An Update on The Metaverse

the Metaverse? So this was back when the metaverse concept was really just starting to gain a lot of steam, and it was propelled largely by the company Facebook, which would actually rename itself Meta before the end of October. There was enormous excitement around this idea, at least on a corporate and marketing kind of level. I don't personally know many people who were or are that excited by the concept personally. I just know that from a corporate perspective,

there was a ton of momentum. Now, part of that reason for, you know, like the lack of interest among the general public, could be due to my own myopia, Like maybe I just don't know the right people. I'm also old, so it's possible that very young people think it's a really cool idea. I haven't heard that, but why would they talk to me? But also it may be that there's a lack of excitement around the metaverse, partly because we have been really bad at defining what

the metaverse is. Now we should get some slack for that. I mean, the thing doesn't really exist yet, at least not in the science fiction any kind of way that we see pitches presented to us as. But no, seriously, what is the metaverse? Or heck, maybe we need to phrase it as what is a metaverse? The answer to that question kind of depends upon whom you're asking. Some definitions are deeply and perhaps tragically tied to blockchain technology

and cryptocurrencies and the much maligned NFTs. That's done a lot of damage to perceptions about the metaverse overall, because the NFT in particular took such a spectacular nose diive

a couple of years ago. Some versions of the metaverse lean heavily on mixed reality, incorporating either virtual or augmented reality or some mixture of the two to describe a new way in which we interact with the digital and physical worlds, and the two are much more closely aligned, so that the things we do in the digital world can have repercussions in the physical world, and vice versa.

Some versions eschew the whole mixed reality concept entirely and just focus on a persistent online world that continues to exist whether you're logged into it or not. Arguably, you've got plenty of examples of that, and it's just like the real world. You know, even if you spend your days cooped up in your own home and you never the house, the world keeps moving on. That one hits

a little close to home for me. Another concept that's frequently connected to but not necessarily required for the metaverse is one of interoperability. That is, you can envision a series of online environments. Maybe they're run by different companies or organizations, but there's some level of compatibility between them, so that you can maintain a semblance of a common experience as you move across different platforms. This one gets really tricky. Uh, it's tricky to explain, it's even harder

to accomplish. So to explain it, let's in first, you know, jump into the real world to understand how something is pretty simple in the real world but very difficult to pull off in a virtual or digital space. All Right, So you're in the real world. If you go into a real world shoost and you buy a pair of real shoes, and then you decide you're gonna wear them right then and there, you take the shoes out of the box, and you put them on your feet, and

you stroll right out of the store. Those shoes will maintain their appearance, they will maintain their utility, and they will do that no matter where you go, no matter what other store you walk into, your shoes will remain shoes, and they will still look the way they did when you bought them. It's not like the shoes will suddenly look different as you walk into a different shoe store or a home good store or any other kind of store you can think of. They're not gonna spontaneously become

gloves or just a picture of shoes. They will be on your feet, they will be shoes. They'll look the same. They are consistent, and they only change as they experience wear and tear in that kind of thing. But that's because reality isn't divided up into siloed experiences. All of these spaces we're talking about, they all exist within the grander space that is real world. But that's not true of the digital world. Right. Let's take some games as

a subset of the digital world. In order to talk about this, let's say that you play an online shooter like Call of Duty Modern Warfare, and in that game you can earn or purchase items for use within the game. You might be able to take those items on future play sessions within the game, they are linked to your player profile. But then let's say you wanted to play some other online shooter like Battlefield, And let's say that Battlefield has its own version of the very same weapons

that you bought in Call of Duty. Even so, you can't just port over your stuff from Call of Duty to Battlefield. Battlefield has its own in game economy and its own method for accessing and earning or purchasing weapons. Plus, if you could pull the weapon from one game into another, the digital models for the weapons would be different. You know, the graphics engines are different from game to game, The

gameplay elements would be different. The gun might handle differently in one game versus the other, or deal a different amount of damage in one versus the other. So the gun would not look or behave exactly the same way across these two game titles. And you know that makes sense. They weren't made by the same company or the same team.

