趋势
当我们谈论元宇宙时，我们在谈论什么
JON RADOFF
准备好玩家一号中的绿洲
由于这是关于构建元宇宙的首篇文章，我想花点时间思考一下这个词的含义，它是如何演变的，以及未来可能会带来什么。
“元宇宙”这个词对人们来说有着不同的含义：对某些人来说，它是一种在持久景观中的身临其境的虚拟现实体验；对于其他人，特定的技术堆栈；对某些人来说，这是未来社会的愿景。
大约 14 年前，我请我最喜欢的科幻作家之一查理·斯特罗斯为我写一篇关于游戏未来的文章。关于元节，他不得不这样说：
真正有趣的问题是，事物是否会集中在一个单一的总体元宇宙，游戏或商务会议在不同的地方发生，或者它们是否会破裂，我们会看到更多不同的环境出现。
现在可以说这些未来都没有完全实现。
尼尔斯蒂芬森在 2019 年（维基百科）
在 Neal Stephenson 的Snow Crash 中，元节由虚构的 Global Multimedia Protocol Group 运行，该组织由现实生活中的计算机协会控制。在Ready Player One 中，OASIS 虚拟现实由一家名为Innovative Online Industries 的公司所有——情节主要围绕着它的控制展开。尽管社交网络似乎遵循赢家通吃的经济学，但虚拟空间的多样性和体验似乎太多了，无法遵循相同的路径。
当斯特罗斯写到虚拟世界的碎片化时，他更接近真相。碎片化正在发生，因为游戏、虚拟现实和在线社区所基于的体验过于多样化，无法融入一个特定的环境。这些体验包括Ready Player One所设想的沉浸式 3D VR 环境。Fragmentation 包括您手机上的体验：Candy Crush和Star Trek Timelines以及Genshin Impact。它是您客厅墙壁上的 Netflix，或投影到 Oculus 内模拟剧院的虚拟表面上。它包括Fortnite 中3D 中的第三人称。它是Decentraland和Sim City以及罗布洛克斯。它包括异步和同步，实时和回合制。它是客户端 - 服务器，下载或流式传输。
元宇宙是人们可以拥有的一组在线、互联体验。共同的主题是“玩家”连接到允许实时内容更改、实时社交连接或实时货币化的在线框架。关键词是“活”。元宇宙是一个活生生的多元宇宙。
另一个“多”是游戏和虚拟世界的创建已经成为多学科的，需要游戏设计、博弈论、行为经济学、分析、数据库、音乐、人工智能、GPU、图形、品牌、性能、用户体验的知识设计、讲故事、软件工程和其他一百种才能。
Roblox 是元宇宙的一部分
接近元宇宙的一种方法是邀请人们进入围墙花园，为这种创造力提供广泛的技术支架。事实上，这已经在某些情况下产生了令人印象深刻的结果。作为交换，这样做的成本是您将支付的高额租金以及所有者对创造力的限制。
解决这些创作者被束缚的整体孤岛的另一种方法是“所有人的元宇宙”。在这方面，定义特征是去中心化。我们已经在去中心化金融领域看到了这一点(DeFi)。为了释放世界的创造力，我们需要类似的模式在虚拟世界和游戏空间中发挥作用。技术、接口和业务服务正在出现，任何人都可以混搭、混合、构建并获得创造力的补偿。这种元节需要在游戏、世界和环境之间创建和交换资产的能力——以及规则、内容和技术基础的脱钩。创造性工作需要摆脱导致流程、工作流程和工程知识领域成倍增加的编程和技术障碍。
在未来，驱动国际象棋桌的人工智能可以在手机上运行游戏或在虚拟现实中显示的桌子内执行；代表资产的艺术可能来自适当补偿创作者的市场；现场国际象棋锦标赛的参与可以由现场活动引擎推动，门票销售为组织者提供资金。
围墙花园将包含您喜欢参观的广阔主题公园 - 但它们不会是唯一的目的地。这些主题公园将包括由个人创新者和小型创意团队制作的游戏、体验和艺术……他们可以选择是更愿意接触这些领域内的大量观众，还是自己出击并保持独立性。
Metaverse — Elif Ayiter 的Flickr 图像
这就是我（以及其他为Building the Metaverse 撰稿的人） 将涵盖的内容：我们将写关于巨大的主题公园、令人惊叹的体验、支持技术和个人创造力的途径。我们将介绍支持生态系统的去中心化工具和接口。我们将讨论未来的商业考虑、商业模式和新经济。
欢迎来到元宇宙：比我们最初想象的更奇怪、更不同、甚至更神奇。
9 Megatrends Shaping the Metaverse
Jon Radoff
May 20 · 12 min read
In this article, I identify 9 megatrends — exponential shifts that are already underway on a global scale — and how they will shape the future of the metaverse.
