If there is one thing the tech industry (in all of its different industries and incarnations), it’s the general creation of new buzzwords that ends up rehashing and cleverly remixing old ideas.
Remember centralized and de-centralized computing? That ended up morphing into wide area and local area networks (WAN/LAN), and has further morphed into cloud computing and cloud services (or on device computing for the other end of the spectrum). It gets worse when specific tech is involved (engineers love to make things difficult to understand as a means of job security since they end up being the primary ones who understands all of the convoluted BS they ended up creating unless you go through expensive training and certification; something that I became all too aware of when I went for my Cisco network certification (CCNA and CCNP) and had to deal with just how convoluted Cisco’s IOS (Internet Operating System) was on their routers and switches, or the abomination that IBM Job Control Language was. But I digress.
The metaverse is yet another one of these buzzwords that the industry has been jumping on; that includes the gaming industry (to try and move beyond the existing genres; more specifically in the MMO space which has been in this long period of stagnation when it comes to innovation). And you have all of these different parties trying to define and put their own spin on it (and to try to monetize it). Which is why I refuse to buy into the pre-hype. Because I worked in the tech industry during those heydays when the bullshit buzzwords were being generated left and right. I get the aspect of trying to talk about it (the metaverse) so that the public in general has some idea about it. But IMHO, this is one of those things where you should just build an actual working prototype first, and then show/talk about it.
Back in the day (in the 90’s), Apple released something (as a beta product) called HotSauce (the codename was Project X) that was a 3D visualization of an MCF (meta content framework) file. In plain english, one example use was to visualize a web page in 3D; avatars and the whole like of rooms or representative real world objects. Another example use was to take a Hypercard stack (Hypercard was Apple’s early graphical database which preceded the world wide web), and to use HotSauce to graphically represent it in a 3 dimensional space. You could easily apply the metaverse buzzword to these early representations (just with more modern tech and current day abstractions).
The reality is that it was just easier and more effective to have a web page with text links and embedded media (images, audio, video). The idea of representing such pages as virtual 3D spaces with these virtual objects, was more or less a novelty. Part of this eventually morphed into VR (which itself has issues given how bulky the goggles are) and augmented reality. Again, they are all a spin on the same general idea with differing implementations.
The “metaverse” wants to try to encompass and “reinvent” the general internet (and all the stuff that runs on it). The gaming industry wants to parlay that into redefining existing online games, the social networking platforms, and how those game worlds are built (because existing game engines were never designed for creating the massively multiplayer online worlds that currently exist, while also incorporating user generated content). Instances still exist in persistent world games because no one has been able to figure out how to scale concurrency upwards without both server and client failing completely under the load. Like how do you deal with bottlenecks like an authentication server (as just one point of many failures)?
This like everything else, can turn into the exploding parts problem when you start adding in all of the social and networking related stuff. Even today, not all of this is platform agnostic. Both Unity and Unreal Engine are cross platform, but that doesn’t translate into complete cross platform games; the vast majority of MMORPG’s for example are strictly designed for Windows and not Mac OS. Why? Because you still have platform and operating system specific API’s. You also have real design limitations involved when it comes to device form factor and input/output control where one size does not fit all. And the laws of physics are still immutable in this particular universe we reside in when it comes to things like network bandwidth and latency (let alone, the last mile physical infrastructure). Basically, show us an actual working prototype of all this, and maybe I will start buying into this latest buzzword.
