There is No Metaverse

I'm here at the Virtual Worlds 08 conference at the Jacob Javits Center and the New Yorker Hotel in New York, organized by Virtual Worlds Management/Show Initiative. Well, actually, I'm home in front of my computer, but it's nearby because I live here in New York anyway. We're into day three now, if you count the pre-party Tuesday night. The mood is quite a bit more subdued from the very first conference held in April 2007, when crazy visionary Philip Rosedale got up and talked about these amazing science guys who inspired him and these awesome weird things he figured out how to do on his computer, and his surprise, after he was done tinkering, that "there are people on here." And it seems to have sobered from the very ebullient Anthony Zucker, creator of CSI:NY, who first threw bars of candy all over the audience last year in San Jose, then told us all that so many people would come pouring into Second Life after watching the TV show (I was going to say "in real life" before I stopped myself) that they'd burn down the servers in Second Life.

Yes, the Metaverse has gone from the Golden Age of heroes and harmony, to the Iron Age of toil and replication. Now, the suits, the lawyers, the kids from marketing and sales, have poured in to roll up their sleeves and get to work really getting this thing up and running for many masses more of people. There's Barbie World, which was the featured virtual world for the opening keynote by Mattel, and then there's the barbies and kens behind the counters of some 50 booths enthusiastically showing various worlds and wares for the Metaverse providing a fine testimonial to the previous centuries achievements with flouride in the water and prophylactic dentistry starting at the age of 4.

Except, wait, nobody calls this the Metaverse anymore. Nobody *wants* to call it that anymore. Their clients don't understand what it is, and it sounds...adverse. Ad-verse. In fact, those things we were breathlessly calling Metaversal Development Companies (MDCs) in as reverent tones as people talk about the MDGs (Millenium Development Goals), don't want you to call them that anymore. Hell, no. What they do now is develop virtual worlds -- plural. Not only is there more than one of them -- truly -- well, there's no Metaverse -- that thing, you know, up in cyberspace.

There is no Metaverse. So let's think what that means. For the consumer, well, it's like this. You went on a drive to this shining Canadian city of Toronto, cleaner, more modern, with more culture than, oh, say, Rochester, NY. But on the way, you took a wrong turn and wound up in Lakawanna, the armpit of New York State. Yikes, trying to untangle yourself out of that one, my God, you wound up in Cheektowaga. Lord, did you know they even make places called Cheektowaga? And here you are at the Savarin rest stop, and there's still only...Buffalo to look forward to, and it's getting dark and you may have to stay at the Howard Johnson's in Niagara Falls, NY before pushing on to Toronto in the morning, or some day...Maybe you should have stayed in Rochester -- they do have the Lilac Festival and the Eastman School, after all.

But, why Lakawanna and Buffalo?

Well, it's like this: everything is going to happen later, in the bright future, and they can't tell you yet, because they are under NDA. Second Life is going to have better simulators. Second Life is going to start with just IBM getting a special license for hosting the SL software on its servers behind its own firewall with data protection and the ability to store and keep its own content, and before long, well, some other lucky companies will get this, too. Some kind of business council or group to help/promote businesses will be formed, maybe in Q2. The forums are getting a facelift, but we can't learn yet how the permaban removal issue will play out until the software and moderators are in place.

Vivox, the company that makes the voice feature for Second Life (or as we're supposed to call it now "the Second Life Grid" is going to have voice fonts, to enable you to change your voice from female to male or visa versa -- "soon". It will also have some kind of "turn-taking" feature to make meetings flow better so that you can tell who is speaking or wishing to get in line to speak easier (they can't tell us how that will look or work yet). You'll have the ability to record -- in the future.

Wello Horld isn't ready to be announced yet, but in a few months? Maybe there's a beta. Maybe you can get into it. It has something to do with turtles. And Brooklyn. Hint: I think it will involve buddy lists of who is present in a place that you overlay on to a real map.

Stroker Serpentine will have some kind of new adult world separate from Second Life -- but it's about a year out from now.

Robert Bloomfield, who was going to pick up this Metaverse Metrics Index from Nick Wilson, sort of bogged down on getting the advisor and it isn't publishing anything yet. One workshop put the figure of "gamers" at 73 million, but that's not quite the same as MMORPGs and VWs.

