which I find unnecessary and annoying. However, “Internet” was also usually capitalized in its earliest years of existence before most people settled on lower-case-i internet, so there is some precedent here.

It is not until chapter three, after a brief historical and philosophical discussion of the concept, that Matthew Ball provides his own definition of the metaverse (smartly leaving aside a discussion of blockchain until later on in the book):

A massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.

After laying the groundwork with history and definitions in the first four chapters, in Part II of his book Matthew Ball discusses in seven chapters the various components which he feels go into the building of a metaverse: networking, computing, virtual world engines, interoperability, hardware, payment systems, and blockchain technology.

In chapter 5 (Networking), Ball uses popular games such as Microsoft Flight Simulator to explain concepts such as network bandwidth and latency, and how game and metaverse companies work around such limitations. Chapter 6 covers the computational requirements and trade-offs in building the metaverse, while chapter 7 looks at virtual world engines such as Unreal and Unity. Chapter 8 addresses the thorny issue of metaverse interoperability and standards (i.e., the ability to take your avatar and its possessions from one virtual world to another). In chapter 9, Ball offers a concise overview of VR and AR hardware, calling it “the hardest technology challenge of our time”. Chapter 10 discusses a key component of the current and future metaverse, payment rails (e.g. credit cards, PayPal, Venmo) and the associated economics of buying and selling on metaverse platforms.

Finally, in chapter 11, Matthew Ball addresses the controversial and contentious issue of blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), stating “some observers today believe that blockchain is structurally required for the metaverse to become a reality, while others find that claim absurd.” Obviously, this book was written well before the current crypto crash, but Ball attempts to write a balanced take on the subject, including an entire section about the various obstacles currently facing the blockchain. He wraps up this chapter by stating:

How much of the blockchain remains hype versus how much is (potential) reality remains uncertain—not unlike the current state of the Metaverse. However, one of the central lessons of the computing era is that the platforms that best serve developers and users will win. Blockchains have a long way to go, but many see their immutability and transparency as the best way to ensure the interests of these two constituencies [i.e., platforms and developers] remain prioritized as the Metaverse economy grows.

The real meat of this book is in Part III, subtitled “How the Metaverse Will Revolutionize Everything”. In it, Matthew looks into his crystal ball and makes some predictions about how the metaverse will develop and be used across a range of industries, including education, entertainment, fashion and advertising, lifestyle businesses—even sex and sex work!

Chapter 12 is a discussion of when the metaverse is going to arrive, which of course is entirely dependent upon the definition of a “metaverse”; as I have often said, Second Life (which does get a few passing mentions in this book) is the perfect model of a fully-evolved metaverse, which the newer companies building platforms would be wise to study, emulate, and learn lessons from. However, Ball tends to lean towards the assertion that the metaverse is not yet truly upon us, despite these early platforms.

In a subsection of Chapter 14 titled “Why Trust Matters More Than Ever”, in a discussion of corporate strategies, Matthew Ball writes the following:

My great hope for the Metaverse is that it will produce a “race to trust.” To attract developers, the major platforms are investing billions to make it easier, cheaper, and faster to build better and more profitable virtual goods, spaces, and worlds. But they’re also showing a renewed interest in proving—through policy— that they deserve to be a partner, not just a publisher or platform. This has always been a good business strategy, but the enormity of the investment required to build the Metaverse, and the trust it requires from developers, has placed this strategy front and centre.

In the final chapter of his book (Metaversal Existence), Ball broadens his view to discuss how the metaverse will impact society, and what policies might be necessary to address that impact. Matthew warns:

Misinformation and election tampering will likely increase, making our current-day complications of out-of-context sound bites, trolling tweets, and faulty scientific claims feel quaint. Decentralization, often seen as the solution to many of the problems created by the tech giants, will also make moderation more difficult, malcontents harder to stop, and illicit fundraising far less difficult. Even when limited primarily to text, photos, and videos, harassment has been a seemingly unstoppable blight in the digital world—one that has already ruined many lives and harmed many more. There are several hypothesized strategies to minimize “Metaverse abuse.” For example, users may need to give other users explicit levels of permission to interact in given spaces (e.g., for motion capture, the ability to interact via haptics, etc.), and platforms will also automatically block certain capabilities (“no-touch zones”). However, novel forms of harassment will doubtlessly emerge. We are right to be terrified by what “revenge porn” might look like in the Metaverse, powered by high-fidelity avatars, deepfakes, synthetic voice construction, motion capture, and other emergent virtual and physical technologies.

