Predictions: The Metaverse

Its not what you think it is

I have long been a supporter of the concept of The Metaverse. From first reading Snow Crash and Neuromancer I have always wanted to be immersed in a virtual world with real-world currencies and tangibly owned virtual items.

I first joined Second Life way back in 2003 and over the years ran several businesses including land and property rental, but my predictions for mass adoption were hugely overinflated, and although there was a huge buzz building in 2008, it ultimately fizzled out.

A few years ago I was once-more excited, Facebook was launching ever more capable VR devices, the overhyped Magic Leap was on the scene, and everybody seemed to be building augmented reality solutions… even Apple was rumoured to be producing a device.

… all of these have been a major let down.

For one, nobody wants to be locked into an eco-system owned by ZuckerBot™, no matter how many billions he pours into it. People just trust him and his company.

Magic Leap was an amazing piece of kit and I got to try it out for 48 hours, but it never really materialized and instead pivoted to a business use case. Several billion dollars invested and no consumer unit to show for it.

The same can be said for the HoloLens.

Then there was a glimmer of hope, Apple officially announced the Vision Pro, and to be fair, the technology behind it is amazing but once again, not a consumer device, the Meta Quest 3 is almost as good at a sixth of the price and it has way more games to play on it.

At this moment in time I don’t think we have any viable device that is powerful enough, priced low enough, or compelling enough to make the average person go out there and buy one.

But that doesn’t mean the metaverse is dead.

The metaverse is a concept, not a physical device. Second Life still has an average of 18,000 users a day. Tiny I know but still larger than the Web3 platforms such as SandBox and DecentralLand combined.

But these pail into insignificance when compared to Roblox which has 89 Million daily active users and Fortnite which has 60 Million daily active users.

Although neither of these platforms can be considered a Metaverse traditionally they do aspire to many of its elements. Here is a broad definition of the metaverse:

• Immersive: The metaverse aims to create a sense of presence, making users feel like they are actually inside the digital world. This is often achieved through virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies.

• Social: The metaverse is a place where people can connect, interact, and build communities. It's a space for social experiences, events, and gatherings.

• Persistent: The metaverse continues to exist and evolve even when individual users are not present. It's a persistent world that is always "on."

• Interoperable: Ideally, different metaverse platforms and experiences will be interoperable, allowing users to move seamlessly between them with their digital identities and virtual possessions.

• Diverse: The metaverse is envisioned as a diverse and multifaceted space, with a wide range of experiences, activities, and opportunities for creativity and self-expression.

• A Digital Economy: The Metaverse has its own economy, with users able to buy, sell, and trade virtual goods and services.

Both Roblox and Fortnite are Immersive, this might not be in VR at the moment, but you don’t need virtual reality to be immersed, neither do you need state-of-the-art graphics.

They are also Social. People hang out not just to play games but to go to virtual events such as concerts. The Travis Scott concert reached 22.7 million people in Fortnite, by some estimates it has been viewed 45 million times. Now compare that with the number one physical concert ‘Eras’ by Taylor Swift, it has sold 10.1 million tickets to date.

As for being Persistent, this is only partially so. Both platforms do have some persistence and Roblox notably more so, but not in the true metaverse sense. This could however be achievable easily in Roblox and I will come back to this in my thoughts later.

In both platforms you have Interoperability between worlds/games created in their respective platforms. I can take my avatar with me from game-to-game. But there is no interoperability between platforms and there probably never will be. There have been numerous attempts to work on a ‘standard’ for the Metaverse but the complexities and scope will make this impossible. I can never see this happening. Ever.

From the outside, both of these platforms look like gaming platform, but the range of experiences inside each platform are Diverse. Both platforms offer a range of creator tools to ‘build-what-you-want’. Roblox also wins out on this, you can build any ‘non-adult’ experience you like inside it.

On that last point I have to say, one of the reason Second Life has been around for so longer is because of the more spicier kind of experience you can have playing it.

Finally, both have a fully working Digital Economy where you can buy, sell, and trade items. Again, Roblox wins this one.

As you can see from the above, both of these platforms are almost there in terms of being a metaverse, but neither of the are quite hitting the mark in terms of the Neil Stephenson or William Gibson experience we kind of expected by now.

