In the early nineties, when people of my generation were much younger, many of us felt the Metaverse and similar virtual worlds that populated our imaginations were absolutely bound to the idea of virtual reality.
Both concepts, the Metaverse and Virtual Reality itself, were still young and almost bordering on the realm of science fiction.
At that time, before games like Ultima Online changed everything with their “incredible” graphics, the cutting-edge of open-world online universes was still represented by MUDs, Multi-User Dungeons. All we were looking at on our black screens was colored text, when there was even color. The rest of the job was done by our imagination cultivated by Tolkien, Cyberpunk, and Star Wars.
And yet, the same imagination traveled to interconnected virtual worlds that, one day in the not-so-far future, we thought we would be able to experience with our own eyes and ears, perhaps even with other senses, all thanks to futuristic headsets that would transport us into these dreamlands.
Yet, thirty years later, things haven’t evolved exactly as we imagined.
A few days ago, I read an interview on MatthewBall.co with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney and author Neal Stephenson, the man who coined in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash” the very term Metaverse which has then been used (and often abused) by many ever since.
Stephenson mentioned a concept that definitely resonates with me.
“And so there’s always been this linkage in people’s minds between cyberspace, the Metaverse, and goggles. What we’ve learned is way more nuanced and interesting than that. The year after Snow Crash came out was when Doom was released, and Doom is the ancestor of all games that are set in immersive environments [Note: Tim is nodding]. And it didn’t require stereoscopy. It was all in a screen – very low resolution by current standards – and yet, the magic of the illusion was that you were running around in this three-dimensional persistent environment. And then since then, that kind of experience has only gotten better. And in the meantime, we’ve been learning things about goggles, about headsets and what they are and are not good at. And it took a long time for them to get to the point where [input/output] lag was acceptable. And so there’s kind of this long period of time during which video games on screens were getting much, much, much better, but the acceptance of headsets was [falling] behind, because if lag is bad, you’re more prone to get sick.
One of the things that I became aware of when I was working at Magic Leap on AR headsets is that stereoscopy isn’t enough. That your brain actually uses a lot of other cues other than stereoscopy to build a map of the three-dimensional world around you. And so people with one eye, one-eyed people can still perceive three-dimensionality, for example, because of these other mechanisms.
This is a kind of a long-winded way of saying that the reality we’ve ended up with, which didn’t seem plausible in 1990 when I was writing [Snow Crash], is that we’ve got billions of people fluently navigating highly realistic, immersive, three-dimensional worlds using flat screens and keyboard and mouse.”
Over the past couple of decades and change, we have seen several attempts at achieving “metaverses.” Some have been relatively successful, while others have been abject failures, but we can see an interesting common trend among those that haven’t failed: They either don’t involve any use of VR headsets and similarly cutting-edge hardware or it’s entirely optional.
Even VRChat, which is likely the most successful metaverse that utilizes virtual reality as a primary feature (it’s even in the name), is entirely functional without a headset and is regularly enjoyed by many on traditional flat screens.
Epic Games’ Fortnite appears to be the enterprise that, at the moment of this writing, has the best chance of becoming a sustainable and widespread version of the original idea of Metaverse. Yet, people play it on monitors on their mobile devices. No VR is required or even officially supported.
Second Life was actually one of the closest things to a Metaverse that we’ve ever seen, albeit it failed to reach mass appeal and has since declined, but the idea of implementing VR was briefly attempted and then shelved.
Incidentally, if you’re wondering what a Metaverse actually is, I’ll use Stephenson’s own definition from the same interview. After all, he’s the one who fathered the concept:
“A massively multiplayer online universe that has a sense of space to it so that there are experiences distributed around that space in a way that is perceived by all of its users in the same way. And you can move around from one place to another and interact with other users who are not physically present. It’s not controlled by any one entity; many creators, large and small, build things there.”
In theory, this concept would be a perfect match for virtual reality, and that’s why many used to imagine them as fully connected and inseparable. Just think about visiting that massive universe completely immersed in 360 degrees of stereoscopic goodness. We have been dreaming of that for three decades. It’s obvious that the idea has appeal.
And yet, as virtual reality matured and became a real thing that can actually be enjoyed by most and purchased in any department store, we have also become aware of its limitations.
The biggest limit to mass adoption, even not considering hardware requirements and motion sickness-inducing lag, is obvious even before you wear a headset. VR equipment is relatively bulky and uncomfortable to wear for long periods.
Even Apple, which many consider the ruling sovereign of ergonomics, didn’t do much better than its competitors with the form factor of the Vision Pro.
If you think about the idea of the Metaverse, it’s basically a second existence that you should be able to enjoy for any number of hours without neck pain or headaches.
On top of that, to really be a Metaverse, or even THE Metaverse, an online environment should have mass appeal and involve tens or even hundreds of millions of people. This is in conflict with the requirement of owning an expensive and relatively niche piece of hardware.
These are issues that technology will likely overcome with time. I’m fairly convinced that one day VR headsets won’t even be headsets, but something much lighter, comfortable, and hopefully quite affordable. Yet, that day is still far into the future.
While virtual reality has evolved since the early dreams and applications of the nineties, it has done so at a snail’s pace.
On the other hand, virtual worlds that aspire to that coveted title of Metaverse have evolved at a good clip by using more affordable, comfortable, and especially ubiquitous displays… traditional flat screens.
As Stephenson says, billions (or at least hundreds of millions) of people fluently navigate highly realistic, immersive, three-dimensional worlds using flat screens and keyboard and mouse. I’d add that nowadays many do so even on their smartphones.
While I wouldn’t completely count virtual reality out, at least not in the longest term, it has a lot of catching up to do.
In the same interview, Sweeney discusses the technology Epic Games is trying to achieve with Unreal Engine 6 (the successor of the current UE5) to chase the Metaverse dream.
He talks about networking, the ability of islands by different creators to coexist in the same seamless world (Second Life actually achieved this, but crossing the borders between islands is excruciatingly slow and glitchy even today), and interoperability. What he doesn’t talk about is virtual reality or even visuals in general.
The reason for that is likely the fact that the visuals we have today on flat, traditional screens, or even on smartphones, are perfectly suitable for achieving immersion without having to give up comfort.
That being said, while virtual reality may have lagged behind Metaverses and Virtual Worlds to the point that I wonder whether it’ll ever catch up, not everything is lost.
Just like thirty years ago I used to dream about donning a bulky (at that time it seemed cool) headset to visit the Metaverse as part of everyday life, today I still dream of what may come beyond.
One of the most interesting and fitting examples of Metaverse is what is depicted in the anime and light novel series Sword Art Online.
If you look beyond the dystopia of the original TV series in which thousands of kids were trapped in a single virtual MMORPG that would kill them in real life if they were killed in the game (I wonder why writers almost always have to associate this kind of tech with dystopian ideas), what comes after is a massive network of interconnected worlds that you can visit by transferring your characters and retaining your stats, skills, etcetera.
That’s a Metaverse.
The most relevant aspect is that immersion is achieved simply by conveying signals to the five senses via the nervous system, generating a virtual reality that is indistinguishable from the actual reality.
While this is obviously just science fiction for now, VR headsets like those we have now felt like science fiction thirty years ago.
While it won’t happen tomorrow and probably not even in a decade, I do believe we’ll get there, and it may very well be where virtual reality and the Metaverse will finally reconnect.