Most of the megatrends are a blend of both technology and social change. Here are the megatrends I’ll discuss:
By looking at the 9 megatrends here, we are given a chance to “pull back the camera lens” and see a picture of the wider landscape upon which we’re constructing the metaverse.
Virtual Mainstreaming
People increasingly regard the virtual world to be as real as the physical world.
In the physical world, trust is how relationships and institutions function. It is the basis of how businesses flourish within legal systems, how our money market continues to operate, and a form of measure for our connections. Trust has made each of these systems scalable.
As trust continues to increase in the “virtual” realm — with online friends, virtual items and crypto assets, smart contracts, and live online experiences — it will increase the scalability of the metaverse and the industries that support it.
“Exploring the Universe in Virtual Reality” by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC BY 2.0
But within any large trend, there is frequently a countertrend; as people value the virtual world more, it will embolden those who seek to exploit it.
Cybercrime is one example that many people are unfortunately familiar with: phishing to steal your accounts, various online frauds, ransomware attacks and spreading malware are a few examples.
Online bullying, abuse, cheating in games, and cheating in relationships, will all increase in harmfulness due to the fact that people believe virtual relationships and property to be real. These behaviors will surge as more value is placed onto them, with higher investments from companies intended to fight crime and abuse.
Products alone will not solve these problems. It will also take education, training, virtual literacy, and supportive communities and understanding parents.
Low-code Platforms
Low-code and no-code application platforms (LCAP) provide higher-level abstractions (such as visual scaffolding and drag-and-drop tooling) to replace the hand-coding of processes, logic and applications.
The most obvious benefit of this trend is that non-programmers can do some of the work that programmers previously did. However, this doesn’t fully capture the impact, or why companies are adopting these platforms.
A great deal of the “magic” of LCAP is the large amount of automation that happens underneath the visual layer: the automation of workflow, deployment, security, scaling, and integration with various data endpoints. Often, this complexity and scaling is what takes up the bulk of developing Internet applications.
Appian Process Modeler, a no-code development platform.
The result will be not only a shift in who does the work, but a massive reduction in the quantity of work required to create applications.
Gartner forecasts that by 2023, over 50% of large enterprises will use LCAPs to operate at least part of their infrastructure.
Similarly, many of these developers are moving towards a serverless architecture (a somewhat confusing term, because usually there are servers, just none that you need to deploy, manage or code yourself).
At the opposite end of the enterprise, you have an increasing number of creator tools that are making it easy to create metaverse content, script complex behaviors, and participate in commerce.
Unity 3D Studio
There’s received wisdom that products either cater to the enterprise or they cater to small business, but that’s not quite true. Although it is usually hard for “enterprise” tech to scale down to individuals, there are plenty of examples where things were able to be in the hands of the individuals which became the easiest option for the enterprise as well. That includes just about anything Adobe has ever made. More recently, no-code/low-code platforms like Shopify power everything from small businesses to some of the largest brands in the world (Hasbro, Budweiser, etc.).
Get your Transformers from Hasbro via Shopify. No “enterprise” commerce needed!
The metaverse will increasingly be built by a wider population of creators and supported by a deeper catalog of plug-in applications and logic.
Machine Intelligence
Machines are doing more of the jobs that were previously done by human beings. This includes domains sometimes called deep learning, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
We live in a world where advertising messages, merchandising and online engagement is tuned by learning algorithms. We are in the early innings of natural language processing and image recognition. In the physical world, we’re tantalizingly close to applications such as autonomous vehicles.
In the metaverse, machine intelligence converges with every other trend you see here.
“Artificial Intelligence & AI & Machine Learning” by mikemacmarketing is licensed under CC BY 2.0
It will impact creativity, as computers become collaborators in the creative process — just look at how AI Dungeon generates stories, or how Promethean AI can set up a virtual landscape — and imagine how much further this will come over the coming decade.
AI will be used to design the microchips that power the metaverse, and generate code to assist programmers.
