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We are kicking off a new series of articles here on MetaPortal where we will attempt to take Matthew Ball’s “Metaverse Primer” and condense it into a more readable format. Matthew has published essays about the metaverse as far back as 2018 and his January 2020 update certainly impacted our views and thinking about the space.
The “Metaverse Primer” includes 9 articles and is an absolute must-read. However, that’s 33,000 words with high information density and full of terminology. We will try to summarise each of the 9 articles individually first. We will then try to consolidate everything into a relatively short, all-inclusive text, an ELI5 of sorts. This will be no easy feat, no doubt, but we believe that this will make it easier for us to share and spread some of the concepts and ideas in the primer.
There’s another reason why we want to go through this exercise. Matthew talks about this concept of the metaverse stack. So if we think about the dream of an open metaverse, which parts of the stack have to be decentralised? Are we deploying funds and other resources in those specific areas? And if not, how do we do it? From our perspective, an open metaverse is not a foregone conclusion. We just might end up in the Big Gov Metaverse (Chinese version) or the Big Corp Metaverse (American version). So we wanted to explore the idea of the open metaverse stack, based on Matthew’s concept, and see where we stand, as an industry and as a community, in making sure the dream of an open metaverse becomes a reality.
Without further ado, let’s dive into the first article – “Framework for the Metaverse”
Matthew’s first article sets up the framework for the metaverse. To set the stage, he uses electricity and mobile internet as two transformative eras that could be comparable in magnitude and consequence to the emergence of the metaverse.
The main lesson from looking at history is that the breaking point of when a technology becomes transformative usually comes when many different innovations converge. These transformative eras occur in waves, and cannot be pinned down to any one event.
In the case of the mobile internet, many would identify the 3G iPhone as the start of the mobile internet era. However, the 3G iPhone benefited from previous innovations in mobile, from 2G and WAP, as well as technological innovations in chips, network standards, wireless towers, app development, payment rails and countless other components.
“All of the above creations and contributions, collectively, enabled the iPhone and started the mobile internet era.”
With mobile, infrastructure investments were driven by innovation at the app layer. Spotify, Netflix and Snapchat leading to improvements in wireless connectivity, Instagram to enhancements in camera quality, etc. Improved hardware then facilitated greater adoption and utilisation of apps. As a side note, we believe this cycle of app-driven infrastructure improvement applies to crypto as well. Union Square Ventures outlined this thesis in 2018 in their article titled “The Myth of The Infrastructure Phase.”
Matthew also touches on the importance of user capability and how changing capability affects the adoption of advanced technologies. Basically, we can’t widely deploy new tech until consumers are comfortable using it. I mean, we can, but it won’t gain much traction. As consumers adopt new tech, industries re-orient themselves around consumer habits. As an example, users adopting mobile led to everyone building for mobile, which meant significant changes at the business level over the last decade.
“This transformation is as significant as any hardware or software innovation — and, in turn, creates the business case for subsequent innovations.”
Quick summary:
Electricity and mobile internet were transformational innovations;
They happened because many other innovations, both primary and secondary, came together – the snowball effect;
It’s impossible to identify a breaking point or a specific secondary innovation that caused a flip;
It was impossible to predict how they would change the world.
Applying these lessons to the metaverse, it’s clear that “we should not expect a single, all-illuminating definition of the metaverse.” Furthermore, we can’t predict its evolution and impact other than to say that it will lead to large-scale societal disruption.
“The Metaverse is best understood as ‘a quasi-successor state to the mobile internet’. This is because the Metaverse will not fundamentally replace the internet, but instead build upon and iteratively transform it.”
With PCs, people had occasional access to the internet. With mobile internet, everyone has ongoing access, mostly anywhere and anytime, to connectivity and computational resources. Metaverse will place us “within” the internet, and within billions of computers worldwide, alongside everyone else.
Matthew does attempt to encapsulate his thoughts into a singular definition:
“The Metaverse is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds which can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”
He does further clarify the concept of the metaverse by expanding what it is not:
Not virtual worlds;
Not VR headsets;
Not user-generated virtual world or virtual world platform;
Not video games;
Not tools like Unreal, Unity, WebXR, etc.
Don’t worry, this futuristic “within the internet” vision is far away and requires extraordinary technological advancements. But here, in 2021, we are at the beginning of the metaverse journey. “Metaverse” has become a buzzword, Facebook is rebranding itself into a “metaverse company”, we talk about open metaverse vs. closed or federated metaverse, etc. To track the emergence of the metaverse, Matthew introduces the metaverse stack, which consists of eight core categories.
Hardware - physical technologies and devices
Networking – provisioning of persistent, real-time connectivity
Compute – computing resources to support the existence of the metaverse
Virtual platforms
Interchange tools and standards
Payments
Metaverse Content, Services, and Assets – all businesses and services that support the metaverse but are not integrated into platforms
User behaviours - observable changes in consumer and business behaviours
While we can’t be sure how exactly these technologies will develop and interact, we can guess that together they will eventually enable a society-altering metaverse. “Based on precedent, however, we can guess that the Metaverse will revolutionize nearly every industry and function. The collective value of these changes will be in the trillions.”