The Metaverse is an Elephant

There is a parable that is at least 3,500 years old about ‘the blind men and an elephant’;

The parable of the blind men and an elephant is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows.
The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true> .

(Emphasis mine.)

Ukiyo-e print illustration from Buddhist parable showing blind monks examining an elephant. Each man reaches a different conclusion based on which part of the elephant he has examined.

I love looking at futuristic predictions and projections that get things wrong, and I think my favourite comes from a book called ‘E-Media”, published on January 1st 2000. It contains a description of a near-future online grocery shopping scenario that was spot on with some details (a full-time worker, too busy to walk around a supermarket ordering her groceries online), in others slightly off but in hugely important and totally unpredictable ways (eg. a passing reference to “one of the search engines”- as if there would always be a competitive marketplace of search engines rather than a massive monopoly; Google had yet to start selling advertising at this point), and in others wildly off in ways that seem obviously predictable (the supermarket shopping ordered online was delivered to a secure, refrigerated lockbox outside the customers house, locked with a digital key, so that deliveries didn’t need to be coordinated with the customers’ movements...) ¹

This kind of thing is one of the many reasons I try to avoid making predictions; at best, they might turn out to be correct, but what might be astute insights at the time just look like statements of the obvious (or worse, lucky guesses) in retrospect. At worst, they are wrong and look stupid- even if they were based on what were completely reasonable assumptions at the time.

But I do like talking about the future...

Just under a year ago, I wrote The Metaverse - A New Rorschach Test; the main point of that post was;

I think, like "data" and "digital", ["metaverse" is] 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 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…

Unfortunately, I suspect that the most prescient part of that article was a casual aside;

(Hopefully, the industry doesn't over-use [the word ‘metaverse’] 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.)

A year ago, the Metaverse was a shiny, new, exciting, futuristic thing. Today... perhaps its become more like the punchline of an elephant joke. In the future, assuming that we see growth in VR/AR, remote working, an ongoing cycle of technological progress and manage to avoid an economic/climate catastrophe on the way... well, perhaps the elephant test will be a more appropriate analogy.

So... Which Metaverse are we talking about?

Whenever I read anything about “the metaverse”, I find myself trying to figure out exactly which definition of the word what I’m reading is talking about. Generally, it fits into one of the following;

• The virtual/digital spaces we share - generally speaking, this tends to focus on online gaming (the ‘holy trinity’ of Minecraft/Fortnite/Roblox, sometimes things like Animal Crossing or Destiny get thrown in), but also sometimes touches on ‘meeting’ platforms (Zoom, Teams etc.)
• A specific subset of virtual, 3D spaces - again, more focussed on games - but likely to touch on older experiments like Second Life or PlayStation Home.
• A decentralised platform (that doesn’t quite exist yet) that links together various virtual spaces in a way that… somehow involves web3/NFTs/blockchain technology and decentralisation.
• An immersive, 3D, VR world that turns fictional metaverses (Snow Crash, Ready Player One, The Matrix) to life. (Albeit in a way that hasn’t actually happened yet - a virtual world in a virtual future, I guess.)
• The tools we use to share real-world spaces with virtual objects/spaces/worlds (ie. AR, VR... which I suppose shifts the focus from the virtual spaces to the interfaces we use to access the virtual spaces...)

I think I can pinpoint exactly when my sentiment around the metaverse truly shifted from enthusiastic excitement to jaded cynicism; I got sent a client brief. (Identities withheld to protect the guilty) - they wanted to talk about doing something in the metaverse. Great! Except... they wanted to talk about what they could do in the metaverse (and to be clear, my position was already very clear that the metaverse does not yet exist) to promote a big launch event they had in just a few months time. So- not really enough time to do something properly in games that actually existed, let alone a future platform that didn't...

In my mind, that’s something like having a conversation about what would be involved in colonising Mars in the future, and asking about how the opportunity for Martian colonies could be best used to launch a new toothpaste brand in 2023. In other words, its a stupid question that’s so stupid that its virtually impossible to even acknowledge it politely.

I thought it was going to be a one-off, but it wasn’t. As it turned out, it seems to be the template for almost every ‘metaverse’ brief/conversation I’ve had since then.