He adds, “for the same reasons the metaverse is so disruptive—it’s unpredictable, recursive, and still vague—it is impossible to know what problems will emerge, how best to solve those which already exist, and how best to steer it.”

Matthew’s book is packed full of interesting anecdotes, such as the following tidbit from chapter one:

Not long after Tencent publicly unveiled its vision of hyper-digital reality, the Communist Party of China (CCP) began its biggest-ever crackdown of its domestic gaming industry. Among several new policies was a prohibition on minors playing video games Monday through Thursday that also limited their play from 8 pm. to 9 pm. on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights (in other words, it was impossible for a minor to play a video game for more than three hours per week). In addition, companies such as Tencent would use their facial recognition software and a player’s national ID to periodically ensure that these rules were not being skirted by a gamer borrowing an older user’s device. Tencent also pledged $15 billion in aid for “sustainable social value,” which Bloomberg said would be focused on “areas like increasing incomes for the poor, improving medical assistance, promoting rural economic efficiency and subsidizing education programs.” Alibaba, China’s second-largest company, committed a similar amount only two weeks later. The message from the CCP was clear: look to your countrymen and women, not virtual avatars.

The CCP’s concerns about the growing role of gaming content and platforms in public life became more explicit in August, when the state-owned Security Times warned its readers that the Metaverse is a “grand and illusionary concept” and
“blindly investing [in it] will ultimately come back to bite you?“

While Ball sprinkles footnotes throughout his book, there were not nearly enough to satisfy this librarian! As I tell my students when doing information literacy training, footnotes are useful to find what sources the author refers to, so you can look them up yourself. For example, in chapter one he writes the following tantalizing but non-footnoted sentence, without further explanation:

Stephenson’s novels have been cited as the inspiration for various cryptocurrency projects and non-cryptographic efforts to build decentralized computer networks, as well as the production of CGI-based movies which are watched at home but generated live through the motion-captured performance of actors that might be tens of thousands of miles away.

Now, after reading that, wouldn’t you also like to know the source of this information, and the names of such productions? More footnotes, please! (Also, I’m not sure that “cryptographic” is the correct adjective here, as Ball seems to be using the term to refer to non-blockchain or non-cryptocurrency projects in this sentence.)

Also, while Ball is quick to use popular games such as Fortnite and Roblox to explain various terms and concepts throughout the book, I found it rather frustrating that he was not nearly as quick in drawing examples from the many metaverse platforms which already exist (e.g. VRChat, Rec Room, Sansar, NeosVR). I mean, this is a book about the metaverse; why not use more examples from existing social VR and virtual worlds? I know he’s a busy venture capitalist, but it makes me wonder how many metaverse platforms Matthew actually visited in his pre-writing travels. The book would have greatly benefited from that extra virtual legwork, if not by him then by his research assistants!

But these are picky little quibbles; overall, the book is an excellent introduction to the metaverse, and an informative overview for users new to the concept and wondering what all the recent fuss is about. Even those readers who have many years of experience with the metaverse will learn some new things which they did not know before. I can recommend this book, and I look forward to Matthew Ball’s future writing on the topic.

Thank you to the person who gifted me a copy of Matthew Ball’s book!

Book Review of Charlie Fink’s Remote Collaboration and Virtual Conferences: The Future of Work

I will be blunt: this is a rather perplexing (and downright irritating) book.

First, let’s deal with the irritating parts. In an afterword, a preface to the advertising sponsors (yes, this book has advertising, like a magazine), it reads:

There isn’t much of a business in books, especially if they are rushed to market in ten weeks by an academic team without the resources to pay for design, printing, the Kindle version, websites, and social media, which adds up to tens of thousands of dollars.

