(2020-12-07) Lai Meet Me In The Metaverse

Jonathan Lai: Meet Me in the Metaverse. There are many competing visions for how we’ll build the Metaverse: a persistent, infinitely-scaling virtual space with its own economy and identity system. Facebook Horizon is an ambitious bet that it will be realized in VR. Epic Games is doubling down on a game-centric approach with Fortnite. But the most exciting part about the Metaverse is not its scope or infrastructure, but its potential to reinvent the way we interact with our friends and loved ones.

a subtle but important shift in how we socialize and play: from purposeful interactions centered around activities, to spontaneous interactions focused on people.

Fully emergent social experiences that model the serendipity of the real world will become the norm through two key trends: the proliferation of user-generated content (UGC) and the evolution of AI into both creator tool and companion.

Multiplayer games have done the most to push the boundaries of social entertainment

In-game socializing also tends to be focused on specific activities

Open-world games such as Grand Theft Auto and The Witcher 3 have introduced unstructured play where players freely explore a virtual world and pursue objectives in any order they choose

User-generated content offers a promising solution for cost-effectively scaling content production.

In order to enable emergent social experiences inside a Metaverse—similar to how we discover experiences in the real world today—there needs to be a vast increase in both the quantity and quality of user-generated content.

We’re already seeing early glimpses of this in action. Led by Siri co-creator Tom Gruber, LifeScore has built an adaptive music platform that dynamically composes music in real-time.

After text and audio, graphics is the final frontier.

With worlds at our fingertips, socializing will shift from the purposeful what to the people-centric who. Instead of making plans around specific entertainment activities, as is frequently the case today, we’ll be free to explore the virtual realm as a shared experience with friends—and trust the AI to fill in the rest.

Our friends themselves will evolve in the Metaverse, as well

We’re already seeing early previews of AI friendships. Companies like Pandorabots and Replika have created emotionally intelligent AI bots that can serve as a friend or romantic companion... over 7 million people use Replika today, for example

In the not-too-distant future, our invitation to friends and family may simply be, “Meet me in the Metaverse!”