The 'Metaverse Primer' recap by MetaPortal - Part VI
Interchange Tools + Standards and the Metaverse
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Today, we continue our recap of the “Metaverse Primer”, covering Interchange Tools & Standards. You can read the original essay here.
Matthew defines Interchange Tools & Standards as “The tools, protocols, formats, services, and engines which serve as actual or de facto standards for interoperability, and enable the creation, operation and ongoing improvements to the Metaverse. These standards support activities such as rendering, physics, and AI, as well as asset formats and their import/export from experience to experience, forward compatibility management and updating, tooling, and authoring activities, and information management.”
While interchange tools and standards are somewhat irrelevant in the absence of things like hardware, compute and networking, they are perhaps the most important part of creating an open and interoperable Metaverse.
History of the Internet
We can start this story by looking at the history of the internet. A product of collaboration between academics, government and independent researchers, the internet was built on open standards. This encouraged sharing of ideas and innovations that often benefited the entire ecosystem, instead of a single entity. Companies could still develop proprietary tech on top of the open standards. But the existence of the open standards allowed more companies to build more things, leading to increased competition and breadth of options for consumers. Open standards also served as a “check the rent-seeking tendencies of platforms in between the web and its users.”
We can imagine the internet developed by telcos. Downloading a .jpg might cost money, you might only be able to use one browser, creating a website would be a costly and bureaucratic endeavour and so on. The bundling of services by telcos would be similar to how Microsoft attempted to bundle Internet Explorer with the Windows OS, but much worse. Microsoft got sued for that, by the way, opening the door for Google. In a world where the internet was developed by a corporation, we’d have much less freedom and innovation, and the impact of the internet on the world would be a fraction of what it turned out to be thanks to open standards and technologies.
The Metaverse will not be developed by the same set of actors. Governments and universities developed the internet because they were the only ones with computational and financial resources as well as talent. That’s not the case when it comes to the Metaverse. And even though the Metaverse will be developed by for-profit actors and corporations, we still want it to succeed in the same way the internet did. For that, we need an ecosystem of interchange protocols and open standards to facilitate interoperability between otherwise closed ecosystems.
The Problem of Closed Standards
Closed ecosystems are pervasive today. When platforms reach a certain scale, they use a variety of questionable tricks to lock in developers and users and extract as much value as possible. Further, they actively stifle competitive solutions even when those solutions can benefit the ecosystem as a whole.
“Due to digital network effects (which span developers and end-users), plus zero-marginal-cost revenues, this strategy is often potent and damaging.”
Matthew brings up a couple of examples. Like Sony’s refusal to support cross-play, despite the fact that technically, this was feasible as far back as 2016. Or Valve’s, owner of Steam, policy that games bought through Steam will forever require Steam to be played. Steam’s head start in the space, coupled with these types of lock-in policies, make competition impossible. Electronic Arts, after eight years of selling PC titles exclusively through its EA Origin store, came back to Steam in 2019. Epic Games launched a competitor to Steam in 2018 and despite massive spending and better rates, is unlikely to generate cumulative profit until late 2020s.
Apple is, perhaps, the best example of policies and actions exclusively focused on preventing disruption and constraining calls for open standards.
“We see this through its control over all iOS app distribution and monetization, its prohibition on competing app stores and mobile platforms within iOS, its ability to coerce Metaverse platforms into changing how they describe themselves in order to stay in Apple’s favor, its power to collect 5–6x standard rates for digital payments, its lying about down ranking competing services on its app platform, its promoting of its own services in ways its competitors can’t, its locking competitors out of key APIs/capabilities, its unilateral determination of when and how new innovations will be made available, its changing of its policies to harm competitors and define them as it sees fit.”
It's rather ironic that the iPhone itself wouldn’t have been possible without the open standards. Now Apple is hard at work preventing a similar breakthrough in technology and innovation.
Interchange Solutions
While there are many examples of closed platforms, there are also examples of interchange solutions that emerged to make multi-platform development easier.
Gaming engines, such as Unreal Engine and Unity, that can run and be optimised for any gaming stack offer many benefits. They allow game developers to focus on developing the best games, take care of operating system updates and new devices, expand the addressable market for the devs, make hiring easier by standardising tools and experience needed for development and, lastly, make barriers to entry lower for new developers who now don’t need to worry about time and resources necessary to build a gaming engine.
Another example is live gaming services providers such as Microsoft’s PlayFab and Amazon’s GameLift. “These offer publishers unified backend infrastructure capabilities, such as player account management and single sign-on, leaderboards, matchmaking, analytics, voice chat, and more.”
The strength of standard, cross-platform gaming engines and live ops infrastructure has contributed to cracks in closed platforms, including things like Sony enabling cross-play on its devices thanks to Fortnite.
Now for the Metaverse
When it comes to the Metaverse, things get even more complicated. The Metaverse will integrate most of our devices, our cars, home-security devices, AR and VR hardware, office productivity tools, wearables, etc. All of those things are designed to benefit from proprietary standards though. Facebook is heavily investing in XR specifically to set those standards and avoid their fate with mobile, where operating standards were set by their competitors, Apple and Google.
With games, we want to “move assets, items, achievements, play history, currency, avatars and more” even though that would disrupt the incumbents. We want identity and player data open and accessible, to improve our experiences and also mitigate the issue of toxicity in gaming.
With rendering, in addition to video games, other industries have invested in their own solutions. Maya, Houdini, Pixar’s RenderMan for film, homegrown solutions in engineering, etc. For the Metaverse to succeed, these tools will need to be interoperable.
“More broadly, it’s likely that the leading virtual platforms of the Metaverse will be even more lucrative and powerful than today’s mobile leaders. This is because, compared to iOS and Android today, these ‘operating systems’ will span far more of the physical world, while also controlling more of both labor and creative product itself.”
The Metaverse will require a lot of new tools and technologies. These tools will define what is built in the Metaverse, the quality of those experiences and who will build them. They will define how many developers can participate. Through their take rates, lock-in features, and ways in which they limit consumer choice, the companies of today will determine what the Metaverse looks like.
Interchange standards for the Metaverse
We are seeing some interchange solutions being developed today. Disney’s Pixar open-sourcing its Universal Scene Description (USD) file format, Nvidia’s Omniverse platform, Epic’s Twinmotion are some of the examples of tools that make it easier to create or generate interoperable assets.
Cesium is an open platform for 3D geospatial data that uses the 3D Tiles open standard. It allows anyone to leverage simulations.
Epic Online Services (EOS), launched in 2020, offers the same services as Microsoft PlayFab and Amazon GameLoft but for free and without locking developers into their preferred cloud solution.
Discord is another example, allowing anyone to plug in directly into its best-in-class audio and text communications.
One of the challenges of open standards, however, is the need to offer developers greater profits than provided by closed platforms. This is challenging given the level of investment, often loss-making, by the major platforms.
We hope, however, that blockchain technology will be able to provide some answers here. Blockchains and decentralised applications have shown the ability to effectively disintermediate processes across various industries, using token incentives to bootstrap powerful networks. The next essay, Payments and The Metaverse (and Blockchain) will cover this topic in greater detail.