Twenty years of metaverse advocacy journalism is bound to leave a mark. Or quite a few, actually—bruises from watching many much-cherished ideas around the concept beaten down by the laboratory of life. Some of these myths somehow still persist, even as shiny new hobby horses arrive, both leading entire companies, organizations, and people down rough, unreliable paths.
Some well-trodden metaverse myths worthy of debunking (or at least roughing up a touch) include:
As I note in Chapter 1, Neal Stephenson himself walked back from this notion almost immediately after Snow Crash was published. At any rate, the black and white display terminals that poorer denizens use in the novel hardly resemble VR as we understand it now.
It's still less the case in the actual consumer market. As of this writing in early 2023, the install base of the top-selling HMD, Meta's Quest 2, stands at an estimated 18 million. That's a decided niche when the Metaverse's addressable market must be targeted to all the world's Internet users—over 6 billion people.
VR headsets first enjoyed a flush of mainstream coverage in the early ’90s. Since then, every factor that supposedly limited their mainstream appeal has been addressed. We were told virtual reality sales would strongly grow once they were affordable—but although they are now less costly than video game consoles, sales are still anemic. We were told mainstream acceptance would happen once there was enough content and HMDs were more lightweight—but even as hundreds of VR software titles are added to the market every year, and the headsets themselves become much lighter with every model, sales remain steadfastly slow.
Beyond the dearth of sales lies an even greater unaddressed problem: evidence that VR is not considered enjoyable by roughly half the population.
As I cover in Chapter 3, my colleague danah boyd (now a researcher at Microsoft) published a landmark study suggesting that women and girls tend to process 3D graphics in a way that often causes them nausea. A subsequent study published in 2017 by Experimental Brain Research—trenchantly entitled “The virtual reality head-mounted display Oculus Rift induces motion sickness and is sexist in its effects”—found similar results. (And this is even setting aside the simulator sickness a majority of people report from simply interacting with 3D graphics on a flat screen.)
XR expert Avi Bar-Zeev, a developer at Apple, shares danah's core concerns around VR, pointing to general physical differences—beginning with women's IPD, which stands for interpupillary distance.
“Literally the distance between your eyes,” as Avi explains. “The IPDs of women on average are smaller than men’s. So if the IPD [in the HMD] is wrong, that is enough to cause discomfort by itself.”
A Metaverse that is unwelcoming to women is not a Metaverse worth fighting for.
At the same time, while VR is not essential to the Metaverse, it can still be important to it. We see this most vividly in VRChat and Rec Room, where those who own a VR rig tend to gain social cachet because their body-tracking equipment allows them to be far more expressive through their avatars—enabling, for instance, live dancing or even juggling through their avatar, with their real-world body movements mapped onto their avatar.
Cory Ondrejka, who spearheaded Meta's acquisition of Oculus’ VR technology (see Chapter 3), succinctly put it to me this way:
“I think metaverses, virtual worlds, they don't need VR. Virtual reality is just a different interface into them. But when you're in a situation where VR is comfortable and is what you want to be using, wow, you can create amazing experiences.”
This points to VR's likely future in the Metaverse: a totem for some of the most creative and dedicated members of the virtual community.
Which takes us to a related myth:
Augmented reality (AR or sometimes XR for “extended reality”) is also often proposed as an inevitable companion to the Metaverse. Why only offer people a virtual world, the argument runs, when we have the technology to add a layer of data over the real world that's viewable by an AR headset or a smartphone?
Attempts to incorporate AR into a virtual world, however, have met a reception that's at best questionable. As I write this in early 2023, Niantic, creator of the wildly successful AR mobile game Pokémon GO, is pressing forward with plans to launch a “Real-World Metaverse.”
One small challenge to this: no proof anyone actually wants it. Pokémon GO remains the only massively successful augmented reality game on the market, both in general and for Niantic in particular. (The company's AR-driven follow-up, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, despite mass market brand recognition, fell far short in terms of active users.)
Worse, none of the visions painted for AR in the Metaverse address the unresolved social pushback that XR owners get in public, as they ignore people around them to check the data stream on their headset screen—or worse, point a live camera at them without prior consent.
Snow Crash, I'm obligated to note, does not depict AR or XR as part of the Metaverse, even though the hero's “gargoyles” headset is revealed to have AR capabilities once the Metaverse is switched off. He even uses this function to navigate a dark passageway in real life.
Decades before Google's “Glasshole” scandal in 2014, when the search giant's first foray into AR headsets was rejected as creepy even in technophile San Francisco, Neal Stephenson wrote this about wearing an HMD in public:
“[I]t's not pretty. In fact, it's so ugly that it probably explains why gargoyles are, in general, so socially retarded.”