My predictions for 2025 and what I would do

I know as I write this that The Metaverse is not for most of you but I want to be thorough and outline some opportunities, so if you have the time I hope you will indulge me.

Devices And Technology

Like I said before, the cost of hardware and having a compelling reason to purchase it is not balanced right now, and a couple of things need to change to make that happen.

First of all we need a ubiquitous 5G network, ideally 6G but seen as we barely have a functioning 5G network at the moment, this will be five years away at least.

The reason we need this is because compute power needs to shift away from the device to the data-centre. At the moment, to run a headset you either need to be wired up to a PC, or put the computer in a headset or package attached to your body. Meta’s headsets have effectively packaged the equivalent of a high-power phone with a decent graphics chip and OLED screens inside their device.

For the Metaverse to work, these devices need to be lightweight and be wearable for hours at a time. To achieve this we need fast communications capabilities where the graphics are streamed from a high-power GPUs in the cloud, frame-by-frame to your device. This will work the same way Microsoft allows me to stream XBOX and PC games directly to my older and incapable Android phone, my iPad, or my low-cost Linux box. I get 4k resolution at 60 frames a second and hundreds of games for £14 a month with GamePass Ultimate.

The technology exists for this and it is proven. I also know that Second Life are experimenting with this at the moment. It won’t be long (and I think it might be at this years developer conference) that Roblox may announce this too.

So 5G or 6G will be needed to make this a truly portable experience, but home WIFI is fast enough to bring this into the realm of reality with current technology.

This should easily knock $150 off the price of the hardware, after all, I can use a $50 raspberry PI to stream XBOX ultimate games. This will significantly reduce the barrier to entry even if it means paying a monthly subscription fee.

Will this happen this year… I don’t know. But if you scrap all the extra augmented reality features therefore reducing the cost, and purely focus on VR then you could establish a foothold in the market, have a really low cost gaming device much like the original Oculus was imagined to be but with a small form-factor headset that doesn’t hurt your neck after an hour of use.

Display technology has changed so much over the last 18 months that lightweight film screens should bring the price and weight down. Have a look at the XREAL Air, these weight just 79g, and offer a huge IMAX display (These cost $197). Combine this technology with a tiny pc capable of streaming and you have your product. .

Again, will this happen, probably not. This is more like two years away. But will it get adopted… only if a trusted brand builds it. If META have anything to do with it it will fail, nobody really likes or trusts the ZuckerBot™, this needs the backing of Microsoft or Sony, or even Epic Games (the developers of the Unreal Engine).

What I see offering more promise for this year is lightweight smart glasses, the kind that Google Glass was envisaged to be without looking like you are one of the Borg.

There are a few promising start-ups already shipping glasses with tiny built-in displays that connect to your phone via Bluetooth and hand over processing, just displaying information.

These kind of devices will provide full access to AI on the go, provide in-display maps, image recognition, face recognition and more. I expect one or more of these devices to hit big this year, with lots of cheap Chinese rip-offs hitting the market a few months later.

(on another note I recently spent $19 on a Smart Watch from China to see if I could hack it and play around with it, and to be fair it is not as well manufactured as an Apple Watch but it has almost all of the same features built in for a tiny fraction of the price… this is why I believe smart glasses will take off this year and I think with some clever lens technology that already exists, you wont need to order speciality prescription lenses… stay tuned I will have more in the coming month).

I stuck my flag back in Second Life

Let me start off by saying that I don’t think that Second Life is ever going to be big again, that time has passed… but there are lessons to be learned and knowledge to be gained.

I recently decided to rent some land, get a house, and build a lab there again.

Not because I wanted to build a business there again, but because I wanted to explore what is still working, what draws people in, and what people are innovating with.

There is a lot of knowledge to be gained there, even with just 18,000 daily active users people are still running business, still making money, and still creating unique experiences. A lot of those users have been there for 20 years+ and I wanted to chat with a few of them.

Over the last week I have explored hundreds of destinations, I even spent three peaceful hours sailing around a bunch of islands experiencing it in a totally different way.

The one thing I came away with (apart from a few cool tech ideas) is that people go there to socialise and to just live in a place that is a lot more interesting than their daily grind. People build real friendships in Second Life.

… and they really like being creative.