Linden Lab, IBM, and all these other companies who were talking up a storm at VW 07 in San Jose about "interoperability" like Samsung don't seem to have...the articles of incorporation yet? Or had a few meetings? But...didn't decide much?

Oh, Philip Linden was here, his new haircut for the Congressional testimony the other day still not worn off. He was looking rested and centered, and was running off to meet with...National Geographic. (BTW, National Geographic isn't your Mom's National Geographic, the reporting is more modern, the website is spiffed up.)

So, across this somewhat dismal landscape, the prospect of opening up the Linden forums again and undoing all the permabans...gleams like a bright, shining beacon.

OK, you get the idea.

But, in case you didn't, Hiro Pendragon is here to explain it to us all. There's no Metaverse...like that one you imagined from Snowcrash. It was structurally impossible to build. Why, it was a good prototype, but not technically feasible. So we have to give up *that* ideal, and now build *the other* Metaverse. And that will be...what? I'd have to endure another stemwinder from Hiro at the bar about why that huge Boulevard in the sky programmed by elites to run the world, with crappy public terminals that log-on the plebes, who only have generic Ken and Barbie avatars that render as grey sometimes, with a huge, big black box of a club called the Black Sun, is...different than this thing we *already* have called "Second Life" -- but stay tuned.

Even before I heard the talk by Electric Sheep Sibley Verbeck yesterday, I had been thinking to myself "there's no Metaverse." That is, the fictional mental construct that sort of riffed from the original Snowcrash concept of Neal Stephenson was in fact not being built, wouldn't be built any time soon, and maybe wasn't the metaphor. Of course, I had been helped in this thinking by futurist Jerry Paffendorf telling me there is no more 3-D Web (and Mark Wallace retired Web 3 Point D as a blog (they both are working on the secret Wello), there is only "Web Different" (augmented with various 3-D stuff.

Basically, Sibley explained that the road to the construction of the Metaverse was so steep, required like 50 technologies that weren't here yet, had only been partially completed in one techno bump by Linden Lab, and would only be a little bit more constructed with 2-3 innocations by all the kids' and pets' worlds, that, well, it was a long way up there. It sounded more to me like that old joke about the difference between Stalin and Brezhnev building the rail line, where Stalin kept ripping up the track from behind to put it down in front, calling it a railroad, and Brezhnev put got everbody into a rail car and shook it and said the railroad was running, and Gorbachev said, look, up ahead are some bright lights at the end of the tunnel! But it was the train coming in the other direction to run you over.

Well, no, I don't mean to scare you. The years 2005-2007 were all about excitement with Second Life, but enormous hype. Now, the years 2007-2009 would be about the kid, teen, and pet worlds. Then after 2010, there would be communities of various sorts, like dating, education, hobbies, etc. having virtual worlds.

Look, I promise you, once you get back on the road to Toronto after the Falls, you'll be fine again.

Comments

[Crap Mariner]

I've always wondered about the concept of an NDA. When one mentions an NDA, it usually means there's something in the works they don't want revealed quite yet.

What if an NDA is meant to cover the fact that there's actually nothing to hide? The proverbial "Giant Laser Frisbees" of Bloom County fame.

Something to ponder, I guess.

[Digado]

I only partially agree. What can be explained to clients is a goal to create interoperated virtual worlds. It means they can make an investment once and place it into various niches (worlds).

Whether you use the term metaverse for this or not - it depends, I like it because it removes some of the prejudice against the term virtual worlds at exec level. But I could also understand a decision not to use it because it's too 'sci-fi' and only raises more questions.

And as for the part of 'no metaverse' - it depends very much by what definiton you go - Stephensons vision, the roadmap's prediction 2016 or the commercial concept of interoperated vw's. Only recently we had MetaverseU - which was all about 'the metaverse' - different, less commercial angle. Marketing-wise kids worlds are king because of their critical mass, and interoperability is a non-issue so its only natural to hear less about 'metaverses'.

[John Lopez]

The concept of a Metaverse was an extrapolation of the universality of the earlier networked environments. The funny thing is, even *those* weren't some monolithic and interoperable environment until a defacto standard arose in the form of the web protocols and infrastructure we all use today.