This freshly painted myth has persisted since roughly 2021, when hype over the cryptocurrency, blockchain, and NFT speculation bubble reached an apex. It somehow persists even after (a helpful November 2022 CNBC report informs me) investors lost $2 trillion on crypto ventures and assets in that year alone.
More key, web3 does not provably add any substantial value to a concept that's existed for over three decades, and has hundreds of millions of users to show for it. As explained in Chapter 6, several web3-centric metaverse platforms have failed, despite heavy publicity and interest by major brands, to gain substantial user traction.
Further, web3 solutions cause new problems for a metaverse platform without adding any value. Richard Bartle, the game industry's most respected expert on virtual worlds, recently wrote an essay on my blog where he recounted his futile attempts to explain this to web3 advocates.
For instance, responding to the common idea that virtual items can easily be stored as NFTs on the blockchain:
This objection was brushed aside by saying that non-blockchain databases can handle that.
Well yes, they can, easily so—so why the need for a blockchain?
Web3 features can be implemented with metaverse platforms, and we see interesting potential (and so far, only potential) in some limited cases, such as Upland and Neal Stephenson's Lamina1. But as of this writing, web3 gains far more by trying to associate itself with the Metaverse than vice versa.
There is actually no proven relationship whatsoever between the popularity of a metaverse platform and photorealistic graphics. Despite this, a wealth of metaverse startups and platforms frequently announce new plans to roll out ever more realistic environmental graphics, and ever more eerily human-like avatars.
The very most popular platforms, Minecraft and Roblox, are intentionally low-fi, mainly immersive through their physics and responsiveness. Their whimsical avatars are similarly abstract.
This likely relates to their core user base: people in their teens and preteens, who are often still uncomfortable and unsure about their own real-life identity and appearance. This seems even more acute for teen girls and young women, still negotiating the social expectations and judgments around their real-life presentation; presenting them with a lifelike, photorealistic avatar to customize is effectively asking them to take on even more social expectations and judgments.
We also have something of an opposite proof point.
At launch, Second Life avatars were human by default but not ultra-realistic. The internal prim creation tools encouraged the construction of avatar attachments (robot helmets, furry tails, and so on), which led to a wide variety of avatar types and creative environments to explore.
The arrival of mesh in Second Life, in 2010—high-resolution 3D files created in offline software and then uploaded into the virtual world—greatly changed this dynamic.
Nick Yee has already spoken in Chapter 9 about the community moderation issues that realistic human avatars provoke: Preference them in your virtual world, and all the hidden and not so hidden prejudices of our offline world come along with them.
Thanks to mesh and other graphics enhancements, Second Life avatars and environments now look as detailed and as vivid as those from top AAA games (for those lucky enough to own a powerful PC). However, this rise in visual quality has contributed little to actual user growth.
But by enabling ultrarealistic avatars, especially through mesh-based body attachments, mesh quickly altered the virtual world's culture. Within years, the virtual world's economy came to be dominated by ultrarealistic avatars; the overall creative culture changed, accompanied by the rise of environments most suited to them—glamorous beachside homes and nightclubs, beautiful locales that resembled real-life tourist destinations and locations for the latest reality TV show.
As Second Life's economy snowballed around quality mesh items, so did its culture. While avatar fashion and virtual housekeeping were always a crucial part of the virtual world, the creative tools also attracted a cohort of creators and tinkerers more interested in using the platform as a multi-user game development space and all-purpose sandbox space.
By and large, however, tinkerers of this type faded in prominence within the larger community, overwhelmed as it was by new fashion releases and shopping extravaganzas. (The tinkerer community still exists but is less prominent in the community.)
My takeaway: Putting an emphasis on graphics quality, as opposed to physics and interactivity, will tend to shape a virtual world's creative culture around aesthetics at the expense of other qualities, while having negligible effect on user growth.
This myth is so pervasive, and so misguided in many ways, it deserves a deeper plunge.
Interoperability continues to be a grail quest for many metaverse evangelists, partly spurred by the flawed assumption that the Internet should become the Metaverse. The World Wide Web is interoperable, the argument roughly goes, enabling us to leap from one website to another; so too must the Metaverse be.
In my chat with Neal Stephenson (see Chapter 6), the Web metaphor seems exactly what the Metaverse should not be:
“[Immersive experiences] should be linked in a kind of spatial arrangement,” as he put it. “It's what is lacking in the World Wide Web—you've got this web of hyperlinks all over the place that jump you from one site to another, and there's not really a kind of spatial organization that ties it all together.”
