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Clive Jackson, the creator of Blink 3D and inDuality, has some very specific suggestions regarding the development of the Metaverse. He has compiled these in a comprehensive white paper entitled Metaverse 2.0. You can download the entire document from his company’s website here. (http://www.pelicancrossing.com/WhitePapers/TheMetaverse20.pdf) . His ‘Recipe for the Metaverse 2.0’ is also available at www.virtualjobcandy.com (http://www.virtualjobcandy.com/virtual-world-white-paper-excerpt-from-the-metaverse-20-by-clive-jackson/).

WHAT IS THE METAVERSE?

By Clive Jackson

 

For those new to the term, the “Metaverse” is a concept developed by Neal Stephenson and described in his 1992 book “Snow Crash” . Stephenson has shown remarkable vision, considering that at the time of the novel’s publication, the World Wide Web was only available to limited government and educational establishments. Stephenson describes a virtual world; a Metaverse where people log into from computers using special goggles for visualization. In this virtual world, people are represented by avatars – 3D renditions of themselves. The center area is the Street, a main road which loops around the equator of the Metaverse. The Street is lined with buildings and bright neon signs. There are side roads veering off the Street and builders with planning permission create virtual buildings everywhere. Everything is there from night clubs to shops and residential buildings. Anyone who is anyone has an address in the Metaverse.

In recent years, many people and companies have spent considerable time and effort trying to reproduce this vision, or variations thereof, with varying degrees of success. Examples include Second Life, There.com, and Active Worlds. Although Active Worlds was one of the pioneers, it has since been eclipsed by the commercial success of Second Life, which reportedly has around 1 to 2 million active users .

Another visionary author that must be mentioned is William Gibson, who, in his 1986 novel” Neuromancer,” described a virtual reality and jacking into a matrix grid. His writings have also inspired many of the designers in the virtual reality community.

Stephenson’s description of the Metaverse is an obvious reference point for many designers and how they envision the future of virtual environments. Still, his idea, although an excellent starting point, does not begin to encompass the true potential of what the Metaverse might actually be. The Metaverse has the potential to be much richer in culture and content than is suggested in his novel. The Metaverse can provide a place for training, education, music, art, theater, commerce, virtual heritage, games, and more.

 

WHY IS IT “METAVERSE 2.0”?

 

Just as the Web has been versioned Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and now Web 3.0, it is important to version the Metaverse. It helps to define the stages of evolution and provides a conceptual framework for arriving new technologies. But just as people can not completely agree on what specifically constitutes Web 2.0 and what will ultimately be Web 3.0, the same difficulties apply to the Metaverse.

Metaverse 1.0 started around 1995 with VRML 1.0 (Virtual Reality Markup Language), continuing with VRML 2.0 in 1997, Adobe Atmosphere in 2000, and culminating with Active Worlds and Second Life. It’s been a bumpy ride; VRML and its successor X3D have not seen the success that many had hoped for. Adobe discontinued Atmosphere in 2004. Non-web products like Active Worlds came on strong initially, closely followed by Second Life, which languished until adding an economy and the concept of Intellectual Property. A more recent entrant has been There.com. Various people have heralded all 3 companies as being the true Metaverse.

In 2007, we are starting to see problems. Active Worlds seems to have been frozen in time, There.com is creating custom versions of their product for MTV and the government, and Second Life is suffering from scalability problems, lack of control, and dated looks. People are beginning to wonder what’s next – the answer just may be Metaverse 2.0.

 

What about standards?

 

People have been trying to come up with standards for Web 3D for over 11 years and the results are less than impressive. Consider this quote from Jaron Lanier who is considered by many to be the “father” of Virtual Reality, “VRML, for example. Utterly useless stuff.” Admittedly he was talking about its use in Virtual Reality, but he may have a point.

X3D and its predecessor VRML have been miserable failures, despite protests to the contrary by proponents. With all the new related 3D products that are coming on line, how many are using VRML or X3D?

In order to get around limitations in the X3D standard and in an attempt to get more companies on board with the standard, the concept of extensions was added. This means that a vendor can add their own extensions to the X3D standard. While this appeared to solve the problem of standards stifling innovation, the result was a non-standard. You needed viewers from different vendors to view environments that contained extensions. So now, you need to have multiple web browser plug-ins on hand to handle the many and varied extensions. From my perspective, this has defeated the concept of a standard.

 

What is the difference between Web 3D and the Metaverse?

 

For me, the definition of Web 3D is becoming distorted which is why I would prefer not to use the term in this document. People often associate Web 3D with the Web3D Consortium, the people behind the so called X3D standard . I have also seen a number of cases where people have stated that Second Life, There.com, and Active Worlds, etc., are all Web 3D. However, as none of them actually run on the Web or in a Web browser, perhaps the correct term that should be used to group these sorts of companies together is Internet 3D.

To some, this may seem like splitting hairs. However, as people start to talk about the future of the Web and Web 3.0 and 3D, they need to be careful when suggesting that Second Life is the epitome of Web 3.0. It can never be, as long as it does not run in a Web browser and use Web protocols such as HTTP.

For me, the term Web 3D should be used for 3D products that actually run on the Web using Web protocols and inside a Web Browser. Web 3D can be used to describe a single isolated 3D environment on the Web. However, when multiple 3D Web based environments are linked together they start to form the Metaverse 2.0.

 

THE METAVERSE 2.0 DEFINED

 

I believe that the Metaverse 2.0 will be cosmopolitan meaning it will not be a single monolithic 3D environment like Second Life or There.com. Rather, it will be a vast collection of millions of interconnected 3D environments made of various 3D authoring products. When we created Blink 3D, it was with this view of the future in mind. But given the nature of the Metaverse , we will surely be joined by other software tools in the future as they catch up to this concept.

The 3D environments themselves will be as varied as the 2D Web is today. 3D environments for education will be utilized – in addition to games, chat, virtual heritage environments, collaboration areas, pre-visualization, personal home environments, and many others. There will also be 3D environments that are non-immersive; environments where an object in the environment can be viewed and rotated, but nothing more. These environments could showcase commercial items such as the latest footwear styles or mobile phones or 3D representations of historic artifacts.

There are already thousands of 3D environments in existence today, some linked to each other and some not. Over time, as the numbers increase, they will evenually clump together. This phenomenon has been seen before in a little something called the Web. The clumps will form around vertical applications, games, virtual heritage, education, training, art, music, video, etc. As these clumps get bigger, they will join with other vertical application clumps. This process will continue until critical mass is achieved. This critical mass is the Metaverse 2.0, and it is already beginning to take shape.

Critical mass is the point where users can surf the Metaverse for hours each day and not visit the same 3D environment twice. Critical mass is the point at which it becomes nearly impossible to keep track of all the new 3D environments coming online, just as it became hard to keep track of all the new websites as they came online.

There will be concentrators, used as jumping off points to other environments. These concentrators will be 3D environments with links to other 3D environments. These will be grouped or categorized, just as Web portals are now.

Because the virtual worlds that comprise the Metaverse 2.0 will be created using a variety of different software products, the Metaverse will not be owned by any one company or individual. The failure of a single environment or a software company will not destroy the Metaverse. Just as the failure of one website or HTML editor does not jeopardize the entire World Wide Web.