That rush to market is all too readily apparent in the final product. Here is an actual screenshot of one of the pages of the book, which I took using SnagIt from the Windows Kindle app at 100% zoom, because I had to share the horror of it with you all (the red notes are mine):

As you can see, it is riddled with typography and font problems, with parts of headings cut off or overlaid with diagrams. The text in the Windows Kindle app (even at 125% or 150% zoom) is frankly unreadable. Page 101 is mistakenly left blank, which means that somebody’s essay (Charlie’s?) starts off in mid-sentence.

This is a mess. Did nobody proof-read this before it was set to sale on Amazon? Test it out on a few Kindle devices to see how it actually looked? After paying CA$20.00 for this book, I feel like asking for my money back, just for the poor quality of the publication alone. You should know that, up front, before you pay for this book.

Thankfully, the text was somewhat more legible on the Kindle app on my iPad, so I settled in for a good read. And this is where we get to the rather perplexing part of the book: the content.

My understanding is that this book is the result of a undergraduate-level course Charlie Fink was teaching on virtual and augmented reality at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, which was interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. The eight students in his class were sent home to practice good social distancing with Oculus Quest VR headsets, and collaborated to write the one-page profiles of each of the companies which appear in this book. And this book still feels somewhat like a class project; some profiles are better written than others, and the coverage is a tad uneven.

And, as I said when I first reported on the publication of this book last weekend:

Now, the problem with a book (even an electronic book) is that it only provides a snapshot of a rapidly-moving and evolving industry, and as such, it will very quickly become out of date.

And, as a book, it will indeed age very rapidly. Given the rapid rate of change in this industry, six to twelve months from now, it will likely already be out of date (is this why it was rushed out in such an hurry?). Frankly, I’m not sure I understand why this was published as a static book in the first place. (Why not a website, which could at least be updated in real-time or near real-time?)

As somebody who has spent the last three years writing a blog about social VR and virtual world platforms, I feel I am in a somewhat favourable position to judge how well a book covers the territory, to wit, “remote collaboration and virtual conferences”. (You can disagree with me. I’m not perfect. I probably would write a lousy book myself. But I’m not trying to write and sell a book. I’m a blogger who wants to disseminate accurate, timely news and my own personal editorial viewpoints, informed by my own perspective and experiences in the metaverse.)

Here’s another screenshot (this time from my iPad, since the Windows version has the same horrible, blurry font) to show you the list of companies selected for inclusion in this survey (and yes, the headings are all smashed together and cut off on this page as well):

Now, as you might expect, five of the six corporate sponsors of this book (Arthur, Flow, Nreal, Streem, The Wild, and VirBELA) have entries describing their products. Obviously, Nreal doesn’t have an actual collaboration platform to talk about (at least, not yet), but they did provide an advertisement that looks like it came straight from a fashion and lifestyle magazine:

Which leads me to another concern of this book: separating fact from hype. Too much of this book reads like it was cut and pasted directly from the company’s promotional copy or website, without any real independent critical assessment, or sometimes even without proper characterization and categorization, of the products discussed and where they fit in this rapidly-evolving marketplace. It’s a broad-brush approach, and sometimes unlikely things get lumped together under a category heading.

For example, under the heading Social VR in the book are listed seven platforms, all of which I have written about on my blog in the past:

  • Bigscreen
  • Fortnite (?!??)
  • Hoppin’
  • NeosVR
  • Rec Room
  • VRChat
  • Wave

Now this is a rather haphazard selection of social VR platforms, meant for different purposes, and at wildly different stages of development and deployment. It’s almost as if they were picked out a hat at random, and I know (I know, trust me) that there are many platforms missing. This is far from a complete survey of social VR; it’s more of a random sampling. Oh, and Fortnite is categorized as social VR? While yes, technically, it appears you can play Fortnite in a VR headset, I would hardly call it social VR. Again, a sign of a rushed process.

