Being There Now
The Metaverse is in its Unconnectedness Era.
Breathtaking virtual realities now exist, as isolated universes with little or no access to each other or to the outside world.
It is also not clear what exactly counts as a virtual reality, or more properly, a virtual reality platform. What is the ontological status of a multi-player game like Beat Saber, compared to Facebook’s Horizon, which lets people be creators, not simply players in a pre-set activity?
I am most drawn to non-gaming Social VR platforms where I am able to create worlds and be with people. I host or co-host several events on the same VR platform, AltspaceVR, owned by Microsoft.
All major platforms that I am aware of are privately owned. Some are focused only on VR, like Sansar, VR Chat and ENGAGE. Some are focused on Web-based VR, like Hubs, owned by Mozilla. Facebook is another tech giant, like Microsoft, with its own platform — Horizon, that is part of larger empire.
Since Mark Zuckerberg is thinking about the Metaverse, many people are thinking about the Metaverse, because he thinks out loud and has a big megaphone. At his Q2 earnings call in July, 2021, he reiterated his costly commitment, but disappointed analysts a bit with his vagueness.
For instance, he defined the Metaverse simply as:
a virtual environment where you can be present with people in digital spaces
Looking for a nice simile we could all cling to, he also told us that it’ll be like:
an embodied Internet that you’re inside of rather than just looking at
I doubt that anyone who has not put on a VR headset and felt immersed in a virtual world has any idea what he’s talking about.
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I have been in a VR headset for thousands of hours and I’ve never experienced anything like an embodied Internet that I’m inside of. If I had to communicate what it’s like to people who haven’t tried fully immersive VR, I’d start with images anyone could relate to:
Virtual Worlds are another version of the physical world, with all the people and places and things you already know. They exist like pictures in your mind, or like dreams — except they last and they don’t act crazy — other people can be there with you, talking and interacting like you always do.
I wouldn’t say it’s like going inside the Internet. I’d say it’s more like going inside an unscripted movie where you’re a character. I’m sure I’m not the first person to type those words.
None of that is the Metaverse.
Virtual Worlds, and the emergent property of shared social presence, are components of the Metaverse, which is not just the sum of the parts but also the network of relationships that connects and coordinates them.
The Metaverse Zuckerberg wants Facebook to inhabit, if not dominate, is also more than the people, places, and things we already know, but I think it’s best to start with what’s familiar.
It’s true — there are Subways in VR that look just like the ones you’ve been to, with everything you need for your footlong.
It’s all synthetic, not physical. You can’t actually eat anything, and the animated character behind the counter talks dirty.
It is also possible to do things and interact with people and places in ways we can’t in the physical world due to cost or to constraints we call Laws, as in the Law of Gravity. In virtual worlds, Gravity can be altered — turned up or down to zero.
As a semi-old person, I’m pretty good at taking gravity into account in the physical world, although I am learning to adapt as my physical body changes, but overall, I don’t think about gravity much. I’ve got it mostly under control. I could say that about a lot of things — like walking or holding something, which are really just subsets or special cases of gravity.
It is at this level — walking, holding and dozens of other fundamental interactions between you and the physical world — that the current status of the Immature Metaverse stands out in high relief.
When every platform wants you, for example, to hold onto objects in their own unique way, it really makes you think about holding. About the different ways of holding and reasons for holding. About holding while in motion and releasing — throwing, which some have argued was a key step in making us human.
We recap hundreds of thousands of years of our species history and a few years of our own personal history as we re-learn holding-and-releasing on each new VR platform. I get frustrated when it takes me more than a few minutes even though humans are in fact the only species that can throw very well at all and it took life on earth billions of years to produce Sandy Koufax.
It’s mind expanding to think deeply about basic life functions, but it’s not very functional. I’m not sure how many different ways of being in the world I can store and retrieve as needed.
Last week I found myself having to relearn the UI of Life four times in a day.
- as a student at a training session in ENGAGE
- on a world hopping tour in Horizon, brainstorming with a colleague
- participating in a meditation and discussion in Hubs.
- attending a Dharma talk and checking-in with friends in AltspaceVR.
The ENGAGE training was a 9 am hour-long tutorial on the rich toolset for creating worlds and the things you want to put in them.
It was the third session, so I’ve taken in a lot of old-school ‘just-in-case’ learning — exploring every feature one-at-a-time just in case you need it sometime later.
I’d rather work on what I want to work on and have a just-in-time bot looking over my shoulder making sure I don’t make fatal mistakes and helping me find things. However, just-in-case is what’s available and I appreciate it.
I scaled and rotated a grizzly bear, placed an invisible chair on its back, and teleported up to sit there attached while we flew around. Not bad for a semi-old guy. And because I was in a focused learning mode, what I did sunk into my muscle memory — the way I selected from a menu, even the way I brought up a menu in the first place — and what sunk in was ENGAGE’s Life UI.
When I exited ENGAGE and went right to Horizon to meet up with my friend Ruth, the ENGAGE way of being and doing was still operational. In ENGAGE, you poke at menu items to select them, like you’re pushing a button. In Horizon, you aim a ray from your controller and pull the trigger. But I poked, realized my mistake, and still poked again the next time. You don’t move things the same way. You don’t hold things the same way.
You can say what you want about Planet Earth, the physical version, but at least the Life UI is consistent. When I go to Cambodia, my body works the same as it did back in the US. I grab things and throw things the same way in Cambodia as I do at home in the Pacific Northwest.
You can’t say that about the Metaverse and until you can, it’s really Immature. It’s mostly a bunch of parts acting independently with no substantive relationships between them.
