What is the Metaverse?

“I always think it’s important that people understand what something is. And I’m really not sure the average person can tell you what the metaverse is.”

Tim Cook,?Apple

This week, I wanted to try something different with the newsletter. I wanted to theme it and I decided upon “The Metaverse” simply because I think it is hugely misunderstood and something we can dive deeper into, together.

Whilst I don’t claim to be an expert in this area, I am extraordinarily curious about new technology and have seen first-hand the push back given to new tech before it becomes mainstream, and I find the dichotomy really interesting. (I can still remember the reaction when the world went online for the first tine and I saw first-hand the smartphone revolution as part of a mobile startup that was founded months before the dawn of the smartphone revolution).?

I have also interviewed hundreds of tech founders and innovators including several in this space which I have learned so much from — Philip Rosedale , Rony Abovitz and Mary Lou Jepsen to name just a few.

So let’s discuss the metaverse.

Background

In 1992 American writer Neal Stephenson published his science fiction novel, Snow Crash , within which he coined the term “Metaverse” — where humans, as programmable avatars, interact with each other and software agents, in a three-dimensional virtual space that uses the metaphor of the real world.

Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta’s Metaverse in 2021, and in changing Facebook’s name to Meta seemingly cemented his charge in this new technological sphere. This is the moment when everyone started to sit up and listen.

But whether Meta will actually lead the way or whether “the metaverse” will be led by many, as I suspect, remains to be seen.?

My theory is that its rise will be akin to the internet.?

Definition

Matthew Ball (author, pioneering tech theorist, essayist and VC) defines the metaverse as, “a persistent and interconnected network of 3D virtual worlds that will eventually serve as the gateway to most online experiences, and also underpin much of the physical world.”

It’s quite a mouthful but when you think back to early definitions of the internet, you can see why it is difficult to come up with a simple definition for a new platform that actually encompasses so much (and more which is yet to be decided or built).

Cathy Hackl (founder and Chief Metaverse Officer) says, “In some ways, our digital lifestyles are catching up to our physical lives. It’s about breaking free from two dimensions into a fully 3D environment.” Watch her demystification of the metaverse here.

I think the best way to think of “The Metaverse” is if we call it “the multiverse” and, akin to the internet. It will be a decentralized, fragmented hyperscale extension to the web today. A group of interoperable spaces where we will exist as an online society.

It won’t be one place and the metaverse being built today is not the metaverse Stephenson described in Snow Crash. How could it be? The book was published in 1992, however Stephenson understands what it could take to build today’s Metaverse and he is working on that at Lamina1.

Rony Abovitz , probably one of the most respected pioneers in this space (Founder of Magic Leap, the world’s leading spatial computing company and an Advisor to Stephenson’s Lamina1 startup) defines it as per below:

In its simplest form, he says, it is about, “Computing and the internet becoming spatial, permeating the modern, digital-physical world. The system of systems.”

The people who are in the epicentre, building it, know it’s not hype but just like the web and mobile before, it does feel like many are trying to jump on the metaverse bandwagon without really knowing what it is nor what it could be (much like they did with mobile).

The people who are in the epicentre, building it, know it’s not?hype.

Hype

When the founder and technologist Stef Lewandowski knew I was writing about the metaverse, he pointed me in the direction of this talk from strategist James Whatley which discusses the hype factor and the number of brands unwittingly getting involved and giving the potential metaverse a bad name.

Whatley rightly points out that many can barely define what it is and yet millions are being spent by brands, using agencies, to tell them what it is and why they should be involved (the same thing really did happen in the early mobile days as I am sure Stef and James remember).

When I asked on LinkedIn, “How would you define the metaverse?” I got some interesting answers. From sci-fi author Dustin Grinnell , I got the answer “Plato’s Cave” which I thought could be an interesting framing and how many may well view the metaverse in its current hyperbolic, over publicised, state.

So what is Plato’s Cave?

Plato’s Cave, is an allegory presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work Republic (514a–520a) where he compares, “The effect of education and the lack of it on our nature”. It is written as a dialogue between Plato’s brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates, and narrated by the latter.?

In “The Cave,” Plato describes a group of people who have lived, chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a stark, blank wall and not being able to move their heads. The people watch shadows projected onto the wall of the cave from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and they give names to these shadows.?

Whilst not real, nor accurate representations of the real world, these shadows are the prisoners’ reality and they represent the fragment of reality that we can normally perceive through our senses, while the objects under the sun, beyond the cave, represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason.

Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are actually not the direct source of the images seen. A philosopher aims to understand and perceive the higher levels of reality. However, the other inmates of the cave do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life.

So would the metaverse mean we all lock ourselves away and live in an unrealistic online world where we forget our ability to connect? Where the virtual reality displaces/replaces our own reality?

I think quite the opposite is true. If Covid-19 has taught us anything, it has taught us about the power of staying connected and how many of us are lucky to be living in a world where most people can do that from anywhere. That is hugely democratizing. Think about work, education, social connection…

And also mental health. What we deem the “real world” can be quite overwhelming for many at times, but a virtual world allows us to exist and thrive in a different realm. Again, this is hugely democratizing.

So whilst many may call it hype, many others will perceive its value. The same was true for the internet and, again, with mobile.

As Chris Dixon has stated previously, The next big thing will start out looking like a toy.

It always does…

Reality

Chris Dixon continues…

“The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” This is one of the main insights of Clay Christensen’s “disruptive technology” theory. This theory starts with the observation that technologies tend to get better at a faster rate than users’ needs increase. From this simple insight follows all kinds of interesting conclusions about how markets and products change over time.

Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” user needs. The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading telco of the time, Western Union, passed on acquiring the phone because they didn’t see how it could possibly be useful to businesses and railroads — their primary customers. What they failed to anticipate was how rapidly telephone technology and infrastructure would improve (technology adoption is usually non-linear due to so-called complementary network effects).”

I interviewed Rony Abovitz about Magic Leap and something he said rings true here too, especially the example he gives of the long vision to reach the Moon.

“It’s a lack of understanding of what’s actually going on and what it takes to go long. Major breakthroughs require commitment, time, and the resources to go the distance.” Rony?Abovitz

“The goal was that computing would be all around you like oxygen. I imagined the idea of spatial computing — that computing would move from this trapped 2D environment like your phone or the screen, and it would literally be everywhere.

The revelation came when I was walking on a beach and I was just looking around at the beach and then looking around at the world, and the world is spatial. It is ultra-high resolution, it’s amazing and it’s what you see via the world’s best computing display, your brain. At that moment, I was like — how does that work? I have this amazing display built into me already. And I’m a biomedical engineer, so that led to a deep dive into the opto-neuro system. How does the visual cortex work? And my thought was that the world’s best display is your visual cortex. So how did we plug into that? How does computing merge into your visual cortex? Our theory is that what you think is outside is actually all inside you. That was the theory — that the world that you experience is not external, it’s internal. It’s generated by your visual cortex. We are all amazing, imaginative world-builders — every human on the planet.

The deep inspiration was the neuroscience of the sensory system — the visual system, touch, smell, taste, all of that. So, my biggest vision was that we’re doing something called sensory field computing where computing will match the senses. So a spatial computer will effectively become the size of the world visually, but you can enjoy it whilst still being in your own world. It would not block you from being in your own world like VR does. What I was trying to do was have the whole world there and you’re able to blend it with a new signal — from zero to a hundred percent. The blending of digital synthetic and analogue real-world signals was going to be the magic.

I began to work with physicists who were working on optics and computing — as well as neuroscientists, and there was alchemy in that mix of people. We wanted to see the world and then blend in a new digital signal with ultimately, one’s own visual cortex being the display which is a radical, long-term vision and it will happen over time. The trajectory that I put the company on was to ultimately make that happen. But that’s like saying we’re not just going to orbit the earth and land on the moon, we’re going to go colonise and live on Mars too. And that was the ambition. I still think it’s a great ambition. I learned so much about neuroscience and physics and I think that this really is the end state for computing — a fusion of biology and technology. It will teach us so much about how reality works, and about human perception. The fact that we learned so much about the brain and the eye is, I think, one of the best outcomes. It’s not really publicised but it is truly one of the best things that I experienced there.”

Newnham: I think you are right in your prediction and if it’s not you that gets us there, it will pain me. But what do you think people don’t understand about this long-term vision that you have? Because I feel that people don’t really understand it and I do wonder if it was because maybe you hadn’t communicated it or do you think people just can’t comprehend it because it’s not easy to?