And as I explain in Chapter 1, the Metaverse was never envisioned as the totality of the Internet. At its heart, it is a virtual world: dynamic, real time, immersive, with a base consensual reality shared by a community of active users within it. Analogizing this to the Web—flat, relatively static, and asynchronous—misses this essence.
The Web analogy, as I mention in Chapter 2, is among the many factors that caused Second Life to lose its growth momentum; updating its user interface to resemble a 2D medium grafted onto an immersive real time experience only contributed to new user confusion, and an open mutiny by veteran users. You can click from one web page to another; you cannot right-click a mountain or copy/paste the sea.
The Web experience is more or less the same between different web browsers because they stream the same underlying content. The user interface of a virtual world, however, is effectively part of that world and cannot be altered substantially from one user (or world) to the next.
While many advocates will strenuously disagree, metaverse interoperability for the most part seems like a solution in search of a genuine problem. Or to put it in the form of a question:
“Is your vision of the Metaverse really just Steam with a few less steps?”
Because the interoperable vision, usually described as a network or federation of many virtual worlds that users can teleport to, is really not too different from what consumers already have with Steam (or Xbox Live, or the PlayStation Store, and so on). Experientially, we already travel from one virtual world to another on these platforms after several clicks and minutes of loading time. Beware a vision of the Metaverse that offers to replace this with something only slightly better.
Veteran MMO game designer Damion Schubert likens the interoperability vision to an ambitious but naive startup attempting to create virtual cars that somehow work in wildly different online racing games such as Forza, Wipeout, Need for Speed, and Mario Kart. Each of these game experiences imbue the virtual cars within them with unique physics, game mechanics, and interactivity that simply does not translate.
“You could ‘solve’ this, of course, by coming up with a Uniform Car Standard,” says Schubert. “That way, all the cars across all games handle stats, decals, spinning wheels, damage, and everything else the same way so every car works everywhere. But these games are chasing very different audiences. All of them would be way worse if they were more similar.”
Some colleagues argue (without much evidence) that there's a deep hunger among consumers to bring their main avatar and its possessions across many virtual worlds. But this assumes that we want a permanent identity that always follows us, even to the many places where we'd prefer to be anonymous or different for myriad reasons, including privacy and boredom.
Beyond these challenges, UC Irvine's Tom Boellstorff notes that many (if not most) conceptions of metaverse interoperability very conveniently advantage leading Internet companies that want to track a user's virtual world data and connect it with their behavior on the Web and across the real world through their mobile devices.
“That is about their ideas around surveillance and marketing that assume that everyone wants interoperability, and interoperability can mean lots of different things,” as he puts it to me.
What is also forgotten by interoperability advocates is that it's been tried before.
At the peak of Second Life's success in 2008, Linden Lab partnered with IBM to develop and showcase early stages of interoperability, enabling users to teleport their avatars from SL to OpenSim, an open source spinoff of Second Life. Intel and other top tech companies and organizations also contributed development resources.
“Interoperability is a key component of the 3D Internet and an important step to enabling individuals and organizations to take advantage of virtual worlds for commerce, collaboration, education, operations, and other business applications,” an IBM executive announced in the PR push. “Developing this protocol is a key milestone and has the potential to push virtual worlds into the next stage of their evolution.”
Exactly the opposite happened. The real evolution went into the mass market growth of decidedly noninteroperable consumer game platforms like Roblox and the rest. The project driven by IBM—one of the world's most profitable technology companies—floundered and rapidly lost steam, bogged down by governance issues around IP rights and security. Perhaps more pressing, interoperability attracted little interest from everyday virtual world users. (As for OpenSim, it exists to this day, but as a very niche platform mostly supported by a few thousand educators.)
Veteran metaverse developer Adam Frisby blames the project's failure on Second Life. (After a successful stint as a Second Life land baron, Frisby helped spearhead the OpenSim interoperability project.) Because from a developer's perspective, as he puts it, “The Second Life ecosystem is good for running SL but not for running anything else … at the lowest level it has the Second Life grid baked into it.”
“Technically it did work; bugs notwithstanding, we could port data across boundaries,” says Andrew Sempere, who at the time was a researcher at IBM. “But if you want to observe the rules of Second Life digital rights management and economy, you can't take your avatar with you. This is way more important than many people thought—your identity is you—and if you look like you but are forced to look like some horrible janky box on another platform, especially if you have invested a lot of time into your appearance, you're never going to cross that boundary.”