But wait, it is worse than that: even with HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP, the routing protocols, etc... all we *really* have today is a bunch of islands. This blog is an island, with a loose connection via TypeKey, RSS, Search Engines, Track-Backs and plain old hyperlinks to the rest of the web. Other blogs run on incompatible operating systems, blogging software and even glitch text simply cutting and pasting text back and forth thanks to the lack of universal Unicode implementation.

I'll believe a universal Metaverse is possible once we figure out how to tie the 2D web together with something stronger than chewing gum and bailing wire. By then we should have a defacto standard in place (maybe Second Life, probably not).

[Dusan Writer]

Prok, I waved at you across the bar at the New Yorker but you didn't wave back...you looked a little hemmed in, I suppose, and now I know why.

Being from Toronto myself I guess I feel lucky because I already live with all those sparkly clean surfaces, so I have my compensation for missing out on past conferences. This is all so darn new to me, but I have this odd feeling down here of people walking around in circles, (purposefully ignoring the SL booth) hoping they'll bump into an answer or two. I've got my own take on Sibley's hand flailing, er, I mean presentation, but can't figure out if I'm supposed to wait until he unveils his first blog entry (woot) and that's OK because I'm still all starry eyed over Barbie (or at least the Barbie slides) about which I posted (and which was probably sucked up by Yolto, need to look into that). I LOVE slides that swoosh and twirl, and it was an equal *thrill* seeing my first live gaggle of beleaguered Lindens, and that distant glimpse of the almost ethereal Philip in his Neko collar thing, or was it some kind of warding charm?

Who knows.

But you're right, his haircut was spiffy.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Whew, I'm so relieved to hear that there no Metaverse yet! So now we can all go back to Second Life and continue to work on it, while a zillion companies pop up from nowhere, get some millions in VC funding, develop a quick-and-dirty PetWorld, get 100,000 people to join, and blow up in smithereens when they find out that the attention span of the average teenager is a pico-second.

Remember the survivors of the dot-com bubble. Who did survive and why are they still around?

Ironically, a good friend of mine (who shall remain unnamed on this blog) told me yesterday that the "Metaverse bubble" is starting well before the technology to create the Metaverse exists; and at least the dot-com bubble had 15 years of solid engineering and technology behind it. The *next* big thing might be a bubble that bursts *before* the technology even exists!

I'm not worried, though. People spending money is good for the economy. Some win, almost all lose, but money circulates, changes hands, creates jobs, get people to talk about things. Nothing is ever lost; at the very least, it'll keep people busy writing about it :)

[John Lopez]

"The *next* big thing might be a bubble that bursts *before* the technology even exists!"

They have you covered on that over here: http://www.memebox.com/futureblogger

They make the Metaverse groups look downright sane.

Nobody is surprised that a new technology takes the same path as an old technology did as far as cycles. Gartner may be useless most of the time, but the hype cycle is dead on: http://www.gartner.com/pages/story.php.id.8795.s.8.jsp

What is missing is a similar cycle for the unification of various systems or the creation of a defacto standard (the latter is what I suspect will arise from virtual worlds: one system will simply outweigh the rest as far as user adoption... the complexity of standards creation seems too high a bar for real unification).

[Ann Otoole]

theres a metaverse bubble? dang! metaversetrade.org domain is available to the highest bidder rofl!

[larryr]

Casablanca seems to keep playing in my head....

Im shocked, shocked to hear there is no metaverse;) , and that the javitz is again full of closed circus PT Barnums, who are fresh from the wilds of the faux Second Life Africa..:) trying to sell "sheep" and "zebras " and many other funny animal to those whose job is to forget that all this happended before and will happen again...(Battlestar Galactica ?)the tech and business "press".;)

c3

[larryr]

actually, something IS lost....

the ability to see that something IS lost..

and thats where all this deja vu vr bubblestuff is nothign more than scary, and that only we're to blame for the world we create..

congrats to all who are now graduating "making" 101.

now that you know- who ya gonna bitch about in blogs..:)

c3:)

[Roland Legrand]