The reason - I think - is because the Metaverse that I’m excited about is a platform. A platform that is still about 5 years away - which is a timeline that I interpret as meaning something like “We’re going to make this thing, but before we can actually start building the thing itself we need to build the tools that we’re going to build the thing with, and then we’re going to need to build the tools that other people can use to build on top of the thing, before we can convince people to start using the tools, which we need to do before the thing becomes an actual thing.”

Technical details aside, that’s a lot of interdependencies and time-consuming stakeholder management - 5 years is close enough to feel like you should be considering it at a strategic level if you’re playing in the same industry, but still far enough away that you’re not going to have an embarrassing status update in the next few quarters with no major milestones to report. (Its also far enough away that, 12 months on, you can probably get away with readjusting your timeline based on current events and finding that, oddly, its still about 5 years away...)

So - what is the ‘metaverse as a platform’ all about?

Computer platforms

Every “computer” is different, with different CPUs, GPUs, interface devices etc. etc.

This means that there are essentially two approaches to writing computer software; you can make it useful for yourself (ie. writing software for a specific machine that it will run on - eg. your laptop, Gmail’s servers), or you can make it useful for others- which means writing for a computing platform.

Windows is a ‘closed’ operating system (in the sense that you can’t (commercially) edit the source code and change how it works), but it’s also an open platform (anyone can write and distribute applications that run on top of Windows.) If you want people to use your software on their laptop, you probably want to make a Windows app.

Linux (technically GNU/Linux) is another operating system that’s particularly useful when you’re working with things like servers, because of its open-source licensing model- no licensing fees, and you can write and run your code on a desktop computer, a server, embedded devices, a virtualised machine running in the cloud or a whole farm of servers without having any extra costs. If the operating system doesn’t work in the quite the way you want/need it to, you can rewrite it. Which makes it a very interesting platform if you’re interested in technology, but at the same time very boring if you’re talking about the tech industry (because money moves around in very different ways when you’re talking about 'free' software; the success of Google and Meta has little to do with the operating systems their own servers run on, in the same way that Netflix's success has little to do with AWS.)

“Android” runs on a Linux-based operating system (“Open!”), but it’s a very different platform to GNU/Linux because of the Play Store approach for distributing applications (“Closed!”) iPhone combines a more restrictive hardware platform (ie. one only Apple makes) with the operating system/App Store bundle to make the iPhone platform, but it’s just another platform. (One that’s getting slightly blurred lines with the iPad and Mac platforms, now that Apple has moved away from the x86 CPU platform.) The PlayStation 5 is a console, but it’s also a platform. One thing all of these platforms have in common is that they apply a degree of friction to software distribution through App Store restrictions. Some of this is security (stopping you installing software that will steal your data or lock up your computer and hold you to ransom), some of this is censorship or legal compliance, but some of it is simply strategy expressed as business policy; you build software for the platform, and the platform owner gets paid a fee. (It’s at the heart of things like the Epic Games vs Apple lawsuit.) ²

Thanks to the internet, software on all these platforms can talk to one another. Licensing restrictions mean that, sometimes when the software could talk to each other (say, FIFA on a PlayStation talking to FIFA on an Xbox), it doesn’t. Or rather, sometimes it’s simply easier not to deal with the issue.

The Metaverse is an Elephant

One reason the Metaverse is doomed is because of the idea that it will straddle all of these different computing platforms; too many conflicting business interests will make this an almost impossible challenge to execute. (Just try to find a 3D world that you can join from a PlayStation, Oculus Meta Quest, PC or iPhone, along with other people using different devices; do let me know if you find one.)

One reason the Metaverse will succeed is because of the idea that something will inevitably, sooner or later (on an infinite timescale) straddle all of these platforms; “The metaverse” is just the new name we started giving this vision when “the internet” got too boring and rooted in the here-and-now, “the web” became irrelevant on some newer devices (because although you can read Wikipedia on a Quest headset or TV set, nobody actually wants to) and “cyberspace” got too stale to describe any vision of the future as seen from a perspective where anyone born in the 20th century is an adult.

So - there’s ‘metaverse number one’ - a future vision of a next-generation of the internet/world wide web; an interconnected, unified, open and permissionless technology/computing platform. Lets say that’s the blind man feeling something big and thick and rough and concluding that the elephant is a tree trunk.

That’s just one vision of the Metaverse though; maybe something will exist across all these different computing platforms in a completely closed, proprietary way; suppose that every device that you can get Netflix on starts working with a single massive server/cloud handling all the “virtual world” stuff; entirely centralised, but fulfilling a completely different metaverse definition to the ‘metaverse as a platform’ idea.