Perhaps Fortnite would have fit better under the Virtual Worlds category? Here are the five platforms listed under Virtual Worlds:

  • Decentraland
  • Second Life
  • Teeoh
  • VirBELA
  • Somnium Space (which probably should be listed under social VR)

Again, it’s like these five platforms were picked at random from a hat. Again, a lot of virtual worlds are missing from this book. This is, at best, a very random sampling of the current marketplace.

The whole book is like this. For example, Coursera and EdX are listed under Remote Education, but they are vastly different beasts from all the other entries in this section: Victory XR (used for a variety of VR education purposes); Acadicus, Fundamental VR, Holo Anatomy, and Precision OS (all medical VR/AR teaching platforms); and Nanome (a VR platform for molecular chemistry).

As a librarian, all this miscategorization of platforms bothers me. A lot. This whole book reads like a rush job from start to finish.

And, tucked into the Telepresence category, is probably to me the most ludicrous inclusion of all: a page discussing the $2,000-to-$15,000 line of Beam robotic systems (basically, a video screen with wheels):

Beam is a robotic telepresence system that allows users to inhabit a distant location embodied—not as an avatar—but as themselves, piloting a 2D tablet computer through a 3D world and interacting with other people as if physically present.The robots have four wheels…a wide-angle navigation camera, a monitor to show the user’s face and a speaker to communicate with others.

Beam is lumped in with Avatour (which should have been categorized together with Hoppin’, since it’s another 360-degree video platform); and Spatiate (an augmented reality workplace collaboration app that should have been placed in that section). What the hell?

If this book were free, I would understand and forgive, but I paid good money for this and I’m feeling like I wasted that money. You will get an unpolished, uneven, uncritical, disorganized, and seemingly picked-at-random sample of what’s currently out there in the VR/AR/XR collaboration marketplace, written by undergraduate students for a course credit as a class project, in a format which will make it practically useless in six to twelve months. I feel like asking for a refund.

It might have made a great class project, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it makes a great book.

P. S. I hope that Charlie Fink shares whatever proceeds he earns from this ebook with the students who wrote all the company profiles!

Book Review: Dr. Margaret Gibson Makes the Case for Second Life Being a Mature, “Haunted” Virtual World

After my recent cancer scare, I picked up a book that I had been reading, which I had set aside, titled Living and Dying in a Virtual World: Digital Kinships, Nostalgia, and Mourning in Second Life, by Dr, Margaret Gibson and Clarissa Carden (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). I had promised earlier that if I had time, I would write a book review, and here is that review.

Living and Dying in a Virtual World

This book, which covers various issues of nostalgia, memorial, and mourning in the virtual world of Second Life, is highly recommended reading, particularly for those people who don’t “get” Second Life, or understand why over a half-million people still use the platform regularly after 15 years. Here is a lengthy excerpt from the final chapter of the book, which I found especially thought-provoking reading:

SL was one of a group of virtual worlds which came online in the early 2000s. Not all have survived. The Sims Online, later EA Online, is a notable example of a world which, despite being loved by its residents, did not make it. Of those that have continued, some, like World of Warcraft, are game-focused. The purpose of their existence, and for the continued interaction of users, is apparently self-evident. Second Life provides no such explanation for its own continuation. It continues to exist because it remains in use—but the reasons residents choose to live in SL may be as numerous as residents themselves.

Due to its age, SL, while no longer cutting-edge technology, is still a very new type of entity. Mature virtual worlds have not and could not have existed at any other moment in history. Never before has it been possible for residents to have engaged so extensively and for such long periods of time in a single digital environment. Our ideas of what constitute meaningful relationships, and the way in which these relationships should be remembered, have simply failed to live up to the rate of change. While there is a great deal of ubiquity to memorialisation online, it is easy to forget that there are still people who are surprised by this phenomenon and are not willing or comfortable participants.

