The Metaverse is here...

Well, not here. Not the actual metaverse, in the actual world. But in the strange parallel universe of the 'media/marketing industry', its definitely here. And its been here since before Facebook became 'Meta'.

Exhibit A: Something that the tech industry have been struggling to define for years now has agencies trying to define it;
Wunderman Thompson - "Defining the metaverse" (August '21)

Exhibit B: Agencies need to be able to give a consumer perspective of anything they talk about - whether or not anyone believes that "consumers" actually have a perspective yet is pretty much irrelevant. So, we have already seen consumer studies that ask people what they want out of something they barely understand (because nobody really does), that reach the inevitable conclusion of "brands and sponsored content". (Actually, "free stuff" is usually a more accurate description- but thats the way these types of questions are typically framed...)
WARC: Metaverse audiences interested in brand and sponsor content (September '21)

Exhibit C: Trade press columnists are already talking about its likely impact on advertising (September '21) (but without really explaining what it is that they are talking about; here, its "where everything is both connected and intelligent", which isn't a bad description of the metaverse - but at the same time, it isn't a bad description of one of the display rooms in Ikea, which is not the same as the metaverse…)

Exhibit D: The 'metaverse' buzzword is being applied to dry (and only tangentially related) news stories to make them more interesting; so when the Oasis Consortium was recently formed to set ethical standards for technology ("Advancing Digital Sustainability through Ethical Standards and Technologies"), the only mention of the word "metaverse" anywhere on their website was from a transcript of an interview with someone from Roblox (one of the consortium members), talking about Roblox (as opposed to the consortium.) Yet the headline that Campaign reported was "Tech companies form a consortium for brand safety in the metaverse" (Aug '21)

Exhibit E: Anyone working in senior management is no doubt familiar with the "does your company have an X strategy yet?" email/LinkedIn solicitations (where X might be "5G", "Mobile internet", "social media", "online", digital transformation" etc. etc.) But perhaps the metaverse is (going to be) so important that you need something bigger than a strategy- so Vogue Business asks the question: "Is it time to hire a Chief Metaverse Officer?" (October '21)

Exhibit F: Facebook's vice-president says (October '21) that brands (and partners) should be trying to get their heads around the metaverse today, saying that a new computing platform comes along roughly every 15 years and with the iPhone approaching its 15th birthday, there will be a new 'scale' computing platform appearing in the next few years.

We even have a metaverse lumascape that we can stick into our Metaverse Powerpoint decks.

I've been working on a metaverse report and podcast over the last few months (although, until about June we had parked the "metaverse" title keyword in favour of "The Fourth Space"). [UPDATE - Its now out, and you can find out more about it HERE] So, now that I've mostly finished worrying about what to say about it in a "work" context and can think about it from a broader point of view (ie. what I think is important, which isn't quite the same as what I think advertisers and agencies should do/need to know) - what exactly is "the metaverse"?

Before launching into what is becoming a standard set of references (to Snow Crash, VR/AR/XR and the key tech platform players), or the question of whether it will be "The Metaverse" or "some metaverses", its worth taking a step back and questioning the question.

I think, like "data" and "digital", its a word that means different things to different people - or at least, its being used to mean different things by different people, and like the Rorschach test, how someone talks about it probably tells you more about them than it tells you about the metaverse.

At one end, you've got the word being thrown around in a way that would be pretty much interchangeable with old favourites like "information superhighway" or "cyberspace" - referring to a vaguely futuristic concept of what "internet technology" will be/is becoming, filling the gap that has been left by words that used to sound futuristic but now sound oddly old-fashioned. (Futurismic?Retrofuturismic?)

At this moment in time, coming after more than a year and a half of not really knowing what the pandemic is going to throw at us next or what the next few months might look like (what The Economist refers to as "the age of bewilderment"), it seems like we're in this weird position at the moment where the fog is starting to lift and we feel like we're getting some sort of idea what the next 6-12 months might look like - and we're starting to realise that it doesn't look quite the same as we had expected. All those things we read last year about how we've seen "five years of development in the space of a few months" seem to be coming to some sort of fruition- almost as though we're finding ourselves on an alternative timeline, and realising that we're heading on a slightly different trajectory, towards a slightly different future to the one we were imagining at the start of 2020.

The thing is, that "slightly different future" in 2022-2023 suggests a more significantly different future in another, say 5-10 years.