So - there’s ‘metaverse number two’ - a future vision of a new shared 3D, immersive, VR/AR environment. (A bind man feels something long, thin and smooth and concludes that the metaverse is a kind of spear...)

Either one of those two metaverse visions could fulfil all the virtual/augmented reality stuff that’s actually another, completely separate Metaverse definition. Then you’ve got the actual expression of all of this software; the virtual world itself, the economy that exists within it, and whatever blend of scarcity and surplus ends up driving whatever currency it all runs on. That’s a metaverse for economists and sociologists to talk about, and for science-fiction writers to write stories around. (The blind man feeling something long, thin, smooth and hard and concluding that the elephant is a spear...)

Then you’ve got the “lots of metaverses” idea - a Meta metaverse, an Epic Games metaverse, a Roblox metaverse, a Minecraft metaverse, an Xbox metaverse, a PlayStation metaverse etc.; perhaps they all connect in some way (say, a unified identity system, a virtual currency system, a way of making virtual goods “portable” between metaverses) - but not consistently, and all functioning independently of one another.

(A bind man feels something long, thin and wriggly and concludes that the metaverse is a snake...)

Perhaps the metaverse is more like a toolkit - instead of thinking about games like Fortnite and Roblox as the analogy, we should be thinking about 3D engines like Unreal Engine and Unity, and a ‘standardised’ toolkit or pipeline for building 3D worlds and then compiling to run on everything from a PC to Playstation to a pocket computer.

(A bind man feels a large, flat ear and concludes that the metaverse is best described as a kind of fan...)

Some of these Metaverses are contradictory with one another. Some of them could easily coexist with others. The point is, whatever the fastest growing technology looks like in about five years time is probably going to get the Metaverse label attached to it, and I suspect that people will look back on all the predictions that backed the wrong metaverse and laugh at their lack of foresight, in the same way that we like to quote the IBM guy who said something in the 1940s about there being "a world market for maybe five computers". ³

In the meantime, while nobody wants to be betting on the 'wrong metaverse', betting that any given 'metaverse' will be a bad prediction seems like a very safe bet. So, as long as "the metaverse doesn’t exist" continues to be true, all of the metaverses are wrong metaverses. Today, its true. Tomorrow... Maybe not.

Which- I think- is not unlike how in 2006 (that is, before iPhone and Android were announced), all of the mobile platforms were the wrong mobile platform- but that didn't change the fact that “mobile” was still a good strategic 5 year bet to be making at the time. At least, better than - for example - building your website using Flash instead of the open W3C standards and assuming that mobile technology would catch up sooner or later. (In other words, betting that Flash would always be a more important platform than mobile phones, simply because it was unarguably true that it was more important at the time.)

My bet right now⁴ is that lots of people are going to be spending more time working remotely (not controversial, I think), people will want to be "present" with each other when they are physically separated (again, not controversial), that the current technology we have for that - Teams/Zoom + cloud storage etc. - is not as good as it could be (still not controversial…), and that The Metaverse is how we will describe the next generation of technology that does a notably better job (which, I think, is a relatively controversial point to make).

OK - essentially, I'm saying that whatever technology 'wins' is what I'll call "The Metaverse", and thats the Metaverse that I'm betting on. (Hopefully my other metaverse posts help to make my position a bit less fuzzy...) But I think the really important thing here is to make sure that you're trying to see the whole elephant.

1. Perhaps one day in the future, when every new housing development has its own personal refrigerated Amazon Prime lockbox by their front door, this commentary will look really stupid. ↩

2. Fortnite on the Mac got taken down because Fortnite on the iPhone allowed people to buy virtual goods in a way that Apple didn’t like, sidestepping its fee- Apple revoked Epic Games' developer licence for breach of terms, meaning they couldn't update the Mac client - so it broke when the game hit its next major update and the Apple client software was incompatible. It’s a hell of a story and the legal case is ongoing, but the details aren’t really the point here. ↩

3. The “computers” of the 1940s were far more like cloud platforms than desktop PCs, and given that AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba make up two thirds of the cloud marketplace, I’m not sure its quite as bad a prediction as it initially sounds. ↩

4. Note: Not a prediction… ↩