As Ruth led me from one world to another, all inside Horizon, the visual styles were all different but all so Horizon-like that my brain gradually let go of the more photorealistic expectations created in ENGAGE.
It goes deeper.
ENGAGE presents itself as objects interacting in time, all of which can be recorded to make new objects and to create scenes. Horizon presents itself as a world building sandbox for self-expression.
It’s metaphysical, more than how the menus work. Platforms have God-like designers who think they know what we want to do there and they enable things according to those beliefs.
Hubs is different than both of them. I showed up there for an early evening meditation and when I say, ‘I,’ it does not mean that I showed up in anthropomorphic form. I was a shape, something like the seahorse fractal shape. My color was lime green and that was my name when someone spoke to me or I was called on.
It was a long way from ENGAGE, where the two leaders were wearing avatar coats and ties. But the meditation leader and the other people there spoke in normal human voices. Being there as a funky avatar was like wearing a costume, which felt natural because everyone else was too. As a costume not meant to express anything or to serve as a personal statement, it conferred deep anonymity.
Hubs doesn’t have the playful feel of Horizon or the university catalog of learning objects offered by ENGAGE. What it has is ease, ease of access and ease of adapting to the worlds on its platform.
Hubs doesn’t make a strong statement about what it is, except easy. It feels to me like a bare bones Airbnb, which is just what you need sometimes.
AltspaceVR has been around forever in digital media years. It has even had a near-death experience.
In July, 2017, the independent pioneering platform was a goner. “AltspaceVR Shuts Down,” the headlines said. Flatlined. Until a few months later when Microsoft used its super power to breath Life back into some code on a bunch of servers.
AltspaceVR is the undisputed leader in Social Infrastructure,. No other part of the Metaverse has well-developed procedures for creating, publicizing, managing, and tracking events. Events can be public or private and there are twenty or more every day on the public events menu. For this reason, it is my home base in the current Metaverse.
It’s ten times harder to get started in AltspaceVR than Hubs, but since I’ve already put in those uncomfortable start-up hours, that consideration is irrelevant to me now — except when I try to bring in someone for the first time. Then I wonder why I didn’t just bring them to Hubs, until I remember there’s not much to do there, or if there is, I don’t know how to find it.
I did not consciously set out to survey as much of the Metaverse as possible in a short period. I just went through my day the way it was scheduled — which was my first Aha! — there’s enough going on around the Metaverse to take me to four distinctly different places naturally, with no special effort.
Basic Life actions are accomplished very differently, but it wasn’t impossible to overcome. What I really wonder is what Mark Zuckerberg has lots of people wondering — how does it develop from here? Most importantly, how does it develop with any sense of interconnection and common purpose?
I have met many people who have spent as much time in VR as I have, all on one platform. There is already a tribal dimension. People who know only Horizon feel that they are really into VR and the Metaverse. Or people who know only AltspaceVR (like me), or any one of a dozen others.
Will there even be strong interconnections? Would would a Metaverse of isolated islands be like? What would a Metaverse dominated by a few giant platforms be like? What about a Metaverse with lots of independent platforms that can communicate with each other and share some basic Life UI principles?
I almost made it through a whole piece on the Metaverse without mentioning ‘Snowcrash,’ the 1992 Neil Stephenson novel that dominates our thinking and imagination about Metaverses.
That fictional Metaverse is continuous and connected, by a worldwide monorail, among other methods. There are separate distributed Republics, but there is no suggestion that visitors need to learn a new way of accomplishing all the basics of life in each one.
I’m not sure how we get from immaturity to deep interconnection. WebVR and other standards are the obvious answer, but maybe some of the entities in the Metaverse won’t want to conform to standards, except their own.
Apple is designated as a potential winner in the Metaverse derby by Bloomberg, along with Epic Games and Nvidia.
Other commentators have described the Metaverse as an end run around Apple’s 30% take at the App Store and an existential threat to the company.
I don’t think winners and losers is the best way to build a Metaverse, but I don’t see any other dynamic in play at the moment.
The human-created Metaverse Mark Zuckerberg is talking about is a nano-speck in an infinite Metaverse we don’t begin to grasp.
What we call the Real World, often with air quotes, is first level VR. It’s a consensually shared projection onto the quantum field we’re all enmeshed in. Spatial Media technologies allow us to extend and externalize this mental activity we all do together.
The Metaverse is that total quantum field we call our Universe, plus any other possible Universes. Some quantum physicists say there are plenty. In fact, one interpretation of quantum physics involves new Universes created and sent into an ever-expanding Metaverse every time there is a probabilistic outcome, which is always.
Unless I’m missing something, these Universes are not in any kind of stable communication. Leaks happen, anomalies occur, channelers channel. It is difficult to discern a clear message.
We are not able to access the MetaOS, the operating system of the Metaverse. Also, there is no OS for the privatized, human-scale Metaverse Zuckerberg contemplates. Only apps and in-App messaging. My guess is that the projects will co-evolve. As Quantum technologies extend our range to the limits of our Universe and beyond, we will better understand how to build out our mini-version.
In one recent attempt at a taxonomy of Social VR platforms, Facebook’s Horizon is designated as the leader in a new category they call, Social Creative.
Will platforms that emphasize sharing lead us to a more integrated Metaverse? If so, the ones designed to let Every User create and share their creations should be well-positioned. User-Created worlds and Events are the best thing about AltspaceVR. Creation and sharing is the essence of Roblox.
Each one of us is a Metaverse of the parts that make us up.
The different heart and knee and skin universes we contain are served by common carriers and share biochemical protocols. As far as we know, it happens this way because it works, the entities that divide labor and share protocols survive.
I suspect that applies to every Metaverse at every scale.
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My Day in the Immature Metaverse was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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