People spend an inordinate amount of time, and money building and furnishing their little plots of land.

The one thing that attracted me to Second Life in the first place was the ability to ‘build stuff’, to create. This I believe is the core of it.

I remember back in the day I would spend 4-5 hours every evening moving digital pieces of foliage and furniture around, and even this week I have spent about six hours picking out pieces of furniture for my little boat-house, setting up a working radio, installing teleporter pads to get to my lab, and also being a geek and testing API calls to my n8n webhook to see if much has changed in the Second Life technology space.

I actually had to step-away because I was being sucked in deeper with every interaction.

But it got me thinking…

People like to create, and the metaverse presents, in-particular in Roblox, a huge opportunity to allow people to do that. The trouble is learning the skills.

Anyone right now can fire up Roblox, download Roblox Studio, and build anything, be it a game, a social space, anything.

Roblox boasts that is has millions of user created experiences, but that is somewhat a lie. It has millions of virtual spaces filled with a few boxes, and some crap prefabs from the marketplace hiding numerous malicious scripts.

The problem with Roblox Studio is that it is overwhelming. People just give up. I nearly gave up because the barrier to entry was so high. If you want to build a nice house to invite your friends around to, then you have to learn 3D modelling, texturing, scripting. You have to learn the nuances of multiplayer scripting (which is not easy on Roblox).

(Fortnite makes this a lot easier but you have to have a really decent PC to run the Fortnite Creator version of Unreal Engine.)

So what is the opportunity?

A middleground.

If you look at experiences on Roblox such as BloxBurg, people go there to build their own house and decorate it, they roleplay in that space. It makes BloxBurg more than a million dollars a year and it is shit. But it is the best shit you can get without having to learn all those other skills.

The opportunity is to provide a kind of Second Life experience where you can build the Barbie house of your dreams, or a three story Victorian mansion with gardens, with all the building tools available directly in the mobile device you use every day. You can invite your friends over, and access games designed for a social experience.

Think of it as a gated community for creators with easy to use tools where they could drag in an airship for them and their friends to board, rez a parachute and jump out at 2,000 feet aiming for a target on the ground.

Sure, you can already do that to some degree in Roblox but the scope is very limited.

If you make an experience where it is fun to build new games without having to learn all of the complicated coding, and 3D modelling skills that Roblox requires to build anything satisfying then this is where the money is.

Provide the building blocks to create a fun experience. Building blocks that are connected and aware of each other, more like a Minecraft experience where you can put together complicated ‘machines’ from simple elements.

You make it free to use, and offer premium items, think the SIMS building experience but with friends.

You set a standard. You open a private marketplace where people can get items compatible with your experience. Items that are aware of their connections and state.

Creators will then begin to build items just for that marketplace.

This is a RaineLand™ compatible item (yes I have an ego problem here). I can just drag it into my experience and it will work.

… and you add persistence. If your friend leaves their hoverboard there then it stays there until you remove it, your friend requests it back, or the land auto-returns it based on your settings.

This way your friends can bring a personal experience they have created to your space and set it up and it will still be there, in the same state when they come back.

Add in things like finite resources that regenerate slowly and workshop plans, friends could group together to build an item, or elements of it to create a larger structure. Make it more like a MMO where you can chop trees to get wood, build a sawmill to create planks, use the planks to create a rollercoaster etc. Encourage group behaviour.

And remember, the planks you create are not just for use in one experience, they are RaineLand™ planks that can be used in any RaineLand™ experience.

All of this is technically possible in Roblox right now and if you pull this off this could become a massive community all powered by Roblox’s powerful infrastructure so you don’t have to pay for anything.

This is effectively creating a metaverse inside a metaverse without the cost.

Yes this sounds like a huge project and it is, but you could start really small and abstract a couple of the ideas I have mentioned. This after-all is just me just ideas out on a page.

But buried somewhere in here is an opportunity, even if you abstract this away a little, there are huge opportunities in Roblox for building a brand in User Generated Content. Several creators in the clothing space are already making $10k+ a month from selling their items in the standard marketplace. What about items that are also aware of items from the same creator and they work together, I don’t think this has been done yet.

Again, just a thought.

There are huge opportunities here, and the real metaverse hasn’t even emerged yet.

Think about them.