The Metaverse in the Room

2 minute read.

Now this is one con­tro­ver­sial blog post. A lot of peo­ple have very strong op­pin­ions on what the meta­verse is and what it is. I have an al­ter­nate one, you might find in­ter­est­ing or hap­py to dis­card right af­ter read­ing.

Whoami

I build a de­vel­op­ment plat­form “Won­der­land En­gine” for build­ing AR and VR We­bApps. We­bXR is of­ten seen as part of “Web 3.0”, which brings me close to blockchain based ser­vices, but I’m cer­tain­ly look­ing at it more from the out­side.

The Metaverse

It seems that a lot of “Meta­verse” projects strive to be _the_ meta­verse. In my view of the meta­verse, they are ac­tu­al­ly try­ing to build, what in Web 1.0 one would call “the web­site”. To­day, we know that a web­site is way more like a home or build­ing than an en­tire world.

The anal­o­gy ac­tu­al­ly works quite well, if you con­sid­er those meta­vers­es where you can own a tile as a “blog­ging site”, you own a blog on that.

In­stead, I think ev­ery­one will own such a meta­verse in a very de­cen­tral­ized way, where ev­ery­one just hosts their own web based meta­verse (“meta web­site”) on their own web­serv­er and links it to oth­ers.

Maybe the orig­i­nal no­tion of there be­ing “one” orig­i­nat­ed from Ready Play­er One’s Oa­sis, but even that has many sub-worlds, which I think map way bet­ter to the “re­al” meta­verse we might have some day.