What Will the Metaverse Look Like?

When thinking about the metaverse you have to consider many factors — accessibility, content availability, interface, social infrastructure, privacy options, and personal expression among many others.  If you take it one step at a time you can start to come up with likely scenarios. I had begun the thinking process with an experience in mind akin to MySpace, Squarespace, or Facebook. These are all tools that are (or were) used for some kind of personal expression to be shared on the web. There is of course a distinction to be made between social networks and web site creation tools like Squarespace but they share a lot in common as well. At their core, they make sharing things on the internet very easy and at a low or no cost.

“Designing” your 3D space could be as simple as picking a template

Focusing on social networks for a moment, consider that they allow a person to share things about themselves with their group of friends and acquaintances as well as have some (small) degree of control over privacy settings and how and when they share things with people. But it might be a mistake to take these concepts and translate them directly to a 3D VR space where user profiles become boxed rooms with shared bits of information, video, images, and other types of content lining their walls. Sure, this is somewhat compelling in that it becomes almost like ones room growing up as a teenager where you have your own personal space that you can customize to express who you are with things like posters of your favorite bands or sports stars and a library of your favorite movies and books along your book shelves, maybe even personal notes and photos on your desk. In addition to this, features such as lighting and color can be adjusted to express yourself further. Of course, what depiction of a teenager’s room would be complete without including the angsty music blasting from their stereo. This is a bit dated, maybe a room from the 90’s when I grew up, but I think there are correlations to teenager’s rooms of today.

I think a better place to start is to consider what types of content are currently available to be shared and what types of content are likely to be available in the near or distant future within VR. Currently there are photos, videos, audio files, text, 3d and 2d games, 360 degree videos and photos, and that probably covers a majority of the content. Soon there will be much higher quality 360 degree video with depth information and at around the same time we are likely to see the ability to capture 3d scenes with depth from our favorite games and experiences in VR and share those in the 3D medium as well. So imagine you are in a VR experience, let’s say EVE: Valkyrie, and you decide to record a 3D 360 degree video within the game of some crazy move you pull off in your spaceship. You could then share that “video” with other VR users and they could essentially see the experience as you saw it, able to look around at their own leisure and get full positional tracking (within reason). So in that way, as more content (games and experiences) are developed for VR, people can share those things with others without them having to own the content.

Early on I think most of the enhanced content that will become available will be primarily created by professionals and advanced content creators rather than the masses. Because of this, I think it will be a medium of curation more so than video is presently. It may be more similar to the early web where people were not necessarily sharing their own videos but rather pulling things from around the web and sharing them in places like Geocities, etc. In fact, back then video was really too bandwidth heavy to even share online. So early on in a metaverse it may become more about curating things you find that are well suited to VR (3d 360 video, games, experiences, 360 photos, etc) than authoring things and displaying them. And let’s be honest, even today with all of the GoPros, smartphone cameras, etc there are still a majority of people consuming rather than creating the content (cat videos, Pew Die Pie, Let’s Play, etc).

RIGS is an eSports title in development for Playstation VR

In addition to the content outlined above, there is also likely to be new classes of experiences to try, record, and share. So things like eSports might become so accessible and effective in VR that there could be whole industries formed around it with spectating being akin to going to a basketball game but instead of assigned seating in a stadium you can fly your avatar to any and every angle of the arena and watch the action unfold. And along with this ability to spectate, you can record what you see in those 3d 360 video captures I was describing above. Also, real, physical sporting events might be digitized to a degree that includes full motion/depth capture of players so they can be experienced in similar ways as digital based sports. Other types of events such as concerts, dance performances, live theater, etc, might all be adaptable to this type of shift in spectating.

Player housing in Ultima Online

Avatar centric design — if you look at Second Life and other MMOs, you will notice that they are avatar centric methods of personal expression. Each player focuses on customizing an avatar as opposed to a space. There are instances of games that use customizable player housing such as Ultima Online, but these are not as common because even in those cases, the majority of player interaction is done in public spaces and as a result the player’s avatar becomes the easiest means of expressing oneself. This is done through things like items and clothing as well as weapons and spells. Advanced players may have items that new players don’t have access to with special particle effects and other visual flairs to distinguish these items from the common ones. This makes sense in an RPG where there is level progression and skill advancement but for experiences that focus on social interaction these items can be made available to new players as well and in fact they generally are through market places where real money can be spent to improve your style just like in real life. With all this in mind, it becomes clear that avatar centric user expression seems the most likely scenario for the metaverse as well.