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Metaverse

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

This is a spanning page for the Metaverse

Stephensonia

The Real Time 3-D Virtual Internet, or Metaverse as Stephenson dubs it, permeates ruling-class activities, presenting Stephenson's vision of how a virtual reality based Internet might evolve in the near future.

Metaverse

By: William Burns III * Darian Knight

"It's a construct of the mind, brought to fruition by our dreams and desires. A collaborative hallucination."

Definition

An electronic representation of a real world environment, populated by real people and programs (known as bots or deamons). Within such an environment it is possible not only to interact with the scenery as you would in real life, it is also possible to interact with other system users in 3D real time.

The Metaverse, as defined by the book Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson), is representative of a highly evolved Internet system in which the standard 2D interface for the GUI is all but replaced by a lush three dimensional interactive system with approximately sixty million simultaneous users (referred to as "in world").

While much of the hardware and software exists to truly create a full Metaverse system, the vast majority of companies involved with systems capable of doing so are keeping their programs closed to expansion, and thus hindering the greater potential that their software systems could produce.

Some "homebrew" applications are popping up across the Internet, interestingly enough, in places like Sourceforge.net in order to attempt to tackle this problem. Unfortunately no homebrew software campaign has managed to sucessfully capture the ease of use and power of a real metaverse system.

Points of reference - "Snow Crash" : Neal Stephenson "Diamond Age" : Neal :Stephenson

Internet 2.0

The future of the Internet itself has yet to be determined, but one thing is for sure - it includes ever increasing bandwidth options. While the fiber optic internet of fiction has yet to be realized, there are ongoing plans to utilize high bandwidth systems for our immediate and distant future.

It's a matter of mathematics to say that technology in most respects will double every 18 months via Moore's Law. This is not only limited to the speed of processors, but indeed extends into every facet of technology connected to the CPU. Years ago, it was stated that it would be impossible to imagine the consumer needing anything more than 640k of RAM for all applications, and yet we are currently using gigabytes of RAM for the latest software, operating systems and games.

So too, the demand for bandwidth must follow as our online experience matures and the rate of data transfer increases. Where once we had simple HTML text websites with a few hyperlinks, we now have media rich sites utilizing streaming audio and video. But these too will mature as the bandwidth increases; there is only so much a person can experience via video and audio.

So what form will our future Internet take? The obvious answer for this is a Metaverse, or more aptly, Multiple Parallel Metaverses. With broadband rapidly expanding from all directions (cable broadband is now up to 6 and 8Mb/sec) we are expected to double the information transfer capacity accordingly. It's not viable information that we will experience in the future, but instead passive information - wherein objects representing concepts (metaobjects) will be downloaded on demand and instead of a flat webpage, we will experience an entire online virtual space, collaboratively.

The future of the Internet is indeed broadband. And not the 3Mb/sec you see today, but upwards of 90Mb/sec and higher. Of course, current hardware will not support the onslaught of data transmission, and nobody expects it to. Just as the bandwidth increases, it does so in response to ever increasing storage capacities, cpu seeds, GPU (graphics processing units) and onboard RAM requirements.

Some companies today are in posession of systems that can easily qualify as a Metaverse, though not nearly as high defenition as the ones described in fictional literature. Everything has a start, and even the most advanced technology metamorphs into something truly amazing every year it exists. What we have is the beginning of the Metaverse as we know it. Conceived in the late 1980's, created in 1995, and finally gaining acceptance in 2006 with companies like Active Worlds.

As well it should. While the real world grasps the meaning of what a true Metaverse is, and how it should effect their life, some companies such as VR5 Online understand that a Metaverse is not a product, but a new form of media. While the companies in charge of these products struggle year to year in order to define their new "browser", they seem to fail at understanding what it actually is. The Metaverse is not a single product to be classified and marketed as most tangible products are today, because in and of itself, it is not a product.

Trying to market a Metaverse is the same as trying to market the Internet as a product. It simply cannot be done. You cannot limit the capacity of such a system by saying "Look here, it's a game!" or "It's a training tool." The Metaverse simply "is". It's anything the human mind can possibly imagine, and sometimes it's things we could not.

For a glimpse of this media, one would only have to look here: Metaverse Embed or download the standalone here: Metaverse Install

The browser chosen for this writing was due to a few discerning factors:

  • The Active Worlds platform is massive multiuser.
  • The browser can be embedded into a webpage
  • The environment is easily scriptable and editable.
  • Multiple "metaworld" capability

While other companies such as There.com, Secondlife and such indeed have impressive systems, they are missing half of those requirements to qualify as a true Metaverse. They are both catagorized as a single Metaworld, despite what they may tell the media and are both incapable (or unwilling) to create multiple Metaworlds in a structure linked together in order to create a Metaverse.

Interestingly enough, recent additions to this wiki entry have turned up links for another company, Media Machines and The 3D Experience. Both are the same technology (flux 2.0) and are missing 3/4 of the requirements to be qualified as a Metaverse. Flux 2.0 is based on the X3D engine which is an OpenGL version of VRML (to a degree), but does not support massive multiuser nor realtime editing of the environment.

Also listed, Blaxxun Interactive, was supposedly trying to create the Metaverse using the VRML standard and adding it's own back-end client to add support for massive multiuser - but fell short of all of the requirements by not including scriptable and editable environments. (VRML is not a live language, but instead a precompiled world standard).

VR5 Online, while not in the browser business, instead focuses on the fact that a Metaverse is a media format - offering services to design worlds and environments in the Active Worlds system. What they also offer is a customized version of the Active Worlds client named "Metaverse" (which is not intended as a product name, but merely a description of what form of media the browser interprets), that adds extended functionality to the original client browser in accordance to terms set by Metaverse definitions across the Internet.

Wikipedia Entries of Interest