Getting closer to building a metaverse


NEW YORK

IN “SNOW CRASH”, a 1992 science-fiction novel, the author, Neal Stephenson, conjures up a “metaverse”, where characters immerse themselves in a permanent, interactive online virtual world, one controlled by a single corporation. In “Ready Player One”, a 2011 novel later turned into a Steven Spielberg film, Ernest Cline imagines something similar, a virtual “Oasis” where people can live, work and play, an escape from dystopian deprivation.

In 2020 these ideas, though still far from reality, will begin to gain something more than virtual currency. People will increasingly hear the term “metaverse” as firms invest in bringing precursors of it to life. A wide range of companies are investing billions of dollars in the physical and digital infrastructure necessary to bring persistent virtual worlds into being—from 5G to virtual-reality spaces.

Magic Leap, a startup in Florida, makes augmented-reality glasses that could one day allow people to “see” a digital virtual world that neatly overlays the physical world in which they are wandering about (and it is conceptualising entertainment for what it calls the “MagicVerse” to come, with the aid of Mr Stephenson). Improbable, a British gaming-software startup, is trying to crack the problem of allowing enormous numbers of people to interact with each other in the same space at the same time: “concurrency”, in a word. Then there is Facebook, which in 2020 will introduce Horizon, a “social virtual-reality” space. Mark Zuckerberg is a believer in the importance of bringing virtual reality to Facebook’s colossal social graph, and he has also shown, with the purchase of Oculus, a VR gaming company, in 2014 for $2bn, that he is willing to devote billions to the idea.

Of all the current contenders, Epic Games probably has the closest thing to a metaverse in “Fortnite”, a multi-player battle royale game played by some 250m people around the world. Epic’s Unreal gaming engine powers “Fortnite” and other massive multi-player games. As currently constructed, “Fortnite” remains a long way from a metaverse: it accommodates only 100 people interacting (often killing each other) in the same space, and each experience lasts the duration of one game round. But millions can congregate in the same virtual space at the same time, even if they cannot “see” and interact with each other. In February 2019, 10.7m “Fortnite” players attended a virtual concert hosted by Marshmello, a DJ: it was more than 100,000 instances of 100 people interacting with each other, not one giant virtual mosh pit, but it was a cultural milestone.

Unsurprisingly, entertainment companies have taken note and allowed their intellectual property to be employed within “Fortnite”, even though it means that rivals like Marvel and DC exist in the same space, like Coke and Pepsi. That kind of cultural power suggests the awesome potential of “Fortnite” to become something much larger than it is, like a metaverse, says Matthew Ball, a digital-media analyst.

Tim Sweeney, the majority owner of Epic, often talks of what it will take to build a metaverse, and especially of what form it should take—an open platform, not controlled by one company like Facebook. He and his competitors will not build the metaverse in 2020, but the virtual experiences they are creating to get there will increasingly be felt in the real world.

This article appeared in the 2020 visions section of the print edition under the headline “Building a metaverse”



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