An Expert’s Guide to the Metaverse

The virtual reality renaissance that is now underway is creating much excitement surrounding the potential arrival of the “metaverse.” As I write, four great technology titans are competing to bring affordable head-mounted displays to market and usher VR into the mainstream . While the term “metaverse” was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, current usage has diverged significantly from its original meaning. In popular contemporary culture, the metaverse is often described as the VR-based successor to the web. Its recent surge in popularity is fueled by the expectation that the availability of affordable VR equipment will invariably lead to the creation of a network of virtual worlds that is similar to the web of today—but with virtual “places” instead of pages. From a societal perspective, the metaverse is also associated with anticipation that as soon as VR technology reaches a sufficiently high level of quality, we will spend a significant portion of our private and professional lives in shared virtual spaces. Those spaces will be inherently more accommodating than natural reality, and this contextual malleability is expected to have a profound impact on our interpersonal relationships and overall cultural velocity. Given its potential, it is no surprise the metaverse is a persistent topic in discussions about the future of virtual reality. In fact, it is difficult to find VR practitioners who can speculate about a plausible future where technological progress is unhindered and yet a metaverse is never created. Still, there is little consensus on what a real-world implementation of the metaverse would be like. Our research group, Lucidscape, was created to accelerate the advent of the metaverse by addressing the most challenging aspects of its implementation [2]. Our mandate is to provide the open source foundations for a practical, real-world metaverse that embraces freedom, lacks centralized control, and ultimately belongs to everyone. In this article, which is part opinion and part pledge, I will share the tenets for what we perceive as an “ideal” implementation of the metaverse. My goal is not to promote our work but to provoke thought and spark a conversation with the greater VR community about what we should expect from a real-world metaverse. 评论