Metaverse

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The term metaverse comes from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, and is now widely used to describe the vision behind current work on fully immersive 3D virtual spaces. These are environments where humans interact (as avatars) with each other (socially and economically) and with software agents in a cyber space, that uses the metaphor of the real world, but without its physical limitations.

In Stephenson's words, the "Metaverse" [is] my invention, which I came up with when I decided that existing words (such as "virtual reality") were simply too awkward to use [Snow Crash Acknowledgements]. The metaverse concept appears under other names in the Cyberpunk genre as far back as the 1981 novella True Names.

Stephenson’s vision of the metaverse

Snow Crash provides a unique use case for the metaverse. It shows how a metaverse might be implemented, how it could be used, how it might interface to the real world, and how it complements the real world.

It also has the benefit of foresight. It was written before implementation was practical, and can be seen as an immersive requirements description for a metaverse. Much of what he proposes is becoming more relevant as modern implementations begin to address the problems he describes. For example:

• scalability: you can have millions waiting outside a club trying to get access. They are rendered as a crowd, without the impossibility of rendering individual detail.
• access levels: from low quality public terminals, through goggle-based (heads up) to an interface that is bio-integrated (gargoyle).
• usability: avatars can see facial expressions and get body language cues - providing a virtual experience that is as rich as real-life face to face communication.
• bandwidth: the sophistication that an avatar can project and the facilities that a user can experience may be limited by the available bandwidth. However Snow Crash avoids any discussion of whether a user's computer receives a fully-rendered video feed or simply a description of his location and surrounding objects.
• code protocols as law: the metaverse is built on coding protocols. These define what can and cannot be done, what is legal, what is not. Law is code.
• economics: in the dystopian world of Snow Crash, there has been a great redistribution of real world power structures at the same time as development of the metaverse, and the growth of the corporation as mini-country (franchulate).

Some elements of Stephenson’s metaverse were necessary for the plot, but have not stood the test of time. His idea of a single privately-owned managed environment does not fit with the co-operative network structure of the modern internet, or the distributed efficiency of peer-to-peer networks. A related idea, of ribbon development outward from a center with real-world style rapid transport (rail and motorcycle), is also seen now as an unnecessary complication.

Early implementations

Most of the pioneering work on creating a metaverse has come from the gaming community.

In 1993, Steve Jackson Games launched a MOO (a text-based low-bandwidth virtual reality system) called The Metaverse as part of their online BBS system Illuminati Online. Several other game companies opened up virtual shop there, presaging the Second Life commercial land-rush nearly a decade later.

In the mid-1990s, SenseMedia created a MOO called SnowMOO. The world was based on Snow Crash and was a text-based implementation of the Metaverse. SenseMedia also ran ChibaMOO (aka The Sprawl) which was based on William Gibson's Cyberpunk literature but also was fashioned as a text-based Metaverse.

Active Worlds, which was based entirely on Snow Crash, popularized the project of creating the Metaverse in 1997 by distributing virtual-reality worlds capable of implementing at least the concept of the Metaverse.

Second Life and There have differentiated themselves from others by providing a social networking space and an economic framework for user-created content. Second Life has also begun opening up the architecture, turning it into a space in which users can freely develop content and interact for their own purposes and economic gain.

Massively multiplayer online RPGs are also shifting towards massively multiplayer virtual environments, which are purposely taking the concept of "game" and "role playing" out of the mix. The intention is to suggest the metaverse is augmenting real life opposed to offering an outlet.

Recent developments

Current applications no longer claim to be the Metaverse. However, many are inspired by the vision and are exploring the potential of a 3D immersive virtual space from many angles. For example:

World of Warcraft (WoW) has been described as “the new golf” - where the young and affluent meet in a stereotyped environment and use it for real world business and social networking.

Second Life is a pioneering microcurrency based social and economic platform, where users own IP on their own creations, and are free to build their own spaces and communities.

The Croquet project takes the metaverse metaphor as a starting point for a new form of operating system, that is built for the increasing power of modern computers, and does not have its foundations in the limitations of the previous century.

Google Earth is coming from the area of GIS and satellite imagery to build virtual structure on top of real earth data (cf downtown Tokyo).

Even some 2D advances in social networking come under this umbrella. For example the mesh networking structure that underpins the One Laptop per Child operating system and its Sugar user interface builds a desktop interface out from the principles of social connectivity.

3D web

The Metaverse Roadmap Summit in 2006-7 produced a 50-page public foresight report on 3D developments that are moving the web toward the Stephenson vision.

Economics and regulation

Economic activity within virtual worlds cannot stay unregulated. The metaverse will likely not incorporate Barlow's vision of an independent cyberspace.

The key development may be that of a global microcurrency platform. Inworld transactions have already gone from the Castronova observations in 2002 of students paying for tuition through inworld activity, to a global market where work is done (and real income generated) by players in developing nations, and paid for out of the residual leisure income of people in wealthier nations. At present there are a small number of exchange points (e.g. Second Life's LindeX) where conversion to and from real currency can be regulated to avoid money laundering or other illegal financial transfers. Just as the internet comes into conflict with the real world with issues of freedom of information (cf the great firewall of China), applications that work towards the metaverse will come into conflict with fundamental areas of real world social and economic activity.

Another possibility is not to use any conversion at all, but instead to use normal currency.

The social and economic impact of the metaverse was at the core of Stephenson's fiction, and is still an open question today. Will the massively multi-user metaverse architecture become a massively regulated architecture as the applications and infrastructure scale up to global metaverse dimensions, or will regulation be achieved in codethrough open protocols and secure e-commerce layers. What does the framework for a massive virtual economic and social space look like? Who will control the metaverse?

See also

• Simulated reality

References

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Last updated on Friday March 07, 2008 at 17:25:48 PST (GMT -0800)
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