(Hopefully, the industry doesn't over-use it and turn the future promise of "the metaverse" into a phrase that you have to distance yourself from whenever you use it in a presentation - like we did for "the year of mobile" a few years early. ¹ )

At the other end of the spectrum of "metaverse meanings", you've got a much more tangible concept, rooted in the sci-fi world of Snow Crash (the book in which Neil Stephenson first coined the phrase in 1992), that is some sort of mashup of VR, AR, social media, 3D gaming worlds and smart assistants/user agents. Thats a version of the word which has probably been best articulated (at length) by Matthew Ball, who I'm largely paraphrasing with this summary description ⁶ ;

Its like a game - its something immersive, "real time", and lots of people can be there together (even if they aren't physically co-present).
Its like the Web - a platform that works across different types of devices, connecting different types of services, independent of the type of phone in your hand/computer on your desk/operating systems/platforms etc. But importantly, it takes interoperability a step further, not just at the client-side (any type of computer or operating system can have a web browser), but also server-side, in that you'll be able to take your virtual assets/items/content with you across platforms in the metaverse. (Imagine buying a customised pair of real shoes, making them part of your FIFA team's kit, wearing them in Grand Theft Auto, then lending them to your kid to use in their Roblox games.)
Its like social media - persistent, ongoing, and open for users to create content/"experiences"
Its like virtual reality - beyond simply "creating content" and putting it out there, you will have a sense of presence within the metaverse.
Its like augmented reality - it spans the physical and digital worlds.

While the more tangible definition is probably a lot more interesting, it is also a much longer wait until it becomes a reality. But the 'metaverse destination' itself probably isn't as interesting/relevant today as the path that gets us there as all of the various bits and pieces fall into place.

Then, of course, there's the Zuckerberg vision of the metaverse. The vision that has billions of dollars of ongoing investment behind it - presumably with an equally clear vision of how those billions of dollars will eventually be recouped by Meta Platforms Inc.

1992: the internet will be like Snow Crash
2021: the facebook will be like Snow Crash
— jack⚡️ (@jack) July 29, 2021

Another common thread of "metaverse" discussion is that most of this technology already exists in some form; "what is it?" is a sensible question to ask (and for people like me to try to have a decent answer to if we might face it in a professional context), but perhaps the more important question is "what is it for". Most of the talk is about the metaverse as a platform - but what about the actual content?

Any 'new media' starts out by repurposing the content of 'old media' ² , so it might seem like 'the metaverse' is just a bunch of stuff that we've already got with a fancy new name- the point being that its most likely going to start out that way, as a fairly straightforward combination of existing parts. But thats just the beginning- when it exists and starts getting "content" developed for it, it will evolve.

Just like the internet. There was a time when it was "catalogues, travel blogs, a chatroom or two"⁹⁹⁹ , but although the underlying technology hasn't really changed in the last couple of decades, the internet today is obviously a very different place. Nothing would have stopped someone from building Whatsapp, Snapchat or TikTok twenty years ago - but without an audience of people with touchscreen smartphones with built in video cameras and a reasonable amount of processing power, none of them would have been particularly interesting.

Maybe 'social media' is a more useful parallel (as it avoids conflating the telecoms infrastructure of "the internet" with the content); twenty five years ago, we had the internet, we had the World Wide Web, we had forums and chatrooms and bulletin boards and blogs (although I think we usually called them "homepages" back then), and observers would talk about how it was going to change the world because anybody ³ could put things on it and reach an audience without the traditional media gatekeepers of editors/publishers/broadcasters etc. - but although anyone could talk to anyone else, we didn't really have "social media" yet; if you were to talk to people online, you were probably doing it under a pseudonym. Most people weren't really using the internet at that time, and of those who were, few were doing it on a daily basis - meaning that you didn't really know the people you were talking to. Identities were generally tied to the particular website you were on - so, if you happened to be talking to someone in 1997 on a Star Wars board about whether you thought the prequels were going to be as good as the original trilogy, and then talking to the same person in a different chatroom somewhere about whether the next Oasis album was going to be as good as the last, you wouldn't really have any way of noticing that it was the exact same person you were talking to.

"Web 2.0" was slightly different - in that it marked a rise of platforms that took you away from needing to write your own HTML and manage a server to being able to put your own words/pictures on the web. There were still some caveats around the "anyone can put stuff on the internet" idea- but they were getting smaller. It wasn't really the obscure, slightly geeky version of the internet that had come before- now it was a big party that never stopped and everyone was invited- except (unless you had particularly geeky friends), not many of your friends were there yet. Because even in the Web 2.0 era, a lot of people didn't have their own computer, home broadband, or the spare time when they were in front of a computer and connected to the internet to join the party.

"Social media" was a paradigm shift - the technology it takes to make a website like Facebook/Twitter/Reddit today isn't really fundamentally different from the web technology of 25 years ago (ie. HTML/CSS/Javascript); but more people on the internet, more of the time, and not just when they happen to be sitting in front of a computer screen makes the combination of internet/services/computers a totally different proposition. When you're online, people you actually know in real life are also online, and they are using their real names. With "social media" you can find them and talk to them in a way that you couldn't really do before about 2007 or so when Facebook made putting your real name (and face) online a normal thing to do.

