Explain the ‘Metaverse’ to Your Grandparents

How to Explain the ‘Metaverse’ to Your Grandparents

By Aaron Frank

THIS IS AN INTRODUCTION for a complete or almost-beginner. There’s plenty of mainstream coverage on the issue, but it often confl ates concepts: VR is not the Metaverse (though it’s

related), crypto/Web3 by itself is not the Metaverse (though also related). Confusing, I know. Whether you’re a business person, or grandparent, this is my best eff ort to lay everything out.

Firstly, who am I to explain the Metaverse to the grandparent/MBAs of the world?

There are experts with more experience who are commenting smart things in this space, and I will cite many of them here. I was too young for Second Life in its prime, but I do come from what I might call the Oculus Rift generation.

Since 2013, I’ve used VR, built apps, and written related articles at Vice and other places. I’ve also worked at a Silicon Valley technology organization called Singularity University where I’ve researched, used, and built virtual worlds as my core focus. That’s the point of view I can off er.

What is the Metaverse?

In 99.99% of cases, provided the term is used correctly, you could replace the word ‘Metaverse’ with ‘internet’ and the sentence will mean the same thing. So then why is everyone using this fancy new word? I think analyst Doug Thompson, says it very well “that we’re using the term as a proxy for a sense that everything is about to change.”

So if the Metaverse is just the internet, what about the internet is about to change?

To answer that question, this article comes in four parts: 1. Spatial Computing (What is that?) 2. Game Engines (What are those?) 3. Virtual Environments (Is that the Metaverse? …sort of) 4. Virtual Economies

So let’s explore... 1. Spatial Computing (and the history of the ‘interface’)

To understand the changes coming to life online, you have to start with the seemingly obvious way we currently access the internet; computers.

And to understand where we’re headed, we have to look to the history of computing interfaces. By computer interface, I’m referring to the way that humans interact with digital machines to get them to do what we want.

In the middle of the 20th century, getting a computer to do things involved sticking your hand in it to wire cables.

Then something called punch cards were invented which allowed us to keep our hands to ourself.

Then came command lines (like MS-DOS) - you

could interact by typing words. Next was the invention of the graphical user interface (GUI) or clicking pictures and what most of us take for granted as just how they work today. Today GUI’s are used in everything from ATMs, to ticketing machines, and it’s the reason ordinary nonprogrammer people like us can use them.

Why do I go through this history? The point is that

at every stage in the development just described, working with computers became easier, more accessible, and more people could use them.

Today, the next great computing interface is emerging — it just doesn’t have a good name yet. You may have heard about concepts like augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, immersive computing, or whatever two-letter acronym.

What all of these concepts share in common is that they involve the use of 3-dimensional space.

That is a very big deal.

My colleague at Singularity University, interface designer Jody Medich, taught me just how important 3D space is for the human brain. Which makes sense. We are born into 3D space. We grow up living in 3D space. It would make sense that our brains and bodies are built to interact in 3D space.

So this term ‘spatial computing’ is becoming a commonly used way to refer to these interfaces.

Generally you should also think of ‘spatial’ things as having the properties of moving around in space.

To explain why this matters, I often use the example of Protectwise (now a Verizon company). They build tools to help cybersecurity professionals detect threats to their IT/ computer systems. Typically, a cybersecurity person lives life inside dashboards looking at log fi les to sense what’s happening. What if that data could be turned into a spatial environment? Now patrolling your company’s computer system is like playing a video game. More people could do that since it’s more intuitive. This isn’t the Metaverse, but it does point in the direction we’re headed. Cybersecurity work turned into a VR game.

Spatial computing like this is coming to life online.

2. Game Engines (The Construction Tools to Build the Metaverse)

Game engines may be one of the most consequential technologies of the next decade but maybe you’re asking: What is a game engine?

A game engine is the software tool developers use to build (and run) video games. In these software programs you can upload 3D objects, apply rules for how those objects can move, add sounds, etc. The Protectwise system shown above was made using the Unity game engine.

Aaron Lewis nicely points out, “game engines are basically eating the world. Urban planning, architecture, automotive engineering fi rms, live music and events, fi lmmaking, etc. have all shifted a lot of their workfl ows/design processes to Unreal Engine and Unity.”

Another jargon-y term you might start to hear is ‘digital twin’, which is the idea that a physical thing can use its sensor data to create a software copy of itself inside a computer. This lets humans interact with simulated industrial objects as if they’re computers.

While there’s more happening in the world of game engines than I can go into, there’s two engines to know; Unreal and Unity. Unreal is owned by Epic Games, the publisher which owns Fortnite, and Unity is a large publicly traded company. Personally I’ve only ever used Unity

since it’s designed to be somewhat beginnerfriendly.

The last thing you should know about game

Metaverse from page 95

engines, is that they are going to see mind-bending levels of improvement this decade.

The takeaway is that during this decade, graphics will stop looking like ‘graphics’. We’ll see photorealistic virtual environments that appear like real life. This means you should try to see past the cartoonish aesthetic today’s Metaverse coverage will put in your mind.

For example, imagine what that means for something like Beyond Sports, a Dutch company which uses Unity and real time positional data taken from sports to render live events as they are happening inside virtual reality. Picture this in 10 years (walking around inside a game live with your friends) and now we’re starting to arrive at what we might be doing in the Metaverse.

And here we can introduce the fi rst of a good defi nition of what the term Metaverse is pointing toward: the internet has been built by web developers, the Open Metaverse is being built by game developers.

If you start paying attention to it, you’ll notice game engines everywhere, which is especially true for…….

