(2021-07-10) Herrman Are We In The Metaverse Yet

John Herrman: Are We in the Metaverse Yet? Crypto people say they’re building it. Gamers might already be living in it. The art world is cashing in on it. Web veterans are trying to save it. But what is it?

The biggest ideas in tech often lurch into the lexicon before they are truly coherent

Remember hearing about “the internet”? Get ready for “the metaverse.”

In fiction, a utopian metaverse may be portrayed as a new frontier where social norms and value systems can be written anew, freed from cultural and economic sclerosis. But more often metaverses are a bit dystopian — virtual refuges from a fallen world

Together, these new technologies hint at what the internet will become next.

Video games like Roblox and Fortnite and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, in which players can build their own worlds, have metaverse tendencies, as does most social media. If you own a non-fungible token (NFT) or even just some crypto, you’re part of the metaversal experience. Virtual and augmented reality (XR) are, at a minimum, metaverse adjacent. If you’ve attended a work meeting or a party using a digital avatar, you’re treading into the neighborhood of metaversality.

Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist and prolific essayist, describes the metaverse not as a virtual world or a space, but as “a sort of successor state to the mobile internet” — a framework for an extremely connected life.

A World Built on Blockchain

Earlier this year, in the midst of a crypto boom, the price of a currency called MANA began climbing the charts in Coinbase, a popular exchange for digital currencies. MANA is the currency of a virtual world called Decentraland.

After two years bouncing around 10 cents, MANA briefly broke $1.60 in April, pushing the combined value of all the tokens past $2.4 billion.

By size, Decentraland is more of a commune — as of July, just a few hundred people are logged in at a time, down from a March peak in the low thousands — made up of user-generated NFTs.

Denizens of Decentraland are constantly creating scenes and experiences for other users, like concerts and art exhibits.

Between events, users are mostly left to wander and wonder: What now?

Speculators seem less confused; after all, Decentraland is first and foremost an experiment in scarce digital property.

What separates Decentraland from its predecessors like Second Life, a virtual world owned and operated by a private company called Linden Labs, is that it is indeed fairly decentralized.

When Epic was developing Fortnite, its plan was not to create a metaverse. But what started in 2017 as a tower defense-style game where players fought zombies exploded, just a year later

the company rushed to add social features, like voice chatting and dance parties

Fortnite made more than $9 billion in revenue in 2018 and 2019 combined.

Now, Epic markets Fortnite as not just an interactive experience but as a metaverse.

A Travis Scott concert held within Fortnite last April drew more than 12 million concurrent views

Defining the metaverse was difficult, he said, but he knew what it was not: “The metaverse is not an App Store with a catalog of titles,” Mr. Sweeney said. “In the metaverse, you and your friends and your appearance and cosmetics can go from place to place and have different experiences while remaining connected to each other socially.”

Could it be possible one day to have a tunnel from Roblox to Fortnite and other games, connecting them all in some sort of futuristic world? Mr. Sweeney said yes.

Roblox, a platform where independent developers create games popular with children, may be the nearest and most expansive vision of the metaverse.

He has said his goal is to reach billions of people with Roblox, not just children. At an investor presentation in February, he said the company holds its business meetings on the platform.

we believe Roblox and the metaverse will join these as essential tools for business communication,” Mr. Baszucki said. “Ultimately, someday we may even shop within Roblox.”

There are millions of games created on Roblox each year, and much of the money they generate — through the sale of digital items and upgrades — goes to independent developers

Half of the platform’s players are 13 or younger, the company said.

While there is a lot of corporate interest in the metaverse, skeptics abound.

In earlier virtual worlds, Ms. Heyning said, “it was always seen as people participating in a new type of public commons. Now, obviously lots of companies are going to assert dominance.”

Hopes and assurances from tech executives are nice, but private platforms are private platforms

In pursuit of that connection, Ms. Heyning, 45, has joined a few volunteers to form the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group

Kayvon Tehranian, a founder and the chief executive of Foundation, a marketplace for NFTs, also sees building the metaverse as a chance to get right what he believes former stewards, and users, of the internet got wrong. The key, he said, is blockchain technology. How people engage with the metaverse is secondary.

His metaverse hews to a particular definition of freedom. “The thing I really care about is that you as an individual own objects (property rights),” he said. “Property ownership is a tool. It works. It brings financial incentives.”