Abovitz: “I think it’s a few factors and I’ll give my view. I think some people — not all — have a hard time looking at the long view. They’ll only look at one short frame of the movie — but they miss the whole picture. One example of having a very long vision is when we wanted to go to the moon. Going to the moon meant multiple missions: Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, and a whole series of things that I believe cost hundreds of billions of dollars (today’s dollars) for the government to get the US to the moon. However, if while we were trying to get to the moon, and we stopped at the Mercury Program — it may have seemed as if the program failed. People would say — “Well, you’re not at the moon yet, you’ve only orbited the Earth.” It’s a lack of understanding of what’s actually going on and what it takes to go long. Major breakthroughs require commitment, time, and the resources to go the distance.

Another issue we faced is the immense complexity of what we were doing because it was one of the hardest forms of computer vision, AI, real-time computing, new optics and photonics and all kinds of things in sensing, and then we needed to synthesize that with our growing understanding of the human visual system and brain. Spatial computing is amazing and easy to understand once you have experienced it directly — but it is hard to understand for someone who has never tried it. Some people are super curious as to why it works. Other people, they just want it to work and they don’t really care why it works. I grew up caring about why things work.

I had hoped that there were more creators in the world and more imagination and discovery and open-mindedness for something new. There are still many inventive and creative people, but more people today simply want the final, finished thing — and they do not have much patience for the journey of a new technology. I am very optimistic about the future of spatial computing — it will be perfected, and it will achieve utilization at large scale. I do think we need to intensify STEM education in the US, as well as encourage the arts, music, and using our imagination at the same time. We need to become a country of inventors and thinkers, and not only be thought of as a society for consumption. I believe in the future optimism of a world of creative people.

I enjoy projecting a far and future vision. Not everyone may understand it at the time, but the ones that do, help to build and create that very cool future. Part of being a pioneer is to be far out in front. You may not always be understood — but that is OK. It is part of the job of those of us who invent and create to show the way forward.”

Read the full interview with Rony here.

“I enjoy projecting a far and future vision. Not everyone may understand it at the time, but the ones that do, help to build and create that very cool future. Part of being a pioneer is to be far out in front. You may not always be understood — but that is OK. It is part of the job of those of us who invent and create to show the way forward."

Rony Abovitz

Still curious? Here are my top recommended pieces of content which will hopefully explain the metaverse more, and what it could mean for us all.

PODCAST

Listen to this great podcast episode with Tyler Cowen and Matthew Ball , author of The Metaverse (see book choice below). Matthew and Tyler discuss the potential widespread migration of society from real life connections to the metaverse and the hopefully exciting implications of this interconnected network of 3D worlds for education, work and relationships.

Listen here.

QUOTE

INTERVIEW

“In today’s world, people’s virtual personas are just as important to them as their real-world personas, especially right after the period of the pandemic where everybody was at home. That was such a quantum leap.” Mary Spio

In an interview earlier this year, Mary Spio — founder of CEEK , author and space engineer — highlights the benefits of positioning in the metaverse and why she is bullish on it.

Read the full interview here.

FILM

Ready Player One came out in 2018 but is a great watch. Steven Spielberg directed the film, based on Ernest Cline’s bestseller of the same name.

Set in 2045, with the world on the brink of chaos and collapse, society has found salvation in the OASIS, an expansive virtual reality universe created by the brilliant and eccentric James Halliday. When Halliday dies, he leaves his immense fortune to the first person to find a digital Easter egg he has hidden somewhere in the OASIS, sparking a contest that grips the entire world. When an unlikely young hero named Wade Watts decides to join the contest, he is hurled into a breakneck, reality-bending treasure hunt through a fantastical universe of mystery, discovery and danger.

Watch the film here.

BOOK

The Metaverse And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball is a must-read - a great introduction to what the Metaverse is, as well a look into what it could be.

“A thought-provoking look at the evolving intersection of technology, society, human nature, and creativity. Matthew Ball’s enlightening guide is a must-read for every creator and company that is embarking on their journey to the new frontier that is the Metaverse. A new world shaped by individuals and driven by incredible social experiences has just begun.” Kenichiro Yoshida, CEO of Sony. Buy the book here.

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Thanks, as always, for reading the newsletter today and for listening to the podcast this week. It always means so much to me.

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You can join me by registering here to watch leading tech innovators and thought leaders from Microsoft, NVIDIA, Google, Unity and Amazon share their vision for the future. From Extended Reality (XR) and the Metaverse to the future of Enterprise connectivity, Ericsson’s Imagine Possible event will showcase the power of this new world through lively discussion and real-world examples. Sign up here.