It was a bit odd how Second Life was avoided in most presentations, at least the presentations I attended.
I do know that there are many more worlds out there. However,it remains a fact that 400 universities and many education and non-profit projects are situated in Second Life. Maybe they are commercially not very interesting for the industry (I guess those projects work a lot with students, volunteers etc), but they give us some early examples of very good use of virtual worlds. Those projects are very important for society at large.
It is ok for me that kids and teens experiment with other worlds, but I also think that the older demographic of Second Life will be more loyal.
The content those SL residents create, will be more relevant for society and will get more serious media attention (at last).
Which will help Linden Lab to be financially valuable - Linden Lab which does not depend on advertisements to survive but on hosting and which will find other revenue sources to supplement the existing business.
I am a long term believer in Second Life. Or am I just a sentimental resident?

[Tammy Nowotny]

If you think going from Buffalo to Toronto is disorienting, try crossing from Coos County, NH or Orleans County in VT into the Eastern Townships of Quebec. The "Kingdom" is one of the darkest, most deserted, remotest corners of the northeast US... Appalachia without the coal. And although the region has its charms, it's depressed both economically and spiritually.

Cross the border... and suddenly you are in the Townships, which is Montreal exurban playground--- in one of the richest semi-resort semi-suburban areas in North America. (It's kinda like the Bucks County Berkshire County or Santa Barbara County of Franco-America.)

It's especially funny these days, because Canada in general and Quebec in particular somehow get away with all sorts of things which allegedly would have disastrous effects south of the border. They have universal health care, they have high taxes (including, if I recall correctly, a 23% sales tax), they are multicultural, they speak French, etc., they sell Cuban produce in the supermarkets, etc. --- and yet somehow they manage to be a fairly prosperous society,

Well, I can't say that I have evntured into any non-SL virtual worlds yet, although I am working up to check out OpenSim :-)

[Dusan Writer]

@ Tammy - You forgot the legal dope smoking and gay marriage, an election process that only lasts a month or two tops, and free beer.

Well, OK, maybe not free beer...but the beer companies were behind a mass movement to get an extra holiday which was granted. "Family Day" its called.

[Prokofy Neva]

Tammy, it's tempting to think that because Canada does all those things, that it will be able to go on doing them. Even Sweden has to concede that its years of socialism has caused it huge productivity and deficit problems. Canada always had a low rate compared to the dollar precisely because of its taxes and socialism, and the only reason its dollar is strengthened now from what I can tell is because of the horror of US expense on the war in Iraq, which terribly weakened the US dollar.

I also want to say that Canada's multiculturalism is one of those national fictions that breaks down upon the telling of it by any one of those "multis". Plenty of ethnic groups can be found to tell you that this is a fiction.

No, these things *are* impossible south of the border because no free society devoted to free enterprise is going to sit down for 23 percent taxes. People simply won't tolerate it, even middle class and poor people who might be persuaded that government spending with these taxes would improve their lives. That's because they don't believe in making a giant governmnt power that hires a huge percentage of the population, giving them state-created jobs, and then running people's lives. They want the private sector to take care of this. Does the private sector take care of this? No, but the imperfect version of this is preferable for many people rather than move to the deadening hand of government employees and a huge state.

I'm a beneficiary of universal health care in Canada as I went to university there for 4 years, and I can tell you what a very, very mixed bag this is, and how people wait in line, or do not get the best diagnoses precisely because it's socialized medicine. Private health care is out of the reach of the ability of many to pay, and people live without health insurance, and this is a terrible thing. But socialized medicine without choice is a terrible thing.

If these things in Canada were a)the wonderful things you say they are and b) easy to install in a country like the United States with its history and population, trust me, Canada would be the dominant power in the world, not the US. But they aren't, so it isn't.

Roland, I think they avoided mentioning SL because for most of the suits there it is a bad choice for kids, because of all the liablity and adult problems.

The Teen Grid has yet to sell itself successfully as a safe alternative to SL, not because it is somehow not safe itself, I think it generally is, but because it is seen by lame as some teens and they familiarize themselves with the brand, then go into the adult grid easily by using mom's credit card or cell phone.

This conference was not about virtual worlds in general, and therefore also about education, it's about business. They are interested in advertising and how to reach mass markets.

Digago, you are making an utterly false and unsubstantiated claim with this: "I only partially agree. What can be explained to clients is a goal to create interoperated virtual worlds. It means they can make an investment once and place it into various niches (worlds)."