Machines will interpret gestures, predict where our eyes will look, recognize emotions and even the firing of our neurons.
Machine intelligence will be hooked into our no-code and low-code application platforms, where they’ll operate as part of the service architecture as well as design advisors.
Agents powered by our preferences and interests will surface the information we want, when we want it.
And virtual beings will increasingly populate the worlds we visit.
Rise of Cybernetics
Cybernetics have already arrived. They are not as evenly distributed nor as developed and amazing as they will be in the future.
Cybernetics is about the integration of human sensory and motor systems with computers. Existing examples draw upon videogame input/output devices, wearables, mobile phone accelerometers, and VR headsets.
Miniaturization and high-speed networking have transitioned devices from stationary workstations to mobile supercomputers in our pockets. These computers are getting closer to our bodies.
“muse of cybernetics by kochar” by inky, from the tape is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
We are transitioning from looking at computers from an outside perspective to a future where we’ll occupy virtual space and live in a world where computing is all around us.
“Smartphone” already feels like an archaic term, because these aren’t phones — they are highly portable computers that happen to have a telephony application preinstalled. We can already occupy virtual space through VR headsets like the Oculus, which are responsive to our eyes, head position and gestures. When these become smartglasses, we’ll be able to bring this experience to more of the world surrounding us. In the future, we might even have functional smart contact lenses.
Light field technology may even allow us to project photons — with their accompanying depth of field — to the retina, allowing your eye to focus on different parts of a virtual scene, resulting in a truly holographic experience.
These devices will increasingly interpret our voice instructions, our gestures and our biometrics. And neural interfaces may even allow us devices to understand our intentions — perhaps even faster than we know ourselves.
The consequence? The metaverse will not simply be a place we go into. The metaverse will be everywhere around us.
And the convergence of wearable and mobile technology is not simply one of technology: it is a social change. It will change the organization of our homes, our public transit, our neighborhoods and our workplaces. It will change how you meet people, order a meal, discover the world, and collaborate on projects.
Challenges by Open Systems
The original intent of the Internet was a highly distributed, decentralized network of interoperable computers and applications.
The Internet today is dominated by several very large platforms that act as gatekeepers and tollbooths.
Yet technology and open standards are emerging that may democratize the future of the metaverse.
WebAssembly (Wasm) promises to deliver fast, safe, sandboxed binary applications for the open web. WebGL and WebXR will contribute to graphical and immersive experiences that can be delivered outside of the application stores. Platforms like Unity Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) are taking advantage of these platforms to deliver compact, efficient binaries that perform at the level the metaverse will demand (in particular, Project Tiny at Unity).
Source: Unity — Project Tiny
Open Systems are also a social phenomenon, because they allow widespread collaboration between software engineering projects. Reed’s Law, which predicted the exponential value of applications such as Slack or WhatsApp, can be applied to the Open Source movement — which is essentially a permissionless social network of software developers.
Open Source and open platforms like Wasm could maximize the number of potential collaborators, creating more value than all of the permissioned platforms combined. Permissionless platforms like Linux and PC ought to thrive in this future as well.
Likewise, people may regain sovereignty over their own data using technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs and decentralized digital identity systems. This may encourage consumers to trust more of their personal data to Internet applications — simply because they don’t need to trust anyone.
We have the potential for an exponential lift in network effects, if we can free applications and data to do so.
Blockchain Adoption
What Open Source and Open Internet do for software and applications, blockchains — a distributed ledger technology — can do for assets and data.
Blockchains allow for trustless data exchanges; decentralized authority, a record of history and provenance, provable scarcity of assets. When decentralized, a blockchain allows for permissionless participation, or governance through a decentralized autonomous organization.
Programmability is a key application of blockchains. While not all blockchains have inherent programmability, it’s a key aspect of Ethereum and other “smart contract” chains.
Smart Contracts applications and use cases from 101blockchains.
Why is this so important? It’s the network effects again. The more nodes that can participate in the network, the higher the value of the network, and as groups can form around certain activities (games, financial legos, etc.), the value of the network is increased further per Reed’s Law.
The value contribution is exponential. More individuals, more applications and more components to assemble from equals more smart contracts, and more decentralized applications.
Blockchains are considered “trustless” because you don’t need to trust any one authority; the trust is in the blockchain itself.
The collective long tail distribution of all these trustless applications, contracts and components is what gives blockchains their social scalability.
