Coined by Neil Stephenson in his 1992 novel ‘Snow Crash’, a ‘Metaverse’ refers to a persistent virtual space that is shared between a number of individual participants, in which interactions can be made, collaborations undertaken and three-dimensional virtual space becomes a social experience. Sounds great all that, but when can we expect to see one?

The thing is, we might already have one, or many. As it stands, social interaction on virtual planes is a fragmented experience, but that’s not to say platforms don’t exist for it. Notable early attempts at the medium can be seen in VRChat and AltspaceVR, that allow you to choose or import avatars to a series of virtual locations (including some you might already be familiar with from Half-Life), engage in social meetups and shared activities. If this sounds a lot like Second Life, it’s because it is (that being said, Linden Lab is working on ‘Project Sansar‘, an exciting spiritual sequel to Second Life for VR). While the technology is being continuously refined as more users enter the social VR (sVR) space, current offerings have been limited both by the lack of dissemination of the necessary equipment, whether that be the HTC Vive, the Oculus Rift, or others, and by the narrow set of features. There have already been unfortunate casualties in the rush to bring out viable sVR platforms: last month, the sVR company ‘Convrge‘, well-liked by the fledgling VR community on Reddit, announced they would be shutting down due in part to funding issues- often a sign that an application has failed to gain enough traction for investors. Buggering hell, still too early for the hype then?

Actually it’s not, my strangely British friend. The consulting firm Kzero Worldwide, who specialize in looking at the virtual market, project that by 2018, there will be 170 million virtual reality users, up from 6.7 million early adopters at the end of 2015. That’s a huge jump in demand, and creates a market large enough to warrant major investment in social applications and platforms. Major VR players are at the vanguard of this movement, with Oculus VR announcing dedicated social games and features coming to Gear VR, to coincide with the release of the Gear VR compatible Samsung S7. These include the quiz game Social Trivia, which pits you against friends in a test of knowledge, and Herobound: Gladiators, a multiplayer adventure game that Scott Hayden at roadtovr wrote a great review on (it received top marks). Great, I’ve got a VR-boner already.

Careful now. Let’s return to the concept of the Metaverse, and look at precisely what components we’ll need to make it a reality:

The technical bedrock: since the release of the Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) in 1995, iterative improvements have been made to the representation of 3D environments. VRML’s successor, X3D, is now the ISO standard XML file format for 3D computer graphics, and game engines such as Unity allow for the easy creation of virtual habitats by non-programmers, demonstrated here by the principal designer at Unity, Timoni West. Work is ongoing to establish a standardized framework for virtual reality that covers the four pillars a workable Metaverse would rest on- ‘immersive realism, ubiquity of access and identity, inter-operability and scalability’ (Dionisio et al. 2011). Regarding interoperability, a framework characterizing metadata of virtual objects to enable their persistence across virtual worlds, the MPEG-V, has already been drawn up, and could also permit the communication of the Metaverse with the Internet-of-Things (IoT), a kind of web for internet-enabled physical objects. Immersive realism has arguably already been achieved in the sense that our brains are now coupling virtual scenarios to real-world psychological reactions. While accessibility to the equipment required for VR is still expensive (not including the computers needed to use them), these costs will come down as the war over market share intensifies. An interesting area in scalability research and the improvement of virtuality is ‘parallel programming’, which uses shared memory to improve virtual performance. You can read more about this here. There’s a picture of John von Neumann in that link, which frightens and confuses me- what does all this science bitch stuff mean for the Metaverse? It means that the infrastructure exists, although it is still in its infancy. What will certainly speed up standardization and integration is a large user-base, and their collective will to share a common virtual space. A common philosophy: The Metaverse, like the internet before it, demands open, networked platforms, freedom of creation and continuity of identity. If the first seeds of this virtual cosmos are stifled under the weight of corporate interest, users won’t have a great experience. Luckily, this is very unlikely to happen. Control of virtual networks is already heavily decentralized, with academic, public and corporate-run spaces co-existing in the growing market, and therefore is structurally very similar to an early internet. There will undoubtedly be a rush toward monetization of VR (there are already Youtube tutorials) as a market that might be worth $70 billion in four years time continues to expand. In the same sense as on the contemporary Internet, ‘life… uh, finds a way’, regardless of the obstacles set before it to privacy and freedom, so too will any resulting Metaverse. The people tend to get what they want, and an sVR Metaverse will be difficult to place limitations on. A social user-base: This is something of a given. It is only human to want to reach out to others and break down barriers, and with 170 million active users by 2018, there will be no shortage of reasons and motivations to create spaces where users from disparate points of the virtual community can interact.

So… when? As I said before, we probably already have one, or many ‘Metaverses’- if the definition of a Metaverse is simply ‘a shared virtual space’, but if we’re thinking of something akin to the internet in scope, presence and importance, I’ll go out on a limb and say sometime in the next three years. No time sooner? Because I kind of want the future to be as close to now as possible. It could happen sooner; honestly, the growth of the internet- which took a number of years to mature to the point almost everyone in the developed world was using it- might not be a good model for sVR and the Metaverse. The only spanner-in-the-works is the prohibitive cost for most. But this isn’t a science-fiction technology anymore, and nor is the Metaverse an ‘out there’ concept. What we’ll see within the next three years is a ‘mini-Metaverse’ that enables commerce, community and social life, games, entertainment and music that acts as a secondary, ‘elite’ tier to the current Internet. After that, the sky’s the limit to how many lives VR, and its social element, sVR, could transform.

Non-linked references:

Dionisio, J. D. N., & Gilbert, R. (2013). 3D Virtual worlds and the metaverse: Current status and future possibilities. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 45(3), 34.

Emilien, A., Vimont, U., Cani, M. P., Poulin, P., & Benes, B. (2015). Worldbrush: Interactive example-based synthesis of procedural virtual worlds. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), 34(4), 106.

Zünd, F., Ryffel, M., Magnenat, S., Marra, A., Nitti, M., Kapadia, M., … & Sumner, R. W. (2015, November). Augmented creativity: bridging the real and virtual worlds to enhance creative play. In SIGGRAPH ASIA 2015 Mobile Graphics and Interactive Applications (p. 21). ACM.

http://singularityhub.com/2015/08/26/a-makers-guide-to-the-metaverse/

https://cie.acm.org/blog/metaverse-internet-3d-virtual-worlds/