These worlds aren't interoperable right now and won't be any time soon. And I see that all you care about is, is how you can pitch a sale to "your clients" and therefore you don't care about thinking about the truth, that there isn't a Metaverse unles you sell them that concept. Yeesh, and you think some American toy company is crass and mercantile?!

The idea that insolent, uneducated, unformed kids get to be "king" and get to be endlessly celebrated and sold to as "market-savvy" is one that you obviously find attractive, but it's destructive to the society at large.

I don't like simple explanations like the hype cycle, because you could create some other simple explanation and pitch it that way. This is all merchandising and meming.

John, this is an important point: "The concept of a Metaverse was an extrapolation of the universality of the earlier networked environments"

I'm not certain that we need to tie the web together with more than chewing gum and string. It's actually quite fine for me that I'm not some part of a vast Googlempire that constant scrapes my data and makes money from it and sells to me. Universality doesn't need to mean unified and unitarian. It can mean diversified yet aspiring to one standard that helps ensure diversification, in fact, so that no one power because monolithic. That's terribly important.

Gwyneth, if advances in humanity were left to engineers who insisted on engineering something before you could have a bubble about it, we'd all be back with Edsels and not Fords.

I'm not sure what Philip had on his neck but he might well have been wearing that silver hand-eye logo necklace the Lindens wear (it's a cult).

[Agnetha Vuckovic]

Second Life never was a metaverse....never mind IBM or whoever.

The fundamental aspect of any metaverse is connectivity....or more precisely, contiguity.

Well....one might argue that connectivity exists. One can TP anywhere ( when TP decides to actually work ).....or even have IM with anyone on SL. But this gives only an illusory appearance of connectedness. The true test is the degree to which aspects of the environment are contiguous.

By that I mean, if we are to have a 'world'....then in a true metaverse, as you just walk across it, there should be a relationship between any area you have just left and another one that you arrive in. The experience should be contiguous.

This is clearly not the case in SL. Two neighbouring sims may have absolutely no relationship whatever. They are totally distinct and seperate servers...which just 'happen' to have been allocated grid spaces adjacent to each other...but which otherwise have absolutely no commonality whatever. Such a state of affairs cannot possibly be the basis of a 'world'....let alone a metaverse.

The notion that we are all occupying some sort of common space on SL is little more than an illusion created by a degree of interconnectedness in communication. But that really is where the 'world' ends. In terms of the nuts and bolts of 'physical' existence and location...no such world exists and I doubt its coming any time soon.

[Dusan Writer]

Since when was the Metaverse supposed to be contiguous? Did I miss something? What's our working definition here anyways?

The 23% sales tax number is erroneous by the way. Highest is 15% and that's in lovely little PEI where they have to pay extra to keep the sand clean.

And shoes are tax free in Quebec! Yay!

[Prokofy Neva]

larry, I don't know why your comments keep going in the spam file, there's no reason for them to do that, but there it is, I have to keep fishing them out

Your winnings, sir!

[larryr]

lol
beats me.
but the cylons are right...lol

If you could only go back and time and be able to walk the floors of the Javitz at vr worlds 1995.

same dance...same results will happen again. the toy/games industry making more "avatar" games... MMO bubble in 2000 as well - repeated, now till 2010-- again. Till the next Shiny in diversion entertianment.

and educational usage- just like it did with web3d vrml for a decade- will continue to use VR worlds for non advertising means.and in a year no -one "important" ex. a vc of marketing at viacom, or a writer of reports at forrester. will be at vr worlds conferences...--mobile most likely-- AGAIN..

and again, it'll been proven- that VR media is not a mass broadcast advertising media...

but a very powerful medium for another type of commerce and communications.

and a few new brands of entertainment IP built on immersion and community vs. broadcast storytelling will survive and thrive.

yay.

ho hum.

anyway

ugh.

[Agnetha Vuckovic]

"Since when was the Metaverse supposed to be contiguous? Did I miss something? What's our working definition here anyways?" - Dusan

It's impossible to conceive of something being a 'world'..and yet not being contiguous. A world is surely a place where one place links in directly to any adjacent area. Or to put it more succinctly..a place where the physics concept 'the principle of local causes' applies.