Existing media discourses pathologise long-term engagement with virtual worlds such as SL. If SL is inherently and necessarily secondary, it can be redefined as a distraction, a space in which individuals unreasonably and unfairly spend time which could be more usefully employed elsewhere. This perspective has informed the salacious media coverage which accompanied SL’s early years and, arguably, has contributed to an almost complete refusal on the part of major media sources to engage with SL in more recent years. There are, of course, exceptions, such as The Atlantic’s 2017 article “The Digital Ruins of a Forgotten Future.” As the name implies, however, this article, while sensitive and extensive, ultimately positions SL as something that is not quite comprehensible. There is almost a sense of confusion that this virtual world, which is no longer new and which appears not to have lived up to its initial promise, has stubbornly refused to die.

However, this book has demonstrated that SL continues to be a space in which significant and valuable lives are lived. The distinction between “real” and “virtual” lives reflects a biological fact. Avatars cannot age, or die, or experience the sensation of touch. Avatar life cannot exist independently of physical embodied life. The avatar is in this sense secondary—its death cannot end the existence of the human operator, even though the opposite is true. This purely pragmatic view of firstness and secondness not only obscures the lived reality of second lives, it also speaks against a discourse which holds that the “true self” exists independent of the circumstances of our physical lives. This discourse has been powerful in shaping our understandings of the relationship between computers and mortality. Computers can only be understood as offering a potential salve for mortality if the “true” self can exist outside of the physical body. This understanding of the “true” self is also prevalent in the perspectives of SL residents, who see SL as a place in which they are freed from the constraints of their embodied lives and can finally live “truly.”

Dr. Gibson goes on to make the case that Second Life has indeed graduated into the ranks of a “mature” virtual world, and even goes on to say that it is, in a way, “haunted”:

This tenuous connection to significant objects and spaces is exacerbated by rumours of SL’s impending death. Linden Lab has been spruiking a new virtual reality project, Project Sansar, for a few years. It has gained support from prominent SL residents who have been invited to create spaces and objects within this new environment. It has, however, led to real fears among members of the SL population who suspect that SL will eventually be shut down. If this were to occur, it would follow a string of other virtual worlds—notably including The Sims Online—which have been destroyed after becoming unprofitable. This is a danger inherent in investing heavily in a virtual world, one which likely contributes to the ideas of firstness and secondness which remain an important part of the language of residents. However, residents do not act with a constant awareness of or fear of the possibility of SL’s impending death. The longevity of this virtual world has created a situation in which its life can be projected into the future—it has become a taken-for-granted part of individual biographies which is not understood as facing an imminent end unless residents stop to consider this as a possibility. It is this taken-for-grantedness, this association with individual memory and biography, which characterises SL as a mature virtual world.

Yet SL does not function independently or outside of the physical world. Its history is its own, but it is interwoven with the history of the world offline in both an individual and collective sense. There are spaces in which a resident is transported to an imagined version of a time and place in the history of Europe or the USA. In this book we have discussed 1920s Berlin, but there are also historical representations of Chicago, Texas, Rome, London, and others. In these locations the work of heritage associated with the upkeep of memories and physical places or objects is overtaken by a new kind of heritage work which is rooted in experience and emotion. The heritage sites one encounters in these spaces are not carefully preserved and contextualised in relation to a history which encompasses that which followed their moment of prominence. Instead, they are spaces in which one can live history devoid of context. In a way this allows for a more accurate understanding of individual biography in relation to historical metanarratives—these spaces provide one with a sense that those residing within them do not know what comes next—theirs is an unknown and unseeable future. Yet the users of the avatars do indeed know the future and are thus in a situation in which a future is known but not known, full of possibilities and yet constrained.

Second Life is a haunted virtual world with various forms of spectrality around lost and deceased lives, the persistence of memory, and the persistence of grievability, but it is also a world that regenerates itself. There are always new projects on the horizon. The extent to which these projects are likely to materialise in SL itself is open to question. The future of this world cannot be assured any more than could the futures of those virtual worlds that have gone before. What is certain, however, is that those residents who have developed important networks of relatedness and who have engaged in the acts of memory we detail in this book will find ways to maintain those networks and those memories.

