Musings in the Metaverse…
Part of my job is to watch for trends and see how they will affect us in the coming year, 5-year and 10-year periods. So, as you can imagine, I’ve been spending a lot of time grappling with the Metaverse and its hot little buzz word brother NTFs and how they will affect us in the coming years. That is besides every deck having to mention them.
The Metaverse is coming, if for no other reason than the steel wills of some tech giants. But what will the Metaverse be? When will it get here? And who’s vision will drive it? Those are much harder to answer questions. Let’s start with the obvious,
1. The Metaverse as described in “Ready Player One” isn’t here, no matter how many slick videos try to make you think otherwise.
2. A VR only Metaverse is probably not in the cards for a very long time.
3. The truly inter-connected Metaverse is still fantasy being more than 10 years away!
I know these are all hard truths, but I believe them all to be 100% true. We are in the very early stages of building something truly new but it’s going to be a bumpy ride. So here is what I see happening:
In the coming year, I think there will be a big push from Meta to frame the metaverse around the idea of VR, but it’s not going to win. While Meta is the 1000lb gorilla in the room, there is too much of an installed footprint outside of VR to hold down publishers and developers like Epic, Unity, Valve, Apple, Microsoft or Roblox that want a broader definition. There is no reason to exclude desktop and mobile platforms from the metaverse. This is a good thing.
Next, we are going to start to see the evolution and sometimes collapse of what I’m going to call Bubbleverses. These are self-contained little universes that will be the starting point for shared user data. These are already here in the form of Fortnite (w/creative), Horizion Worlds, Roblox, Core and more. These are very important! Think of them as trial runs for how an interconnected Metaverse will work.
Some of these Bubbleverses are already well defined with multiple worlds, content sharing, etc; but in the end, I think the publisher backed Bubbleverses are the ones to watch. Meta, Epic and Valve have strong existing back ends and more important, strong relationships to many desirable IPs. So, I think they have the advantage. On top of that, Epic and Valve’s ties to engine development give them another advantage point.
In the next 2 to 4 years, I see Epic or Valve either both or together, releasing a shareable asset API that can be cross game, cross engine capable, entitled by their backends. Suddenly if you buy Evil Dead 2 the Game, you can play as Ash in Fortnite, or drive the Delta in Rocket League. Meta and Valve also have enough strength both in terms of capital and connections to push this sort of cross IP collab.
The sticking point here is IP management. Will Marvel/Disney allow you to buy Marvel Heroes and suddenly be able to play as Wolverine in every other connected game? I think it’s a stretch right now. There must be a real shift in IP management, and we all know how fast real shifts happen. I do believe that IP owners will be dragged kicking and screaming into the new world, but it won’t be pretty.
Now, let’s talk about NFTs for a moment. NFTs are a solution, looking for a looming problem that isn’t here today. At some point beyond the 10-year window when the fully connected Metaverse becomes a reality, we are going to need a decentralized system for rights management. And NFTs may likely be one of the building blocks of that technology. But while we are still in the Bubbleverse phase, this is overkill. Most publishers with some form of a storefront already have their own entitlement system that is faster and easier to maintain. That said, I think there will be movement in the 5–10-year window, where I expect some of them to start migrating to using something NFT-like in preparation for the eventual transition.
Also, in this 5 to 10-year window, I feel VR will finally overcome one of its last big hurdles, movement. Now I know there are plenty of hardware-based attempts at solving this today. But let’s be real. They are all bad. Endless treadmills, special shoes, out of all of them; none give a practical solution. The actual solution to this problem will come from brain-controlled-computer interfaces. And no, I don’t mean jacking in.
Valve is already ahead of the game here and Meta is catching up. I think in the next 5 to 10-year window, controllers for motion will be replaced by just thinking about how you want to move. Suddenly your 10x10 room-space truly becomes endless. Are there problems to still overcome? Yes. Motion Sickness and vertigo are already huge hurdles in VR. But as the platform matures, more and more people will just adapt. You see it happening already.
Also in this timeframe, haptics will finally come in to their own. In fact, they might make the 1 to 4-year window right now. Gloves, vests, even whole-body suits are possible. And here is the thing, they don’t have to be perfect. Your haptic glove doesn’t need to give you the full sensation of touch, it just needs to give you a bit, proprioception and your brain will do the rest.
Now beyond the 10-year window is hard to see. I feel that the true Metaverse is out there, but until I start to see standards committees being formed, or a victor in the Bubbleverse wars, it’s hard to see us reaching the Ready Player One dystopia. But the pathways to get there are becoming clearer every day. As a developer and game designer, this is such an exciting possibility.