Network effects already paved the way for on-chain data feeds (oracles) that can be used as conditions in smart contracts; this has given rise to decentralized lending, decentralized finance, and decentralized asset exchanges. The emergence of blockchain computing may replace some aspects of cloud computing; and the rise of non-fungible assets may become the basis of virtual goods in an emerging generation of games, avatar customizations and metaverse experiences.
This is just the beginning of the possibilities when you unleash assets, data and programmable contracts into the open Internet.
Walled Garden Ecosystems
Walled Gardens — and I use this term with love because gardens can be beautiful and organized — benefit from all of the other megatrends that impact the metaverse.
Not every application or every world will be open. Sometimes permission, integration, curation, and control are desirable features of a platform or application. Roblox would never have become popular had it not been for the ensemble of these features.
Ironically, walled gardens also benefit from the open systems that challenge them. They utilize the same open-source and blockchains as anyone else, and many customers may feel safer inside them.
Walled gardens aren’t a problem. That there are too few walled gardens is the problem of the current ecosystem of 2021. It should be easy for you to create your own walled garden and invite other creators to participate, add, modify and interconnect according to the rules you’ve defined.
“Walled Garden 3” by the justified sinner is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
As there are more and more walled gardens, a question is how each will be discovered. There are hierarchical discovery systems such as Roblox, which function as a “YouTube for games,” driven by search and popularity. Since people like curation and developers like access to large audiences, this will continue. But methods for portable avatars, portable social networks, and interoperability are on the horizon — and this may network together various walled gardens using open platforms while sparking new opportunities for discovery and curation.
In the future, we may have a hypermedia-like structure where portals network different worlds and experiences together — the virtual worlds equivalent of hyperlinks on web pages. Hyperportals for the metaverse?
Accelerating Distributed Networks
5G networks will improve mobile networking speeds, concurrency and latency by orders of magnitude. And 5G is not the end of the road: 6G will improve these metrics by another 10–100X. We should see 10 Gbps speeds with latency down to 1ms within the decade.
The accelerating speeds are necessary to support the metaverse, but it is really the network effects that take place when all of the participants in the network are able to share real-time data that offers some of the most interesting applications.
“My Twitter Social Ego Networks” by David Sousa-Rodrigues is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
As the local network layer is no longer the bottleneck, the emphasis will shift towards moving more computing power directly to the “far” edge of the network. Sometimes this will be at the local cell tower; sometimes it might be right inside your home, where information will be preprocessed and surfaced to your cybernetic devices.
Much of the AI that powers applications will happen on the edge, as it will be too slow to process everything in a remote/centralized manner. The future requires that the constellation of local computing devices and data feeds interoperate quickly. This will sometimes mean prediction at the edge, for applications in the metaverse where predictions of behaviors and physics are accurate enough.
Simulating Reality
For years, the way almost every game with 3D graphics generated real-time imagery was through a collection of hacks called shader programming. Ray tracing uses the physics of light to simulate how images look based on how photons bounce between and through different materials. Ray tracing can create far more beautiful and realistic images — which is why it is used for pre-rendered content such as movies — but takes an enormous increase in processing power.
But real-time raytracing is on the way.
“SSR final raytrace” by Penforhire is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
It is just one example of how we’ll be simulating reality inside our machines. For example, one of the use cases of NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform is performing simulated fluid dynamics: imagine being able to accurately depict a river, or simulating an HVAC system (which could be used to determine how resilient a building is during a pandemic involving a respiratory disease). Then imagine all of these simulations and AI engines plugged into an interoperable framework that allows logic and prediction to simulate a world of virtual machines, objects, environments and people.
Data will also come from an exponentially-increasing number of feeds from the physical world. This includes geospatial data and traffic data; digital twins of physical objects instrumented to report all of their properties, oracles that report financial data to smart contracts; and real-time data about people and processes.
We won’t simply have an Internet of Things — we’ll have an Internet of Everything — integrated with predictive analytics, AI and real-time visualization.
These innovations will enable a metaverse that can layer over and predict the real-world — while also powering the next generation of games based on actual physics — more beautiful and immersive than anything experienced thus far.
The Metaverse is Accelerating
The metaverse will transform the ways we socialize, work and play; the megatrends I’ve shared may give you some ideas of how.
Building the Metaverse
Games, experiences, technology, economics, culture and art of the metaverse.
Jon Radoff
Adventurer & entrepreneur. I fight for the game-maker. I like startups, digital culture, stories, software, crypto, cooking/wine, games and adventure.
