Metaverse

Author Neal Stephenson is credited with coining the term "metaverse" in his 1992 science fiction novel "Snow Crash," in which he envisioned lifelike avatars who met in realistic 3D buildings and other virtual reality environments. When I came across the term Avatar in Second Life, I actually thought it had something to do with Indian mythology.

I remember running Second Life when I was still studying engineering, almost 18 years ago and my PC could barely support the graphics.

For those of you who are too old or too young to know about Second Life, it's a massive community of Avatars who would socialize in a 3D world and take part in games, tasks and adventures. This eventually led to the evolution of Roblox and later the creation of Pokemon Go and Fortnite. Fortnite is probably the biggest active ‘metaverse’ with over 350 million players today.

Facebook renaming itself to Meta has been the biggest news over the last few weeks, but didn’t we already have Metaverse with Fortnite, Pokemon Go, Roblox and Second life? What’s so special? Well, no one said that there needs to be only ‘one’ metaverse. There could be many, and none of these ‘metaverses’ (plural) talk to each other today.

Every year, I look forward to @Benedict Evan's presentation on the state of the tech. This year, it certainly wasn’t disappointing. He talks about the great rebranding of VR/AR to Metaverse and how Metaverse will evolve over the next decade.

So, is Metaverse something that a corporation builds and owns or is it something like the ‘internet’ that is shared across users with no single ownership? Nvidia as a company is backing up Omniverse which is a collection of every single universe, multiverse and metaverse. When we think of Metaverse, similar to the 7 layers of TCP/IP model, we should look at the seven layers of metaverse. I really like the graphic below from here that talks of the seven layers of metaverse.

The ultimate vision of the metaverse is where all the different metaverses are interconnected with a set of guidelines and/or protocols. You could, in theory, just have a single ‘avatar’ that spans across multiple metaverses. This way, you can switch from one world to the other seamlessly.

Today, people spend money buying digital clothing, digital goods, digital tools and even real estate in the metaverse (like sandbox). It would be awesome to have common standards that break the barriers and I should be able to carry over the goods from one metaverse to the other; or even in its simplest form, be able to trade using NFTs and use the funds from the sale to purchase something in the other metaverse.

All this sounds like fun, but is there a real use case for metaverse? I genuinely think there is. Just like how we all got used to live-streaming in the pandemic, we will all one day get used to entertainment in the metaverse. Content will be the major draw for most people to come to the metaverse and most of it will start with simple things like virtual concerns and shows. It could also lead to the minting of ‘moments’ where you can buy a certain moment in the metaverse as a drop or an NFT. However, this won’t go far enough. Do we really think that by 2030, we are all going to get cooped up inside our home and wearing a VR headset??That’s unlikely. In reality, the multiverse will need to extend to the real world and everything around us. Multiverse should do what Pokemon Go did for gaming. The ability to use Augmented reality in the real world environment and search for new adventures and spawn off NFTs of real world images and objects. The ability to watch a show on TV and buy moments of your favourite scenes from 'The Matrix Resurrections' and showcase that in your virtual metaverse.

This is just the beginning with metaverse and NFTs. With DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), the reality of how we work will also change. The gig economy will probably extend beyond just what exists today and we will probably see, and even some of the largest companies will transform the way they envision work. I hope that the gig economy will even extend to sales, executive roles such as CEO and CxO. I envision a day to see an ‘Avatar CEO’ who exists in the metaverse running a real company with real world impact both in the metaverse and in the real world!!

Note: Here is an impressive set of resources from a16z on DAO - I especially like the articles on DAO landscape and 15 ways the world is being transformed by DAO