So unless every game is built from the exact same engine, with developers all agreeing upon a standardized approach to designing stuff like weapons, you're not going to have consistency from

one digital realm to the next. Some versions of the metaverse include an element of interoperability that would necessitate a change in that approach, at least to an extent, because it's hard to sell users on the idea of getting them to go to a virtual realm and to spend a lot of real world money to kick yourself out in that virtual realm, only to find out that none of that stuff is portable over to the other virtual realms that you want to visit. Instead, you would have

to start over from scratch. That's not an attractive way to sell the concept of the metaverse to the general public, right. But if you can create a framework that allows people to pick and choose what they want from various virtual environments and then use them across the entire spectrum of worlds within the metaverse, you might be onto something. But that's not easy to do. In fact, it's questionable about

whether it will ever be possible to do. Not from a technical standpoint, I mean, technically you could get to happen, but from a cooperation standpoint, because you've got so many different companies in this space, getting them all to agree upon this would be very difficult. This is where some

of that NFT stuff plays in. By the way, NFTs have often been positioned as a way to create the underlying foundation to allow the interoperability or the interchanging of assets from one virtual world to another, without actually proving that that could really be accomplished. And also there are

all these other issues with NFTs. Right This idea of linking digital items to non fungible tokens to create a foundation for portable experiences regardless of who owns the virtual environment in question just hasn't really held up to much scrutiny. We are not anywhere close to being able to do that.

And there was such a huge gold rush on NFTs on in the early days that it was so absurdly transparent, that it was a greedy, you know, like cash grab approach, both on the behalf of speculators and companies that just dove headfirst into NFTs. That the general public doesn't really have trust in NFTs anymore like any trust that was there who has pretty much been eroded away. Now, maybe one day folks will be more accepting of NFTs, despite

their many drawbacks. But it's only going to happen if it's evident that the whole thing isn't just some sort of digital Ponzi scheme. Most definitions of the metaverse assume that it will span numerous virtual environments created by different companies and organizations and people, and that you could dip in and out of these worlds the same way you

could visit different websites or use different apps. That the experience you have will be dependent in part on the equipment you have at your disposal and the folks who are creating the virtual world that you're visiting now. In that vision of the metaverse, it starts to sound a lot like a variation of the Internet itself. While several companies, primarily Meta, have pushed very hard to be the metaverse company, in its hypothesized form, the metaverse wouldn't be the domain

of any one organization. You wouldn't say that Google is the Internet. Some days it might feel that way, but you wouldn't say it. You wouldn't say Meta is the metaverse or that the Metaverse belongs to Meta, but companies like Meta are trying to create the technologies that would presumably power the Metaverse, and that in itself is its own issue. I'll explain more, but first let's take a

quick break. So I said before the break that Meta in particular, but other companies too, are pushing to create the building blocks of the Metaverse. There's a rush, or at least there was a rush. It's debatable about whether or not it's still happening, but there was a rush to define the standards that the Metaverse would be built upon for it to be this interoperable series of virtual worlds. And I'm sure you can understand why this was the case.

Because if you build the tool, they every no one has to use in order to be part of something that is big, or at least it's being talked about as if it will be big. Well, that means everybody has to come to you first, because you're the one who build the tool, and that means you can charge folks to use your tools. Licensing fees are a great

way to generate revenue. You spend the resources to make the tool, then you sit back and rake in the cash as everyone pays you for the right of using that tool, and then they have to re up their subscription when it expires. It's more complicated than that, but that's the basic idea. That's where a lot of this rush in the metaverse was really focusing was how can we be the ones to build what everyone else is going to have to use if they want to be

a player in this space. But it's also a very unlikely idea because again, it requires the cooperation of tons of companies that all want to be a major player in the metaverse. And while it's not impossible that we're going to see consolidation and convergence over time, the fact is any development in the metaverse space is pretty much independent of all the other efforts to innovate in the

metaverse space. This could mean that a realization of the metaverse, if in fact that ever becomes a thing, could be pushed off several years, not because it's too hard on a technical basis, although it would be very challenging to get a full realization of some of the more out there visions in the metaverse. Technical limitations are one thing. It's really because everyone is trying to make their own flavor of the ding Dan durned thing, and those flavors

aren't interchangeable or interoperable, and I lost my metaphor. But you get what I'm saying, right like, if everyone's trying to be the one to define the thing, then you just end up with a bunch of different things, and that kind of ends up being antithetical to the concept of the metaverse, or at least one of the concepts. In the meantime, you still have a lot of companies and platforms referring to stuff as a metaverse, not the metaverse,

but a metaverse, and that itself is confusing. Really, it typically means the term is losing whatever little meaning it had to begin with. A company could reference that an event that's happening within a game like Fortnite as being a metaverse event, you know, or maybe on Roadblocks that that is a metaverse event, but that suggests that Fortnite and or Roadblocks are a metaverse when really they're just it's an online world and it is persistent, but it

