What is it about?
The metaverse is in the news a lot, but when pressed, most have trouble defining it very precisely. Science-fiction novels and movies have powerfully shaped our picture of a possible metaverse feature set, but virtually all of the features typically mentioned have been present in online games and social virtual worlds for decades. It's more fruitful to look at any future metaverse as extending the patterns in online worlds to real world objects and real people rather than avatars. Virtual worlds and online games have things like unique id's for every object and person, sophisticated digital maps, and annotation on everything they simulate. If we extend these capabilities to the real world, it gives us a glimpse of a future augmented reality that changes human lives dramatically. Put another way: a signature element of the metaverse is that you won’t be sure if you are in it.
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Why is it important?
Applying the lessons from past online worlds gives us unique insight into the pitfalls we are likely to encounter in building a metaverse. Many different aspects of our lives will be impacted if a metaverse comes to pass. For example, in an online world the operator has a detailed record of what exactly a player's avatar does. If you become a metaverse avatar, who owns the data which is a perfect record of your everyday life? In an online world, it's easy to overlay an infinite amount of virtual ads over a given location. If the location is in the real world, who owns the digital rights to real world real estate? We've seen digital viruses spread in online worlds -- what potential is there for malware in the metaverse, and how might it impact the real world economy? And lastly -- online worlds are governed by companies, and are not at all democratic. Who will govern the metaverse?
Perspectives
I've been working in the online world space since the early 1990's. Over the years, it's become very clear that as new people discover the huge potential of virtual spaces, they often ignore the many lessons learned over the decades. Current metaverse hype frequently celebrates very old achievements as if they were new, which leads some to think the whole idea is overhyped. But if we disregard the hype, and actually do build a metaverse as old virtual world hands envision it, it has the potential to radically transform human culture.
Raph Koster
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: From Online World to Metaverse, Games Research and Practice, March 2023, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3582932.
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