All the talk thus far, has been about us heading into the metaverse. It’s mostly about VR and us blurring the lines between reality and the metaverse. But is that the right way to look at the metaverse? Is that definition of the metaverse too narrow and limiting, and is it the line being pushed by those with VR company stock to sell?
If we look at the metaverse as a small universe where individuals go to connect and have shared experiences, then is pretty much every service a metaverse? Is YouTube a metaverse? Let’s examine that…
YouTube has its own set of creators and viewers, and that is a very big set of people indeed. They have their own little niches, and their own little interests and collaborations, which mimic a different community. This could be the music listening and creating community, where the creators vie for eyeballs. It could be a science loving community where Veritasium is king. It could be our own YouTube community that most of you don't follow… Seriously, go there and subscribe to our channel already!
What we’re saying is that YouTube is made up of thousands of smaller communities and interests all exactly like we would expect in a metaverse. If you took YouTube, made it into a huge city, where all channels were buildings and all videos were rooms inside those buildings. Then you had all of us users walk about as avatars exploring the city, it would create a city that’s larger and more populated than any city on earth. This is because there are 37+ million youtube channels. The entire population of the state of Delhi is 31 million people, imagine if every person in Delhi had their own building, how big a city would it need to be? Remember, not family, every single person owning their own building, some with thousands of rooms in them!
Now imagine Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc all being metaverses. Fortnite and Roblox and games like that could be considered metaverses, also games like No Man’s Sky, which is literally a universe worth of planets to explore…
Even the concept of avatars is not new. We all have them for various purposes, either for use in games, or using them for personalised GIFs, making a Wii profile, whatever! In fact, most of us have phones capable of rendering avatars on top of our faces in real-time, so we can record videos as avatars in case we don’t want to reveal our face or don’t like the way we look.
The metaverse concept is the idea that we can be who we want to be, and immerse ourselves into a virtual world. We don’t even need avatars for that. Just take a look at the absolute fakery on social media and you will see that people’s lives are obviously nothing like they make them appear to be. Instagram is especially plagued with this need to make everything look good and surreal, people using a tonne of filters only to hashtag their post as #NoFilter. We’ve all been to the same places these instagram influencers go, and they just don’t look like that. Forget that, even the influencers themselves don’t look the way they photoshoot (and then Photoshop) themselves.
What we’re saying is that we already lead a double life, or at least a heck of a lot of us do. We make our achievements seem bigger than they are, we put so much icing on everything that one forgets that there is supposed to be cake as well below! If living our dreams in an imaginary world is the definition of the metaverse, then we’re already doing that on social media!
Instead of trying to sell you on the concept, we figured it would be better to break down the metaverse experience into little buckets and then you can decide for yourself if you’ve been living in that way already.
There has got to be a draw to the metaverse. It has to be something you experience and then keep getting pulled back into. After all, if it’s going to cost us money to be able to enter the metaverse, we will need it to pay back the experience, right? We’ve got to crave it when we’re not using it, feel lost without it, and be willing to pay money to use it. Does any of this sound familiar?
Another aspect has got to be a constant upgrade cycle, not just of the hardware we buy, but the experiences we get. That’s how a lucrative market is created, which then forces innovation and improvement of all aspects of the experience. We started with it needing to be addictive, because that’s the baseline we need, which then incentivises us to spend more money on upgrading once every year or two. It is what allows the experience to be changed, and experiments to run, and technology to improve, all fueled by a user base willing to spend more and more money on the devices in order to have an even better experience.
Look at the internet. Is there anyone of us who can say we are done with it? Can any one of us say we have seen all we needed to see on the internet and there is nothing more that interests us anymore? A metaverse needs to be vast, so vast in fact, that it always holds the promise of delivering a new and improved experience, and a feeling of excitement when coming back to it. YouTube is the same. You open up the app, it shows you a bunch of videos you haven’t seen before and you scroll through them choosing one you have never seen before, and then watch it. Then you watch another suggested video, and another, and pretty soon you end up watching a one hour video some guy restoring an ancient coal iron used to iron clothes in the 17th century. Or you watch a guy in Asia use only his hands and rudimentary tools to dig out a huge hole in the ground, and then make a mud palace in the middle of nowhere! Why do we do this? Who knows. Yet it feels so satisfying to end up at some random video of someone doing something you’d never even thought possible.
There has to be something in it for the people who support the metaverse. The creators and the developers need to make money, or else there is only so much free time someone is willing to put into a task without reward. Even if you love your job, would you do it for free? And even if you say yes you would, would you do it 8 hours a day? No, because you’d starve and have no place to stay. The world runs off a simple principle of bartering services for reward. On the internet currently it’s advertising that runs the economic system. People prefer not to pay for services, instead subjecting themselves to less than ideal user experiences in order to get free content. This is usually in the form of ads or paid promotions, or sometimes, with sneaky publishers and individuals, paid promotions are masked as actual content (you get none of that nonsense on this site!). On YouTube there are 30 million people who pay for their Premium service and are not therefore subjected to advertising, the rest watch ads on videos (or rather ignore ads on videos), and get the same content for free. Any new metaverse will also run on a very similar system.
Are We There Already?
There have to be laws and rules, because places that don’t have these soon become cesspools that no one wants to use. This is why you can get banned off social media if you repeatedly abuse or harass people. You also get banned from pretty much any internet service for breaking rules, such as violating copyright on YouTube repeatedly, or cheating in online games. In very extreme circumstances, real world laws are used to punish some people who break the laws of a country they reside in. There is a global push led by law enforcement of all countries to clamp down on child exploitation, for example. Then again, in some countries you can be arrested for blasphemy, or hurting someone’s religious sentiments, or for making threats of harm against people. Either way, a metaverse has to have rules and laws that people have to follow, and then have consequences if those laws are broken. All internet services already have this.
This is the real metaverse experience. It has got to feel real. And no, that doesn’t mean that VR is the only way to go. Think about it, you watch a movie in a theatre, and there are scary scenes that actually cause your heart to race. There are emotional scenes that cause you to shed a tear or even cry your eyes out! All of these are examples of content and experiences being emotional. There are YouTube channels dedicated to doing good deeds for people, and helping people out.
So many of us have had to live life on video chat, because we have been separated from family or loved ones who are far away from us, in different cities, or even different countries. Many people have had to attend events virtually, and these have been everything from births, marriages to even funerals, and the emotions we have felt while witnessing those events are as real as ever.
So is there anything the metaverse will bring us that we don’t already have? It will do it all slightly differently and we will hear of new company names and platforms, and need new hardware to access those offerings. However, if being human, and curious, and wanting to connect with people from across the globe, work and have fun and entertain ourselves is what the metaverse is about, then aren’t we already in one? Is it just the graphics that will improve?
As always, write in and let us know your expectations from the metaverse, and what you thought about our cover story on the topic. And watch this space for more on the metaverse as it happens.
Read more articles about the Metaverse.
This article was first featured in the January 2022 issue of the Digit magazine. To subscribe to the magazine, head to this link. To get the digital subscription, head over to Geek.Digit.in