has its own real limitations. It doesn't extend far beyond its borders. Right, meta is working to push social interactions into a virtual world, and that's probably to do stuff like sell us lots of virtual items and costumes and outfits and that kind of thing, And that would be their version of a metaverse. But that's very different from what we're looking at things like roadblocks or Fortnite. Microsoft is pushing to create online virtual environments, but for business

see business reasons. So Microsoft's version is more about like virtual conference rooms and virtual seminar spaces and that kind of stuff. The problem, as I see it, is that people are using the word metaverse to reference pretty much anything, which is the same way as saying the word metaverse means nothing. It's like that depressing saying that when everyone is special, no one is. I don't buy into that particular philosophy, by the way, but that's because I'm a

gen X guy. We're deeply, hopelessly romantic. Also, we tend to overgeneralize. Back on track. While most of the media has focused on the metaverse from the consumer side, or how companies like Meta have poured and arguably lost billions of dollars in development for something that no one really seems all that jazzed for in the first place, there

are other aspects to the metaverse. Microsoft focus on business solutions is an example, though again I'm not convinced that the average business wants to shell out the money necessary to equip all its staff with the stuff they need just so that they can attend a virtual all hands beating.

There's also a concept called the industrial metaverse. Now this does get loosey goosey with the details, like any metaverse definition, but generally speaking, this concept behind the industrial metaverse is to create digital virtual copies or twins of real world infrastructure. So think of stuff like public utilities, or power plants or huge manufacturing facilities. Imagine that. Imagine creating a perfect digital virtual copy of one of those, and it's tied

to the real world version. Right, You've got sensors, you've got all these different systems that are creating readings based upon what's going on in the facility. Imagine using that data to feed into the virtual one, so that the virtual one is perfectly copying what's happening in the real world. So why would you do that. Well, with this kind of virtual construct, you could have experts from all around the world convene virtually in a space that's tied to

a real place on the planet. So imagine that you are running a manufacturing facility, and one of your indicators is suggesting that there's a potential issue, something that might escalate into a serious problem unless you intervene. So you tap in by bringing in your top experts in your company who are really knowledgeable about these systems, but they

happen to be in different parts of the world. So you all convene in this virtual representation of the actual physical space to talk over the problem and come up with a solution. That's the sort of use case that proponents of the industrial metaverse are suggesting. Companies like Siemens have created digital twins of exists sting facilities for just that purpose. Now, whether that becomes a practical practice across

industries remains to be seen. Siemens has spent billions of dollars building out facilities, but whether that pays off by

becoming the way of the future is undecided. Questions may arise about whether or not added components of a virtual recreation are even necessary, or maybe it just makes more sense to depend heavily on sensors connected to your facilities, and then those provide data that you could then read out in a normal computer display and then act upon in some other way, like getting on a phone call.

A lot of companies that had been investing heavily into the metaverse have recently kind of pulled funding for those projects and switched resources to other areas, primarily AI. To the surprise of no one, AI has kind of taken the place of the metaverse as the darling DuJour of the tech space. So earlier this year, reports were that Microsoft had canceled its own industrial Metaverse division, and this was like within four months of them launching the project,

which is kind of crazy. Disney shut down its own metaverse projects as part of a massive layoff in the company. Even Meta shut down a gaming platform called Krata that had metaverse connections, and they had just purchased that company a couple of years earlier. So yeah, things are not going super well. And one reason for this is because funding is fickle, and like I said, AI is kind

of drinking the milkshake of the metaverse right now. All that funding is going towards stuff like AI, and even that, according to Gardner, anyway, is on the precipice of going over the peak of inflated expectations. So maybe that money will be going somewhere else pretty soon. On top of that, you still have proponents of the metaverse. You still have

its cheerleaders and evangelists. A lot of those people are also tied very closely to the cryptocurrency world, which raises some questions as to the reliability of their expertise because a lot of the value of those crypto communities is tied to widespread adoption. One way to get widespread adoption is to convince a bunch of companies that the blockchain and related technologies are absolutely pivotal for a new process

or a new product like the metaverse. And so I would take anyone who's really pushing a metaverse narrative with some skepticism. Doesn't mean that you know it's not going to become a thing. It doesn't mean that they're wrong. Just use critical thinking when you start seeing those kinds of stories or claims. So, yeah, that's an update on the state of the metaverse. I guess I could sum it up. And the too long, didn't read version has

still not a thing and possibly never will be. I hope you're all well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tex Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.