In real life, you can own a t-shirt with a Star Wars logo on it and carry it with you wherever you go, or sell it whenever you like. Intellectual property will also be a huge barrier to an open, interoperable metaverse. That’s the surest indicator that the metaverse, as promised, does not yet exist. Has any one of those three scenarios (licensed standards, widely-adopted open technology, government mandate) happened with the metaverse yet? Signs point to no. To make it happen, it will take widely-adopted communication protocols that don’t exist and reinterpretation of intellectual property law. The fundamental technologies that would let people chat, own property, and do business across platforms and devices in a 3D virtual world have not been standardized in a way that makes it possible. MetaĪnd that’s the main problem with the metaverse right now: the nuts and bolts aren’t there. Meta’s Horizon VR world promises a future without limits-or legs. He also cautioned for a products-based approach to the metaverse (citing Meta’s Horizon Worlds VR chat app) rather than spending a lot of effort defining an architecture that may end up not being used at all. In his Facebook Connect 2021 keynote, Oculus consultant John Carmack said that “The metaverse is a honeypot trap for architecture astronauts,” warning about engineers and designers who take an abstract, high-level view of things and don’t worry about the “nuts and bolts” of making it a reality. Missing: The Nuts and Bolts of The Metaverse That technology might exist in a development stage at the moment, but it is not currently widely implemented, and no industry-wide standards are set. So we’ll define the metaverse as, roughly, a network-connected VR multiverse that isn’t owned by one company alone. Is that the metaverse? (Its creator doesn’t think so.)īut multi-user VR chat isn’t what the current hype is about: It’s really about a successor to the internet-a new global economic playground that could supposedly help tech businesses accumulate astonishing new wealth. Heck, Second Life is here today-you can own virtual property, exchange virtual items, and more. One thing’s for sure: If any online world where people can chat as avatars counts as a metaverse, then we’ve had those since at least the 1980s for 2D worlds and the 1990s for 3D ones. ActiveWorlds has offered 3D multi-user worlds since the mid-1990s. Some people, such as Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, think the metaverse should exist as an open standard, while others think there might only be competing metaverses controlled by different companies. Some people claim that current virtual spaces like Minecraft and Roblox are already metaverses, while others claim that there can only be one metaverse (as with “the internet”) and that platform-independence is paramount in defining what a metaverse is. What exactly the metaverse encompasses is also up in the air.