The Metaverse in 2024: A Brave New World or a Tomorrow that Never Arrives?
By Peter Corcoran, University of Galway
IEEE Metaverse Newsletter, 2024
According to Wikipedia, the metaverse is a loosely defined term referring to virtual worlds in which users represented by avatars interact, usually in 3D and focused on social and economic connection.
The origins of the term metaverse are usually attributed to Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash from 1992. In this fictional world, humans, as programmable avatars, interact with each other in a 3D virtual space that forms an analog of the real world, appearing to its users as an urban environment developed along a 100-meter-wide road, called the Street, which spans the entire 65,536 km (216 km) circumference of a featureless, black, perfectly spherical planet. Virtual real estate is available to be bought and developed. Users access it through personal terminals that project a high-quality virtual reality display onto goggles worn by the user.
Sounds familiar? Stephenson definitely got the technology vision pretty spot on. However his societal vision was more dystopian than we’d want to identify with.
In 2019, the social network company Facebook launched a social VR world called Facebook Horizon and in 2021, the company was renamed “Meta Platforms” and declared a company commitment to developing a metaverse. However, in February 2023, its CEO wrote a Facebook post announcing the company’s pivot away from the metaverse to focus on AI. Was the metaverse done before it had a chance to get started?
But the Metaverse Was Already Here!
The 2003 virtual world platform Second Life is often described as the first metaverse, as it incorporated many aspects of social media into a persistent three-dimensional world with the user represented as an avatar. This virtual world has a rich 20+ year history and in 2021 had a GDP of $600M – larger than many small countries. While attempts to upgrade the underlying technology with VR have not been successful, the original virtual world of Second Life and its associated economy have demonstrated a sustainability that shows there is a niche for such virtual worlds.
Roblox is an online game platform and game creation system developed by Roblox Corporation that allows users to program and play games created by themselves or other users. Established in 2006 it only began to grow significantly in the second half of the 2010’s, a growth that was accelerated during the pandemic. Although it is more limited in terms of the VR spaces and the interactions allowed between users than Second Life, it enables users to build their own content and generate revenues from other users. Today Roblox has a multi-billion dollar economy and 75% of 9-12 year olds in the US are active players. Is it a first step into the metaverse for the iPad kids?
A New World for an Old Idea?
In her 2022 article in MIT Technology Review, Genevieve Bell argues that before smart-phones and computers the first metaverse was encapsulated by the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London. The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, as the extraordinary event was formally known, was the brainchild of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s beloved consort. It would showcase more than 100,000 exhibits from all over the world.
A surprising fraction of the literary and scientific community of the day found its way to the Crystal Palace. That roll call includes Charles Dickens, Charles Dodgson (who would become Lewis Carroll), Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Michael Faraday, Samuel Colt, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Babbage, and George Eliot. “See the world for a shilling” was a common refrain that summer.
Over its five-and-a-half-month run, it was estimated, over 6 million people visited the Crystal Palace – at the time, the total population of Britain was only 24 million!
Bell concludes her perspective: “The Great Exhibition and its array of descendants speak to the long and complicated human history of world-making … the metaverse will never be an end in itself. Rather, it will be many things: a space of exploration, a gateway, an inspiration, or even a refuge. Whatever it becomes, it will always be in dialogue with the world that has built it. The architects of the metaverse will need to have an eye to the world beyond the virtual. And in the 21st century, this will surely mean more than worrying about ancient elm trees and the tensile strength of glass. It will mean thinking deeply about our potential and our limitations as makers of new worlds.
We Have the Technology
Returning to Stephenson’s vision, the metaverse was originally presented as a separate world. But as technology has evolved and recently we have seen older virtual reality (VR) technology being superseded by augmented reality (AR) systems that blend the virtual with the real. This trend will likely grow since the end of the global pandemic. When people were confined in their homes there was a desire to escape from that reality and embrace the virtual but as we have transitioned back to physical presence the demand for VR has subsided significantly.
In VR the goal of the technology is to take over the user’s senses and create a separate and distinct world built on the latest digital media and computing technologies. By contrast AR systems seek to seamlessly blend the digital into the real while enhancing the user’s perceptions or abilities to interact with their environment. Whether AR is achieved through smart-glasses or embedded into our tablets or phones it strives to enhance the world around us, rather than separating us from it.
Which brings us to the smart-phone, a pivotal technology that has inserted itself seamlessly into our daily lives. Stephenson had not envisaged such an omnipresent device, indeed his social vision included the concept of public metaverse booths, similar to payphones.
So how does the smartphone change how we perceive the metaverse in 2024? Well our phones gather together many digital services and capabilities into a single, easily managed control point that we can carry around with us. And having all of these services in a single place and being able to combine their functions to simplify the many complexities of modern life is what makes our phones so compelling. In contrast to Stephenson’s vision where the digital world was separated from the real, our phones bring the digital world into the real, enhancing it for their owners.
Re-Thinking the Metaverse in 2024
Now the explicit question posed in this article is if the metaverse is a tomorrow that never arrives. If you agree with Stephenson’s viewpoint from Snow Crash you’ll likely come to the conclusion that we still don’t have the technology to realize his vision of a digital world that could be real enough for people to engage in realistic physical sword-fights and you’d be right. And perhaps for you the metaverse is a tomorrow that never comes…
But I take a different perspective. As technology has evolved we also have to expand our ideas about what comprises a metaverse. What are the key elements of the metaverse? Well ‘meta’ means to “go beyond” or “transcend”, so the metaverse should “go beyond” the real physical universe. But should our ideas be limited by requiring the metaverse to be a separate virtual world?
If we look on the metaverse as an enhancement of the world around us, then why can’t it also incorporate that real world as long as it is enhanced for its users and netizens? If you can agree with this perspective then your smartphone is arguably the nexus of your personal metaverse. Other digital technologies that we use on a daily basis, from e-mail to videoconferencing and texting are also parts of the digital world enhancing the physical world around us. If you fall into this interpretation of the metaverse then it is clear that for us it is part of our daily lives – an everyday reality that is all around us.
Welcome to that brave new MetaWorld!
