The Metaverse
This article is a part of my Best Reads of the Month section on my website www.mikegorlon.com. Each month I pick one or two articles or blog posts that I find on the internet which I thought were really insightful, interesting or moving. Then I share them with you. You can view the previous month’s articles by going to: https://www.mikegorlon.com/best-reads-of-the-month
July 2021: The Metaverse
Mark Zuckerberg recently announced in Facebook’s last earnings call that they setup a team within the company to help carryout Mark’s vision of developing a metaverse.
The Verge did an interview with Mark following their earnings call and here is how Mark described the metaverse:
“You can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it. And you feel present with other people as if you were in other places, having different experiences that you couldn’t necessarily do on a 2D app or webpage, like dancing, for example, or different types of fitness.”
Later on in this interview, The Verge and Mark discussed an essay that venture capitalist Matthew Ball wrote. Matthew’s essay is about what the metaverse is and what is required for it to be created.
I recommend reading Matthew’s essay because I think that the metaverse is a really interesting idea and that it will be here someday in the future but just not soon. Even Matthew Ball estimates that we are decades away from an idealistic version of the metaverse because of the number of improvements that need to be developed in technology for it to take place.
In addition to reading his essay, I also created a summary of the essay that you can read as well by the following this link:
“Matthew [Ball] is keeping track of the metaverse around the following 8 categories which can be thought of as a stack:
1. Hardware
2. Networking
3. Compute
4. Virtual platforms
5. Interchange tools and standards
6. Payments
7. Metaverse content, services, and assets
8. User behaviors”
“Mark Zuckerberg says that, “the hardest technology challenge of our time may be fitting a supercomputer into the frame of normal-looking glasses. But it’s the key to bringing our physical and digital worlds together.”
“Increasing the number of players on a single game has always been limited. Right now, Roblox can do 200 and has up to 700 in beta testing but a fully imagined metaverse essentially requires no limit to this “number of players”.
‘The question of whether you can build one game that many millions of players can play, all in one shared world, together, that’s a really interesting challenge for the game industry now.’
- Tim Sweeney.”
“If value in the metaverse will be primarily driven through virtual world and virtual creations, rather than better phones, then we want most profits going to developers of the virtual platforms and the developers on them. However, you can’t access the Metaverse except through hardware, and every hardware player is fighting to be the (or at least a) payment gateway to the Metaverse. This is why Facebook, which lacks a major operating system, is investing so heavily in Oculus. And why Snap is developing its own AR hardware, while defending Apple’s 30% take.”