You would not expect it to be snowing in your back garden while it was a heatwave next door. Local causes ( and effects ) are what define a world. Otherwise the notion of physical location ( even a virtual physical location ) becomes a complete nonsense.

Once you abandon local causes....what you have is in no sense a 'world'. You have just a collection of disparate and disconnected servers..that you hop between. This is no more a 'world' than when I used to play Team Fortress ( TFC ) and would hop between game servers running the various different mods of the game. I am at a loss to see where SL has turned that disconnectedness into a 'world'.

[Prokofy Neva]

Agnetha, this is a very crucial discussion to make. There are rootless cosmopolitans who wish to have an endless collage and kaleidoscope of changing scenes and live out of an apartment with no land, and then there are landowners who want to have land, contiguous geography, a public commons, etc.

And the architecture goes in different directions to support these metaphors.

I'm not at all an enthusiast for portals as these folks are because I don't see why you can't just have a teleport. A line for 30 seconds isn't some significant deal if it preserves contiguity.

[Agnetha Vuckovic]

Prokofy

Yes it is crucial....and I think you see my comparison with Team Fortress.

Using the 'Steam' software developed by Valve, anyone can log in and play 101 different variations of Team Fortress, Counterstrike, Half Life, etc. These people are all connected via IM and chat ( same as SL ).

What is more...as with SL....the environments are fully customizable. A person can create their own mod of the game, on their own server. Again...similar to SL. And again similar to SL....there is usually an avatar limit per server..usually 32 or 64.

Now...despite the fact that there are maybe 10,000 servers offering Team Fortress....there is clearly no sense in which the collective effort is a 'world'. This is people playing individual games with other players on the same server. The 'world' you log into is just one server. If you go to another server....you are playing a different game with different people.

SL tries very hard to paper over the cracks, and give the appearance of a single unified 'world'....but I cannot for the life of me see any difference ! It was a subtle ploy of the Lindens...to create a 'Map'....and create the total illusion of connectedness and physical locality. In reality, all the sims are no more connected than those offering Team Fortress.

Anyone who thinks otherwise can have some of that finest spun gold yarn from one of my other posts here.

[Prokofy Neva]

Agnetha, you're so used to playing your own game that renders on shards, where you can't get in touch with other people that you don't get it about SL. How much time have you spent there?

It is VERY different. At any time, I can reach any one of the 60,000 people logged on not in IM, but in person, by teleporting to them to their own persistent contiguous space. If I wished, and I had time, I could also drive to them over contiguous land. They might be 16 sims over, and I could take a boat over to them. The paper of the sim cracks isn't stellar, it is a tough ride, but it's part of the fun for some people to do that. But the point is, it is all laid out not to disappear behind you, as it does for a running WoW warrior, but to remain. You can also interactive and collaboratively build.

[Agnetha Vuckovic]

Prokofy

You missed the point....I CAN get in touch with others on Team Fortress servers....even people on different servers.

The gaming industry was also running voice ( via products like Roger Wilco ) as far back as 1999.

I can also know exactly where anyone on my friends list is...and though I may not be able to teleport and land on their head, its no big deal to transfer to the same server as someone else.

Hmmm.....I'd love to find 16 contiguously attached sims on SL.

I've been on SL almost a year now. I've yet to find a 'world'. Indeed...i know of one place where it is possible to stand on a beautiful quayside and look out over romantic coral reefs and tropical islands.....while people are beheaded, impaled, and otherwise mutilated, in a BDSM sim only 20 meters away next door.

[Prokofy Neva]

Agnetha, so, go over there? And...if it's so great, I'd have to ask, why aren't there lots of other people there? or? what's up? It doesn't have an economy, perhaps?

There are contiguous servers/sims all over in SL. I don't consider the mainland "non-contiguous" just because I don't own all the land on 16 servers. I like having neighbours. The areas I am in are kept nice for the main part. Fly around and check them out.

If you go into the private islands, obviously an area like Desmond Shang's Caledon and the groups that united with him represent something like 60 contiguous servers that are a joy to wander through.

Perhaps you need to change your set home, if you have to look at BDSM crap like that, it's awful. Fly around more than you are flying.