What We Talk About When We Talk About the Metaverse
Jon Radoff
Feb 26 · 5 min read
OASIS in Ready Player One
Since this is the inaugural article on Building the Metaverse, I wanted to take a moment to think about what this word means, how it has evolved, and what the future may bring.
“Metaverse” is a word that conjures different meanings to people: to some, it’s an immersive virtual-reality experience within a persistent landscape; to others, a specific technology stack; to some, it is a vision of future society.
Charlie Stross (Wikipedia)
About 14 years ago, I asked one of my favorite science-fiction authors, Charlie Stross, to write an article for me about the future of games. He had to say this about the metaverse:
The really interesting question is whether things will converge on a single overarching metaverse with games or business meetings happening in different places, or whether they’ll fracture and we’ll see even more divergent environments cropping up.
It is now possible to say that neither of these futures has entirely come true.
Neal Stephenson in 2019 (Wikipedia)
In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the metaverse is run by the fictional Global Multimedia Protocol Group, an entity controlled by the real-life Association for Computing Machinery. In Ready Player One, the OASIS virtual reality is owned by a corporation called Innovative Online Industries — and the plot largely revolves around its control. Although social networks seem to follow winner-take-all economics, it seems that virtual spaces have far too much variety and experiences to follow the same path.
Stross was closer to the truth when he wrote about the fragmentation of virtual worlds. Fragmentation is happening because games, virtual realities, and online communities are based on experiences that are far too varied to fit into one particular landscape. These experiences include the immersive 3D VR environments envisioned by Ready Player One. Fragmentation includes experiences on your phone: Candy Crush and Star Trek Timelines and Genshin Impact. It’s Netflix on your living room wall or projected into a virtual surface in a simulated theatre inside the Oculus. It includes third-person inside 3D within Fortnite. It is Decentraland and Sim City and Roblox. It includes both the asynchronous and the synchronous, real-time and turn-based. It is client-server, downloaded, or streamed.
The metaverse is the collective set of online, connected experiences that one can have. The common theme is that the “player” is connected to an online framework that permits live content changes, live social connection or live monetization. The keyword is “live.” The metaverse is a living multiverse of worlds.
The other “multi” is that the creation of games and virtual worlds has become multi-disciplinary, requiring knowledge of game design, game theory, behavioral economics, analytics, databases, music, AI, GPUs, graphics, branding, performance, user experience design, storytelling, software engineering and a hundred other talents.
Roblox is a part of the metaverse (Wikipedia image)
One way to approach the metaverse is to invite people into walled gardens that provide the extensive technological scaffolding for this creativity. Indeed, this has already yielded impressive results in certain settings. In exchange, the cost for this is the high rents you’ll pay and the limits on creativity imposed by the owners.
Another approach to these monolithic silos in which creators are hemmed-in is a “metaverse for all.” In this, the defining characteristic is decentralization. We already see this in the realm of decentralized finance (DeFi). To unlock the creativity of the world, we’ll need similar patterns to play out in the space of virtual worlds and games. Technologies, interfaces and business services are emerging that allow anyone to mash-up, mix, build around and be compensated for creativity. This sort of metaverse demands the ability to create and exchange assets among games, worlds and environments — and a decoupling of the rules, content and technical underpinnings. Creative work will need to be freed from programming and technical impediments that cause the multiplication of processes, workflows and domains of engineering knowledge.
In this future, the AI that drives a chess table could power a game on a phone or executed within a table manifested in virtual reality; the art that represents the assets could come from a marketplace that properly compensates creators; and participation in live chess tournaments could be driven by a live events engine with ticket sales that fund the organizers.
Walled gardens will contain the expansive theme parks that you’ll enjoy visiting — but they won’t be the only destinations. These theme parks will include games, experiences and artistry made by individual innovators and tiny, creative teams… who can choose whether they’d prefer to access the large audiences inside these realms, or strike out on their own and retain their independence.
Metaverse — Flickr image by Elif Ayiter
That’s what I (and others who write for Building the Metaverse) will cover: we’ll write about the giant theme parks, the amazing experiences, the enabling technologies and the avenues for individual creativity. We’ll cover the decentralized tools and interfaces that support the ecosystem. We’ll discuss the business considerations, business models and new economics of this future.
Welcome to the metaverse: weirder, different and even more amazing than we originally imagined.
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