And from a consumer perspective, since OpenSim looked and played like Second Life, the core audience who were attracted to it were people already familiar with Second Life. And since those people expected experiences they were already familiar with from Second Life, a black market for popular avatar enhancements and other items quickly sprang up in OpenSim.
A similar problem exists with interoperability efforts even now. Since there is no unified Metaverse user experience that is broadly appealing to every existing, highly disparate virtual world user on thousands of platforms across the globe, who exactly is going to use it?
One hypothetical approach is, a la OpenSim, to create a reverse-engineered version of a popular metaverse platform (assuming the company behind it approved). But an open source version of, say, Roblox or Fortnite would likely appeal only to dedicated players in each platform. It is hard to convey the fierce loyalty metaverse communities have to the virtual world and the culture that emerges from their chosen metaverse platform—they can even be affectionate and proprietary about its user interface.
In any case, despite buy-in from many major tech companies, OpenSim was largely abandoned by them. “There was an appetite to do it from certain parties,” says Frisby. “But not from the business-minded people.”
In fairness, Frisby sees interoperability's value not so much for being able to bring magic swords from one virtual world to another but for how it would standardize the development of future metaverse platforms.
Up to now, every virtual world has had to build every key component of a metaverse platform—the 3D engine, the networking layers, and so on—from scratch.
“Every single [platform] reinvented the wheel for 30 years,” as he puts it to me, “building them again and again. Interoperability would solve that problem.” The goal he sees is to follow the path of web interoperability, where websites made as far back as the ’90s still more or less work.
Adam will get to test his thesis on interoperability firsthand. As I write these words, his startup Sine Wave Entertainment is planning to open source both its client software and server architecture. (Second Life, as noted, only open sourced the consumer-facing client, to the great detriment of OpenSim.)
“Enough people are interested in the Metaverse,” Adam tells me, explaining his reasoning, “but you have two choices: You can go with Meta or another walled garden—and Meta definitely will be a walled garden—or you put up a platform anyone can work with.”
He sees this move akin to the trajectory of WordPress, the open source content management system that began in the early 2000s as an indie operation developed by a small team, but due to its openness and versatility, attracted a growing wave of developers and content creators. Upwards of 70 percent of all websites on the Internet now use WordPress.
I am fairly biased on this point, having known Adam since his OpenSim and Second Life days (all the way back when he was a teenage real estate baron), along with consulting for Sine Wave a few years ago. If interoperability is going to happen, he is among the best candidates to make it happen.
My fear is that the WordPress analogy is misplaced, because (as stated before) a web page is not an immersive virtual world. And a virtual world that is so open-ended as to have no unified branding, narrative, or meta game mechanics will face enormous challenges.
Hopefully we'll have a sense of who was right in the next edition of this book. And in the face of Adam's dream of a universally shared creative space open to the entire world, something he's yearned for these last 25 or so years, I hope my misgivings are proven wrong. But without a unified and growing user community to accompany it, I believe any interoperability project is destined to remain an abstract goal.
Because finally (and most key), interoperability as an end in itself misses the core realization that people and the communities they create, not any technology stack, make metaverse platforms meaningful and worthwhile.
Interoperability as generally understood runs counter to a core principle of successful metaverse platforms: Community Creates Value. No matter how expensive or hard-earned, virtual items detached from their original social context tend to quickly lose their luster.
I'd suggest a corollary to that: Only Community Must Be Interoperable.
As long as denizens of one metaverse platform are able to export contacts to their friends and colleagues there, most other interoperability questions fall away.
In any case, a level of community interoperability already exists, with little or no oversight by metaverse companies—virtual world friends tend to quickly connect with each other on Discord, and often go on to spend as much time with each other there as in the actual immersive virtual world—or more.
Speaking with me last year, Matthew Ball suggested this could even be a focus of government regulation. Recently Senator Elizabeth Warren and other politicians have called for standardization of device charging ports. “If that's important,” as Ball put it to me, “then the portability of core user data, your social graph, is even more important.”
Social interoperability also protects users from the worst consequences of everything else on a platform not being interoperable—if virtual content becomes too costly, inefficient, or restrictive for the user base, they can simply threaten to take their friends and move to more welcoming platforms. (Relatedly, in Chapter 9, Ball discusses how different metaverse and game companies can leverage this variety of interoperability to protect their user communities from toxic players.)
Variations of this assertion abound, especially among my colleagues in the evangelist wing of the industry. I sorely wish it were true. Twenty years of increasingly frustrating experiences around this topic, however, strongly suggest otherwise. With nearly every technical and financial hurdle eliminated in recent years—by this point, even owners of entry-level smartphones can, if they truly want to, access a freemium, mobile-centric metaverse platform—usage is confined to a significant minority of Internet users.
