Meet the Metaverse
Web3, a new decentralised vision of the internet, and a new all-immersive virtual world are said to be heading our way. But are they just overhyped pipe dreams? And is a decentralised internet really such a good idea? Scott Guthrie finds out.
This morning I answered a clutch of work emails, scrolled through a couple of WhatsApp groups, tweeted a link to the blog post I wrote last night and checked that my joint bank account had sufficient funds to pay this month’s mortgage. All of these services are operated by private companies. Could a decentralised web, one where I had a stake in how these platforms were run, how they stored and shared my data and where I was incentivised to publish content, be the future of the internet? This is the vision of Web3.
Loosely dated from around 1990-2004, the phenomenon known as ‘Web1’ was a read-only internet. We were passive content consumers reading webpages held on static corporate websites. With Web2, dating from 2005-present, the ‘read-only’ internet became the ‘read-write’ internet. And these days, the social web enables us to interact and to collaborate with ease.
But, in the main, while we create and publish content, we do not own our data, have a say in how the data is stored, benefit from its monetization or have input into how social media platforms are run. Web3 proponents, then, say nirvana will come in the form of a decentralised internet. Instead of having large swathes of the net controlled and owned by centralised entities, ownership is distributed amongst its builders and users. In other words, Big Tech gets supplanted by you and me.
Bored Ape Yacht Club
Web3 initially emerged around ideas about a future enabled by blockchain technology. And admittedly, the breathy excitement from speculators in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin and other crypto currencies has noticeably chilled in the past few months as we enter a crypto winter. However, financial transactions are only one application of blockchain networks. Blockchain can serve as distributed storage for any kind of data, and if Web3 plays out the way proponents envision, blockchain technology will become the rails on which the future internet is run.
Token of trust
For the uninitiated, Blockchain is a distributed virtual computing system that operates across many computers. It has built-in payments, governance protocols and contains incentives. It runs in a trustless way – importantly, it removes the need for trust. When I checked my banking app this morning in the centralised world of Web2 I treated the bank as a trusted party. I trusted that money in my HSBC bank account will be paid to my mortgage held with Halifax. In the decentralised Web3 I will not need to have trust. Trust will be embedded in code on the blockchain allowing peer-to-peer spending without the need of a bank.
Bored Ape Yacht Club
While blockchain is foundational to Web3, the technology also drives non-fungible tokens (NFTs). An NFT is a digital certificate of ownership held on a blockchain and paid for using crypto currency. ‘Non fungible’ confers uniqueness – one NFT cannot be swapped for another. Digital originals, NFT’s prove authenticity and ownership, and can be almost anything: Jack Dorsey’s first Tweet, cartoon apes or a digital collage fetching $69 million at auction.
Yet NFTs are polarizing. Optimists say NFTs add portability and interoperability to these rare digital assets. They enable owners to travel with these digital items across the open web. Opportunists say: pile in and get rich quick. Yet more than 80% of NFTs created for free on OpenSea are fraudulent or spam. NFTs are also a neat bridge into the Metaverse.
Promise of control
If Web3 is an imagined future built on rebadging crypto then the metaverse is a rebadging and bundling of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) mixed in with gaming, all wrapped within ideas of self-expression and self-identification. This is a fluid and contested descriptor, however. For instance, are Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite part of the metaverse or can the metaverse only be accessed via Meta Quest, or similar headset?
At any rate, most definitions agree on a few central tenets: the metaverse is immersive. If Web2 allowed us to participate and Web3 offers us the promise of control, the metaverse will allow us to ‘feel’ and to ‘experience’; interaction will be fleeting and played out in real time; writing will give way to conversation; it will span both the virtual and physical worlds.
Gucci partners with ZEPETO, the app and social media to personalize avatars and create virtual worlds.
The Open Metaverse will also be comprised of many platforms. Users will be able to flit from Fortnite to Roblox to Meta, bringing all of their data, their skins (virtual outfits) NFTs, and crypto currency with them without friction. Imagine buying a skin from Louis Vuitton as an NFT, wearing it to a Travis Scott gig in Fortnite, then catching up with friends who are watching a different version of the same concert in Roblox – all while maintaining the same identity. Then, at the end of the evening, ordering a Domino’s pizza to be delivered to your physical home address.
Two metaverse use cases have been repeatedly pushed forward – the promise of more immersive gaming and the promise of more immersive meetings. For many, neither scenario puts fire in the belly. Nick Clegg, President, Global Affairs at Meta wrote recently of his wonder of sitting at home in northern California and talking to a colleague via Horizon workrooms “an ocean away in his garage in Milton Keynes” yet feeling like two were only sat feet apart. And to be fair, following two years of Zoom-call meetings, reading about another way in which to hold a virtual meeting is not going to float everyone’s boat.
Fully immersive
For communicators, the metaverse presents an opportunity to engage their publics in new ways via immersive digital worlds. In education, universities might offer virtual campuses where students can both access lectures remotely and socialise with fellow students. Lecturers could teach from any place in the world yet feel as though they are standing directly in front of students. Field trips could take place without leaving home. In the medical realm surgeons could practise operations in the metaverse ahead of performing surgery on patients.
Today the internet is controlled by a handful of companies. Web3 promises to decentralise the internet enabling users to create their own versions of Instagram or HSBC. Yet if a decentralised web is in fact possible, would it be practicable or even desirable? How many people actually want to run their own social network platform or bank? How many would prefer instead to leave it to the experts? Web3’s detractors argue that the internet centralised voluntarily because it was the most efficient way forward, and that Web3 is already showing signs of centralising anyway; the majority of cryptocurrency transactions take places in a small handful of exchanges such as Coinbase.
As for the metaverse, its real potential may not be fully realised for decades. Thirty years after Neal Stephenson coined the phrase in his 1992 dystopian novel, Snow Crash, the metaverse remains, according to Nick Clegg, at an “early stage in its development”. Many believe today’s vision remains 15-20 years away from reality. It might even be closer than that. Watch this space.