So- the metaverse is going to come in stages, as all of the different 'threads' (telecoms, consumer hardware, price and adoption, server-side software, interconnectivity protocols etc. etc.) progress at different paces. There will be virtual worlds - we already have them (Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite), but they exist in almost complete isolation of one another. There will be consumer hardware - which we already have (I don't think a 'metaverse device in your pocket' is going to be fundamentally different to the latest iPhone/Android phone - on a hardware level, at least - and its hard to say what it is about the Oculus Quest 2 that would need to change to be a true 'metaverse device'.) Then there will be the metaverse-friendly software that runs on those devices - which I think will need a paradigm shift if "the metaverse" is going to be something more than another app/some more apps on your home screen (I expect Siri/Alexa/'Hey Google' to take centre stage here...)

And finally, there will be the metaverse services; the platforms that will be interoperable that will allow people to build their worlds, assets and content on top of and move their avatars around. Which, I suspect, will be the most challenging to create due to the politics involved- so I expect that will take some time yet.

We've had a few future-internet things that never really (or at least, haven't yet) turned out to be a reality. 'Smart glasses' are probably the first thing that comes to mind - but the implications of walking face cameras seem to be something that society isn't quite ready to handle yet. (It seems like we're still not quite sure about cameras in our homes just yet.) Smart speakers are popular - but I don't think they feel like something you can't live without yet. (Although I think a lot of that is the disconnect between what they promise and what smart assistants can actually deliver today, rather than the speakers themselves.) Virtual reality is now affordable (sub-£300 for an Oculus Quest 2- so less than the cheapest iPhone) and widely available - but still far from mainstream, and not quite clear exactly where it fits into people's lives outside of gaming.

The Semantic Web was supposed to be the real Web 2.0, where your 'user agent' would be able to understand the content of webstes, so you would be able to have it find the times of some film you wanted to see, pick one based on the reviews, cross-reference the screening times and locations with available tables at nearby restaurants after the film had finished and make the bookings for all your tickets/tables for you (and maybe a taxi, if the weather forecast says it will be too rainy to walk.) But that vision - now rebranded as "Web 3" ⁴- hasn't gone away.

Maybe its just too early - perhaps the Siri/Alexa/'Hey Google' five years into the future will be capable of doing all this and more. (Perhaps Siri being able to ask Alexa about questions it struggles with is the kind of interoperability that we really need - it sounds more useful than the ability to take an avatar wearing the same pair of trainers across different platforms, anyway.)

It seems to me like for all the excitement around virtual reality/augmented reality headsets etc. (don't get me wrong - putting on a headset and finding yourself in a virtual world is exciting; but thats the problem ⁵ ) that the semantic web and the promise of virtual assistants is the thing about the metaverse most likely to actually change something about how people live their day-to-day lives. But in the meantime, there's a whole world of "work" collaboration, creative experimentation and technology development going on that I think is making the metaverse a genuinely interesting space to watch.

I'm just hoping that the industries that Ben Evans describes as 'either bobbing up and down or getting capsized in the wake of the tech industry speedboat' don't overuse the word and turn it into a meaningless buzzword.

(If they haven't already.)

I appreciate that by writing blog posts and recording podcasts, I am very much a part of the problem that I'm complaining about here. ↩
The early internet was very much like 'digital print', now we see a lot of 'digital TV'; TV started out as 'radio with images', radio started out with books read out loud, the written word started out by repurposing stories from the oral tradition and so on. ↩
That is, anybody who had a computer, and an internet connection, and enough technical understanding to learn and write HTML and set up a server to put things on. That kind of "anybody". ↩
Apparently software versioning conventions have made the transition to broader concepts than simple bundles of code. (I'm also aware that there is more to "Web3" than just the semantic web- although I'm not sure I completely understand what just yet.) ↩
If I was a better 'webmaster', I'd be able to link to a blog post I wrote in 2009 titled "Why the future is boring and pointless", which explains why its the seemingly boring technologies that underpin the kind of services that actually make a difference to how you live your life; the world wide web or miniaturised transistors are boring, but you could easily say what they were for. Virtual reality is exciting - but "what do you do with it" isn't such an easy question to answer.
Sadly, that post is currently lost somewhere in a half-broken CRM database, so you'll have to take my word for it. ↩
Its worth noting that this isn't quite the same as Ball's description - his first point is around 'persistent', and I'm not entirely sure how useful/important that point really is; while 'the metaverse' is persistent, that isn't the same as saying that spaces in the metaverse will be persistent. I'm also deliberately avoiding the Zuckerberg/Facebook/Meta vision/description - partly because I'm trying to avoid my own vision being clouded by his/their/its pitch, but also because frankly, I don't want to entirely re-write this whole post, most of which I wrote before the Facebook/Meta keynote. ↩
https://youtu.be/k1BneeJTDcU ↩

Some Random Nerd