This is why, when I shared my forecast of the Metaverse's addressable market with Forrester Research in 2022, I pegged the immediate audience to one in four of the world's online population. Forrester branded these the “Digital Immersives,” who already play multiplayer games, use a VR headset, or use Discord to communicate with friends, or a combination of all three.
That said, recall that 1 in 10 of the globe's Internet users, 500 million+ people, are already active users of a metaverse platform. That suggests quite a lot of room remains for metaverse platforms to grow—certainly to well over 1 billion people. (As to whether they can grow beyond that number, see Chapter 11.)
Underlying any “Metaverse is for everyone!” assertion is the premise that new advances in technology supplant older forms; but in practice, this is not always true. As our screens become more central to our lives, it seems even less the case. Some believe the Metaverse is the successor to the mobile Internet, for instance, and that may be true for some kinds of content and some use cases. But smartphones have not replaced previous devices; PCs continue to be sold at a fairly strong pace and even saw a 10-percent growth spike during the pandemic, according to Gartner Research.
What is more typically the case is this: New technologies expand our possibilities and enhance our existing tools—but those tools that still serve a purpose do not go away. Fifty-plus years after its invention, we still send emails.
Metaverse platforms are already following along this path, with users often spending as much time if not more enjoying Metaverse content on social media or messaging platforms like Discord (essentially an enhanced and updated form of Internet Relay Chat, invented in 1988) than in the virtual world itself. (Recall again Syrmor in VRChat, whose passionate fans engage with him most not in VRChat per se but on his YouTube page.)
At the same time, it's difficult to conceive of a scenario where the Metaverse supplants the entirety of our digital experience. There are far too many technologies that are far more useful to use as they are deployed now than how they might be deployed in the immersive context of the Metaverse. (More on that in Chapter 10.) It's unlikely we'll regularly read our email in the Metaverse.
Consider the Spouse Test, something I've formulated after years of hearing excessive hyperbole by assorted metaverse colleagues and evangelists:
After listening to their grandiose pitch, I'll eventually ask if their spouse/partner/significant other/etc. is also passionate about the Metaverse. Every single time I've asked, the answer has been Not Really. (And in fairness, this also applies to my own awesome wife!)
But a more plausible future is just as inspiring: where selected instances of Metaverse creativity and practical use cases regularly jump the divide to become popular or common across the culture, even among people with no interest in directly engaging with the Metaverse itself.
Here I have to depart from most of my colleagues and even perhaps Neal Stephenson himself. There's no substantial evidence of metaverse platforms converging to become the singular Metaverse that Stephenson imagined. There are many good and impressive people and groups such as The Metaverse Standards Forum advocating for that endpoint, planning for the infrastructure to make that possible. But what is still sorely lacking is interest from actual metaverse platform users, creators, and most telling, corporate owners.
Founding Second Life CTO Cory Ondrejka, reflecting on his 20+ years in metaverse-related technologies, shares my skepticism:
“Looking back to the notion that you'd want, you know, a first-person shooter to come climbing through your business meeting is just not sensible. And yes, we also said that would be funny 22 years ago. But then we built it. And three minutes later said, ‘Nope, that's not what we want.’”
So Ondrejka finds it surprising to see that so many metaverse pundits in the current era are once again clamoring for a singular, interoperable platform:
“There's no data to suggest that's actually what people want. And even some sort of softer version of those plans, like a singular identity across worlds with the same avatar—there is plenty of evidence that they don't want that and no evidence that they do. Nor do you want art assets that don't match to be forced in different worlds because they're incongruous and don't work.”
My own sense is that “The Metaverse,” as the technology becomes even more successful, will take on a meaning like “social media” does today, broadly referring to multiple platforms user networks and content strongly overlap but where each still enjoys its own unique identity and functionality. Similar to the way LinkedIn is for business colleagues and Facebook is for staying in touch with older family members, we should expect to see metaverse platforms mostly popular for gaming and hanging out with friends, lightly overlapping with others for business meetings and events.
If this is roughly the state of things to emerge, it should not be taken as a flaw in the Metaverse vision. With over 500 million active users across many metaverse platforms, there are already at any given moment twice as many people using them as there are people in New York. (Which, again, is Stephenson's milestone figure for use of the Metaverse in Snow Crash.) At some point, a single platform alone will boast this level of activity, while other metaverse platforms will continue to thrive. It's quite possible two or more will reach these heights of usage in the near future.
In other words, the Metaverse is already more popular and pervasive than even Neal Stephenson ever imagined.