3. Virtual Environments

Now that we’ve introduced spatial computing and game engines, we’ve arrived where most mainstream coverage of the Metaverse tries to pick up as its starting point.

Virtual environments are the ‘places’ we’ll be logging into in tomorrow’s internet. They are also a tricky thing to defi ne. In many ways, Twitter and Discord (it’s an online messaging platform) are already virtual environments where people meet and exchange.

The virtual environments I’m exploring here, however, are the spatial ones built in game engines and there’s two kinds to explore. First is real world augmented reality (think Pokemon Go).

The other is the more traditionally thought of ‘online’ ones you have to sit down at a computer (or go into a VR headset) to access, though this distinction is arbitrary and is already falling away.

Pokemon GO is a helpful example of AR in the real world. It’s a spatial game, built using Unity, that brings 3D characters to the physical real world.

In the future, it won’t just be games, but the entire physical world will be like a canvas ready to paint with data.

To make this all happen, technology companies are scrambling to build what gets referred to as the Mirrorworld or AR Cloud. These words mean the same thing as a ‘digital twin’ from earlier. If you want to go deeper on this, I wrote this article exploring its impact on society.

This is all another way of saying the internet is spilling out of our phones and computers to merge with physical reality. The Metaverse won’t just be random cartoon game worlds built by developers. It will also be digital replicas of very real spaces, likely the whole earth, and digital twins of industrial stuff like your car. It will come to include sitting in your backyard with family members beamed in as avatars, or putting on a VR headset to walk around other cities in real time.

Next, let’s explore more traditional virtual worlds. Perhaps the most well known example is a platform called Second Life, which was a huge phenomenon roughly 15 years ago and is still big today.

If you’re not familiar, it is a collection of virtual worlds built by users that you can explore as an avatar. Millions of users signed up, and lots of stuff happens there. It’s also a good reminder that anytime you see the media claim that something is ‘the fi rst’ virtual-based whatever, that’s very likely not true.

Weddings, shopping, concerts; it’s all been done in Second Life

A very real economy exists in Second Life, where users buy and sell virtual goods and services and it has its own currency; the Linden Dollar.

Today, there are a whole suite of platforms that could be thought of as successors to Second Life - Rec Room, VRChat, Altspace, Decentraland, Somnium Space, and a lot of others.

The ultimate vision of the Metaverse is that all of these experiences (from Beyond Sports, Pokemon GO, Fortnite, Roblox, to everything) will become an interconnected network of virtual environments, aka the internet but for experiencing stuff .

My own journey to understanding this started several years ago in a platform called Sansar, originally launched by the same company behind

Second Life. What struck me is that I was ‘walking around’ with Sam inside the Internet. Also, here was a retail e-commerce site to buy clothes online.

I will say that just like most companies today have a website, at some point most companies will have a 3D virtual environment of some kind.

With spatial computing (game engines and virtual environments like these), we’re closing the gap between the diff erence of any experience you could have in real life (going to a concert, hanging out with friends, etc.) and having that same experience mediated by a computer online. This is what concepts like Ready Player One (a Steven Spielberg fi lm adapted from a book) are directionally pointing toward.

And here we get our next helpful description of the Metaverse: To tie it all back together the Metaverse is the internet, but also a spatial (and often 3D), game engine driven collection of virtual environments. 4. Virtual Economies (…and NFTs)

One of my favorite statistics is that Second Life still supports an annual economy roughly $500M in size (that number grew during Covid19). The GDP of Second Life is larger than some real world countries.

Fortnite, a game that doesn’t cost a penny to play, still earned $9B in 2018 and 2019. How? They sell in game stuff for players to express themselves in a variety of ways through virtual clothing, dance moves, and other items. In some ways the Metaverse is just a giant virtual fashion industry.

If that sounds silly or weird, just think about how someone carefully plans what clothes to wear, or what profi le picture to use on LinkedIn. We care about how we express ourselves in the world. If we’re going to spend an increased portion of our time online, it’s not so silly to expect people will want to buy expensive Gucci bags to carry around Roblox.

So where do NFTs fi t into all of this? Among other uses, NFTs off er the infrastructure to let people take custody of owning this virtual stuff.

I hate to do this, but it’s worth taking one giant step back to unpack what an NFT actually is.

First thing to note is that NFTs are powered by blockchains. A blockchain is really just a fancy excel spreadsheet that keeps track of who owns what (like what a bank does to keep track of who owns what money). When you send money to someone, today we rely on centralized authorities like a bank to keep track of changing the number of monies in our accounts to refl ect the transaction. The idea behind a blockchain is that everyone just gets a copy of the same spread sheet, and the big deal/breakthrough is that through complicated cryptography (where the term ‘crypto’ comes from) all those spreadsheets communicate to agree about which transactions are legitimate.

No more needing central trusted authorities. No way to hack, change, or mess around with what the spreadsheet says.

NFT stands for non-fungible token. The key word is ‘fungible’ which just means whether you can exchange something for an equivalent version and it will be equally valuable (bitcoin is fungible because it doesn’t matter which bitcoin you have, they are all equally valuable). Non-fungible is the opposite: each item is unique. This is why we’re seeing a lot of digital art using NFTs. NFTs use blockchains to determine who owns what.

This shift toward a decentralized way of managing life online has an industry term you will hear more and more called Web3, which is worth getting to know.

The NFT is the token associated with the metadata that points at the thing.

The reason NFTs and the Metaverse are confl ated so often is that there’s an expectation that they may power these virtual economies by acting as the infrastructure to mediate the exchange of