In short, what makes SL a mature, still-thriving, and evolving virtual world is its strong community. Linden Lab might, perhaps, be a little surprised at the stubbornness and tenacity of SL’s userbase, some of whom (as this book excerpt alludes to) are adamantly opposed to the idea of a new virtual world, Sansar, “replacing” their beloved Second Life. (As I have stated often before on this blog, no matter what Linden Lab does with Second Life vis-à-vis Sansar, they can’t win.)

Galen, in his recent guest editorial, talks about how Linden Lab might choose to reinvigorate Second Life in the (unlikely, but still possible) case that Sansar fails to take off:

What if Sansar fails?

It’s a bit sad that there are many vocal Second Life users who are hoping for this outcome in the belief that Linden Lab will use the money saved to improve SL faster. Personally, I’m not ready to predict Sansar’s imminent or future demise. I still think Sansar has the best shot of success among all the social VR platforms right now.

But let me just speculate for a moment what would happen if LL were to give up on Sansar development and essentially shut it down. I’m going to imagine it from the perspective of what I would do if I were at the helm of Linden Lab and not make an actual prediction, per se.

What would cause me to shut down Sansar? Most likely, this would result from a series of very visible signs that people are preferring some alternative to Sansar and that doom Sansar to have a small niche audience. If, for example, someone made a YouTube video showing how you could create your own multiplayer VR social experience from scratch in Unity in 15 minutes, that would be a solid sign. Or if HiFi’s rendering engine was as good and their typical daily concurrency peak was over 10k and growing, while Sansar’s remained flatly under 1k. It wouldn’t be one single thing. It would be several devastating signs like these that would do it.

Assuming I just shut down Sansar, what would I do with the remaining staff, budget, and experience gained from Sansar? The obvious answer is: Improve SL. I would probably take a big gamble that would still be bold but not as dramatic as Sansar. In particular, I would turn SL into a “hybrid grid”. Let me explain what I mean.

SL is a fossil. Yes, there’s plenty of room to improve it, but the gradual improvements to it are always supposed to be backwards compatible with content going back to 2002. That hinders SL’s potential immensely. That’s why LL took the big leap into the Sansar project as a totally new world to begin with: for a fresh start. I think they know that Second Life’s days are numbered and that something will eventually draw most of SL’s population away.

To breathe new life into SL, I would engineer a significant and only partially compatible version of the Second Life viewer and servers. Let’s call the current technology “SL classic” and the new part “SL next-gen”. The next-gen part of SL would take advantage of many of the lessons learned and technologies pioneered for Sansar. Picture having a new SL client that supports both classic and next-gen sims. Those sims could live alongside one another, as though two grids in one. Your account would be good for both. So would your money. But maybe you would have to create a new avatar in the new grid. Or maybe there would be some conversion utility. And some assets you own in the classic grid wouldn’t be fully compatible with the new one. And assets made specifically for the next-gen grid would be largely incompatible with the classic one. The overarching goal would be to gradually migrate everyone over to the newer platform and eventually retire the old.

…

There are many possibilities that would open up if I were in damage control mode after Sansar had died and I wanted to know what to do next. But I would likely favour doing some sort of hybrid grid as described above and seeking to gradually migrate SL’s residents and ventures into the newer technology platform. That’s what would make SL’s population grow again and give SL many more years of life ahead.

In other words, Second Life as we know it may indeed evolve into some sort of “hybrid” grid system, as Linden Lab slowly moves its SL grids over to new technology (they are already hard at work on a project to move Second Life sims from physical servers to “the cloud”). While this latter work is far from Galen’s idealized “hybrid” grid system, Linden Lab would be wise to consider all its options, lest it lose its Second Life population to rival virtual world platforms such as High Fidelity and Sinespace.

The community fostered by Second Life, as a mature virtual world, “haunted” by the associations, memories, and aftereffects of its millions of users over the years, will continue to live on, in one way or another. I find Dr. Gibson’s book a reassuring academic treatise on the topic, and well worth a read.