Interoperability in the Metaverse

You are reading this document on a 2D screen. Now imagine this screen expanding outward into a 3D space. Whilst this is rendering transform yourself into an avatar.?You are presented with a door that swings open. Walk through the door and into the next room. I am over here to the left. See me? Come over and sit next to me on the couch. Welcome to my world!?Look around you.?Everything you see are software components I have assembled to create this world. Talk into your microphone. Your voice is fed to my voice API which then overlays your avatar's voice profile. This feed is mixed with the avatar’s lip-sync API and now I can see and hear your avatar speaking to me.?

This world I have built is one of the many worlds being built that makeup what we collectively call the metaverse -?a shared universe where we can socialize, interact, learn, and play.?We like to think of the metaverse as the next generation of the internet. Today we have snippets of what the metaverse will ultimately be like. Before the metaverse can break into the mainstream we must solve a number of problems, one of the most pressing of which is that these distinct worlds cannot talk to each other - there is no seamless transition from one world to the next. Virtual goods I purchased in Fortnight cannot be taken on my upcoming trip to Minecraft.?What will make the metaverse whole and drive adoption is interoperability. Interoperability will transform the metaverse from siloed vendor-centric worlds to a thriving connected universe - one that fosters innovation and competition just like in RL (real-life).

In order for this to happen we need to innovate in a number of key areas - identity, payments, and, yes you guessed it, integration. One mechanism that helps spur innovation in early-stage markets is standardization as it helps to increase the addressable market and levels the playing field for smaller innovators. The internet expanded rapidly after the broad acceptance of the TCP/IP and HTTP standards.?Today larger internet companies are investing in their proprietary worlds with proprietary protocols as they attempt to gain an unfair advantage in the metaverse opportunity -?something similar to the browser wars in the early days of the internet. In these proprietary worlds, creators and developers often need to pay very high taxes to sell their wares, and these investments are not leverageable in other worlds because of their incompatibility. It’s clear that the metaverse will be bigger than any one company, and that we will have a need to adopt standards in certain areas or companies will make a business by providing interoperability services. As an example companies are already offering services that enable cross-world avatar services.?We should also accept that there will be variance in these worlds creating the need for vertical standards and proprietary standards to support the use cases on different worlds.

One area for interoperability that has emerged is that of ownership. Blockchain technologies have emerged as a mechanism for ownership that can be transferable between worlds. In Decentraland users can purchase land, the proof of ownership (aka NFT) for which is stored in an Ethereum blockchain.?So long as another world recognizes this ownership mechanism a user's property rights on Decentraland can be recognized.??

Decentraland has proposed mechanisms for broader interoperability with other worlds. One such proposal is integration via a protocol called IPSME (Idempotent Publish/Subscribe Messaging Environment). IPSME proposes concepts that are common in modern middleware such as extensible out-of-process translations to ensure process compatibility and the notion of reuse over point-to-point. Such integration will enable users to participate in activities like live auctions and concerts on Decentraland, and those held on other integrated worlds. This will allow business owners in Decentraland to grow by increasing their addressable market to other worlds.??

What is the implication for today's business? There is no road map for how the metaverse will develop. In this early phase of development, it is likely we will see analogs of traditional web and RL business models transposed into the metaverse, this will likely give way to a more disruptive phase downstream where metaverse native business models start to disrupt these transposed models. It’s important that we start to develop the muscles to transpose our services to this new channel. Retailers need to be able to port their eCommerce websites to sell inside worlds, content products need ways to stream and view their content on virtual screens, advertisers need billboards on digital buildings, and manufacturers need digital twins so folks can experience their products virtually. There is no shortage of opportunity.

We need to start by test-and-learning our new muscles in these new worlds. Once business models are established we will no doubt have to bridge our RL infrastructure with the metaverse infrastructures. It would appear likely that metaverse instances will support API-based interfaces for service integration. Technologies such as APIs and IPSME will no doubt play a part. It will be a fun journey and I look forward to seeing you in the Metaverse no matter what world that is.

ajd

#integration #api