BUILDING THE METAVERSE

The Metaverse will necessitate a plethora of new technologies, protocols, enterprises, breakthroughs, and discoveries to function. And it won't appear out of nowhere; there won't be a clear "Before Metaverse" and "After Metaverse" distinction. Rather, it will emerge gradually over time as various goods, services, and capabilities connect and meld. However, it's useful to consider three key factors that must be in place.

(One way I try to think about these three categories procedurally is through the Book of Genesis - first, establish the underlying universe ("concurrency infrastructure"), then describe its laws of physics and regulations ("standards and protocols"), and finally, one must fill it with worthwhile content ("Content") that evolves and iterates against selection pressures. In other words, God does not make and design the universe as if it were a small model, but rather allows one to expand across a mostly empty tableau, etc.)

Concurrency Infrastructure

At its most fundamental level, the technology does not yet exist to support hundreds, much alone millions, of individuals sharing a synchronized experience. Consider the Marshmello concert in Fortnite in 2019. 11 million people in total watched the event in real-time. They did not, however, do so in tandem. In reality, there were over 100,000 Marshmello concert instances, each of which was slightly out of rhythm and limited to 100 players. Epic can certainly handle more today, but not into the hundreds of thousands, let alone millions.

Not only does the Metaverse necessitate infrastructure that does not already exist, but the Internet was never designed for anything remotely similar to this. It was, after all, created to transfer files from one machine to another. So, most of the Internet's underlying systems are based on a single server communicating with another server or an end-user device. This model is still in use today. Although billions of individuals are on today's Facebook, each user has their connection to the Facebook server and does not share it with anybody else. As a result, when you access content from another user, you're just getting the most up-to-date information from Facebook. Text conversations were the first pseudo-synchronous applications, but you're still feeding primarily static data to a server and pulling the most up-to-date data from it when/where/how/as needed. The Internet was never intended for persistent (as opposed to continuous) communication, let alone persistent communication synchronized in real time with many other people.

The Metaverse requires something more akin to video games and video conferencing to function. These encounters operate because of persistent connections that keep each other up to date in real-time and with a level of precision that other programs don't require. However, they rarely have a large number of concurrent users: most video chat systems have a limit of a few individuals, and after you reach 50, you'll have to "live stream" a broadcast to your viewers instead of sharing a two-way connection. These encounters don't have to be real, and they certainly aren't.

To that end, one of the reasons the battle royale genre has only lately been popular in video games is that it is only now possible to play live with so many other players. Although some of the most popular games, such as Second Life and Warcraft, have been around for more than two decades, they essentially faked the experience by "sharding" and dividing gamers into distinct "worlds" and servers. For example, Eve Online can have over 100,000 players "in the same game," although they are spread across multiple universes (i.e., server nodes). As a result, a player only sees or interacts with a small number of other players at any given time. Furthermore, getting to another galaxy necessitates quitting from one server and loading another (which the game manages to "conceal" narratively by forcing players to travel at light speed to span the immensity of space). And if/when Eve Online reached battles with hundreds of players, the system ground to a halt. And it worked because the game's gameplay dynamic was primarily built on large-scale, pre-planned ship-based conflict. These slowdowns

It would have rendered the game unplayable if it had been a "fast-twitch" game like Rocket League or Call of Duty.

Like the appropriately called Improbable, several companies are working hard to overcome this challenge. However, this massive computational issue goes against the Internet's core design/intent.

Standards, Protocols, and their Adoption

Standards and protocols for visual presentation, communications, graphics, file loading,  data, and so on make the Internet work as we know it today. This includes everything from well-known brands to obscure ones. The WebSocket protocol, which underpins almost every form of real-time communication between a browser and other servers on the internet, assigns GIF filetypes to it.

S&Ps will need to be even broader, more complex, and resilient in the Metaverse. Furthermore, because interoperability and live synchronous experiences are important, we'll have to prune some existing standards and "standardize" around a smaller set of standards per function-for example, today's image file formats include.GIF,.JPEG,.PNG,.BMP, TIFF, WEBP, and others. Even though today's web is based on open standards, much of it is closed and proprietary. Amazon, Facebook, and Google all use similar technologies, but they're not designed to work together in the same way that Ford's wheels aren't designed to fit into a GM chassis. Furthermore, these businesses are adamant about not integrating their systems or sharing their data. Such actions may increase the "digital economy's" overall value, but they also weaken their hyper-valuable network effects, making it easier for users to move their digital lives elsewhere.

This will be extremely difficult and time-consuming. The more valuable and interoperable the Metaverse becomes, the more difficult it will be to reach an industry-wide agreement on issues like data security, data persistence, forward-compatible code evolution, and transactions. Furthermore, the Metaverse will require entirely new rules for censorship, communication control, regulatory enforcement, tax reporting, the prevention of online radicalization, and a slew of other issues with which we're still grappling today.

While standard-setting usually entails face-to-face meetings, negotiations, and debates, the Metaverse's standards will not be established in advance. Meetings and opinions change on an ad hoc basis in the standard process, which is much messier and more organic.

Consider SimCity as a meta parallel for the Metaverse. Ideally, the "Mayor" (i.e., player) would design their mega-metropolis first, then construct it from the ground up. However, you cannot simply "create" a 10MM person metropolis in the game, as you cannot in real life. You begin by focusing on a tiny town and optimizing it (e.g., where the roads are, schools are, utility capacity, etc.). You build around this town as it grows, occasionally but prudently demolishing and replacing "old" areas, sometimes only if/when a problem (lack of power) or calamity strikes (a fire). However, unlike SimCity, there will be multiple mayors rather than just one, and their ambitions and incentives will frequently clash.

We do not know exactly what the Metaverse will require, much less how, when, or through which applications and groups existing standards will be transferred. As a result, it's crucial to evaluate how the Metaverse develops rather than just the technology standard it follows.

The 'On-Ramp' Experience

Consumers and businesses will not adopt a would-be proto-Metaverse simply because it is offered, just as Metaverse standards cannot be "announced."

Take a look at reality. Making a mall large enough to accommodate a hundred thousand people or a hundred stores does not guarantee to attract a single customer or brand. To meet current civilian and commercial demands, "town squares" form spontaneously around existing infrastructure and activities. In the end, any gathering spot - whether it's a bar, basement, park, museum, or merry-go-round - is visited because of who or what is already present, not because it's a destination in and of itself.

The same can be said for digital encounters. Facebook, the world's largest social network, succeeded not because it declared itself a "social network," but rather because it began as a college hot-or-not, evolved into a digital yearbook, and became a photo-sharing messaging service. The Metaverse, like Facebook, must be "populated," not simply "populate," and this population must then fill up the gaps in this digital environment with activities to do and stuff to consume.

This is why thinking about Fortnite as a video game, or an interactive experience is too limited and too quick. Fortnite began as a game, but it swiftly morphed into a social media platform. From the 1970s until the 2010s, teenagers would come home and speak on the phone for three hours. They now chat about Fortnite with their buddies, but not about Fortnite. Instead, they discuss school, movies, sports, the news, boys and girls, and other topics. After all, Fortnite does not have a story or an IP; the plot revolves around what happens on the island and who is present.

In addition, Fortnite is quickly becoming a platform for other businesses, IP, and stories to express themselves. This includes, most notably, last year's live Marshmello show. However, since then, the number of similar examples has exploded. In December 2019, as part of a larger in-game audience-interactive event that included a live...