The Metaverse — New Horizons & Old Challenges?
The Metaverse is, we are told, the ‘future of the internet.’ Many of the great and the good making such proclamations are however struggling even to define what it is. Personally, I like the simplicity of Daniel D Bryant’s take — “currently we are looking through windows (literally) but we are soon going to be climbing through the windows and into the internet.” [1]
The technology necessary for this is now defined by the general term Extended Reality (XR) which encompasses Virtual Reality (taking us away from real life — generally via a headset — into a remote world), Augmented Reality (keeping us in real life but adding digital experiences on top probably by some form of glasses) and any number of others yet to be invented.
How and why we might use the metaverse in our working and leisure lives is open to debate. The underlying principle is however accepted as actively interacting with both the environment and other users in it.
Deloitte sees five key areas in which the technology can win [2] –
1. Work and Learning — from virtual collaboration to classroom tools and metaverse native schools
2. Entertainment and experiences — from games and interactive sports events (being in the game) to interactive virtual tourism (be there without travelling)
3. Health and wellness — from telemedicine to AI powered medical recommendations and 3D modelled treatments
4. Retail — from immersive pop-up shops to full sensory shopping environments
5. Manufacturing — from collaborative product design to quality control and supply chain simulation
Early iterations of some of these things (including gaming and medical research) provide a glimpse of the possible future, with varying degrees of success.
The Good
The British Heart Foundation is using VR to create a virtual beating heart from the scan of an individual patient, thereby enabling surgeons to plan patient-specific surgery. The term ‘transformative’ is overused but the prospect of this type of approach in heart and cancer surgery would be just that.
The Bad
A recent small study in Germany [3] found that a group of office workers (aged, on average, 29) working an eight-hour day five-day week solely in a VR environment reported much higher rates of anxiety, frustration and eye strain compared to their normal real-world office experience.
The Ugly
When Channel 4’s Dispatches looked into the experience of today’s virtual gaming and social environments, the results were often grim. Registering as first a 22-year-old woman and then a 13-year-old girl, journalist Yinka Bokinni’s visits to Rec Room and VR Chat included a disturbing mix of bullying, abuse and harassment which, although virtual, felt very real; the technology works. This seemed to confirm statistics showing that users on VR Chat are exposed to abusive behaviour every 7 minutes [4]
Although the platform enables users to limit their interactions to known friends, without this the environment is open to anyone since age verification at registration proved no barrier. Moreover, the experience of reporting abuse to both the platforms themselves and to Meta (makers of the headset through which the platforms were accessed) yielded little success.
It’s hard not to conclude from this that policing tomorrow’s metaverse will be no more effective than it is in today’s environment. This will likely be exacerbated by the UK Government’s recent decision to postpone (or maybe even cancel) the Online Safety Bill, its much-trumpeted potential solution to many such ills. Meanwhile, the tech giants continue — after 20 years — clinging to their argument that ‘we’re just a platform and we can’t be held responsible for what people do on it.’
Following the Money #1
One thing that is notable from these examples and the five key areas of future development above is that they seem likely to be funded directly by fees (e.g. to access virtual classrooms, to play games and to buy real or virtual clothes) rather than indirectly by advertising.
Some commentators see a desire to escape a reliance on ad revenues as one of the reasons for Meta’s zeal. Zuckerberg is no doubt attracted by the fact that — despite its apparent ‘failure’ to meet the hype — Second Life nevertheless has a GDP of US$600m based on in-environment purchases and subscriptions.
However, the suggestion that companies will make a conscious decision to avoid advertising rather ignores history.
How We Got Here (aka Web 1 and 2)
The founders of Facebook and Google did not start their companies as ad businesses of course. They simply went with the flow — the huge audiences that their free services generated in turn attracted advertisers’ money to buy access to attention. This serendipitous good fortune is hugely lucrative but what happens in these environments has also bought problems — at the very least in a PR sense if not necessarily, for them, in a moral one. It’s a burden that they’d probably like to design away through some form of paywall — they could theoretically better police these environments with more money and smaller audiences.
In the recent past it was probably tempting to stick with the cash cow that advertising has become. However two things have likely made that difficult. Firstly the impact of their omnipotence has put them in all sorts of firing lines — from Meta’s inaction over its own Instagram research revealing its negative impacts on children to terrorist videos on YouTube. Secondly the fact that, despite Facebook and Google having amassed the biggest treasure trove of personal data in history and pretty much taking control of the digital ad landscape, the resulting experience is nevertheless often woeful; as a consumer I am served ads that feel entirely random and as an ex-marketer my money bought response rates that often made little commercial sense.
If these arguments prove persuasive is likely to look very different to today’s online social environments — right?
Following the Money #2 — The New Frontier
In looking for pointers to the future, focus is naturally on the early adopters. Consumers are already taking up Virtual Reality and the major players are making money from hardware; worldwide sales of Meta’s Oculus Quest have now reached over 8m.
Current popular environments include VR Chat, Horizon Worlds, Rec Room, Roblox and Second Life. The latter has of course been around since the early 00s and was at one stage the poster child for what is now being talked about. Whilst all of these have paid premium subscription options and several offer in-environment purchases (Second Life has an established currency exchanged with real-world money), the core environments are however free to access.
At the entry level then, they don’t look so different to existing social and gaming networks today. For some, this is a suggestion of where they might go tomorrow. MIT Associate professor of Digital Media, Justin Reich thinks that advocates of the metaverse hope to create “new digital surfaces that can be covered in new advertising and made as addictive as possible” [5]
Big Brother Is Watching You (Only Maybe More)
Addiction is important. In the early days of digital few people realised that their attention was the product that made the tech companies rich. Today there is widespread concern about the way that platforms collect and trade personal data — not just to advertise to us but potentially to watch over us in much broader terms (what Shoshana Zuboff terms ‘surveillance capitalism.’) This is the environment in which the metaverse will exist, where consumers will be less credulous and trusting. As MIT’s Justin Reich says — “AR is the new frontier of surveillance capitalism” and, in that regard, it may well turn out to be as “terrible as social media is today.” [5]
Development will no doubt be led by those same tech giants with which many consumers have a tetchy relationship today. Although the broad membership of the recently formed Metaverse Standards Forum illustrates that they can’t do it on their own, it’s no surprise that Microsoft and Meta are front and centre.
An alternative to these usual suspects is the idea that the metaverse could be built on the blockchain which, as Bruno Mácáes says, means that “everything will be owned by everyone” with no “single point of control.”[6] As attractive as this may appear in unshackling us from the behemoths that control the internet today, it may also unleash the wild west — replacing an environment that many complain has too little regulation with one that has none.
Promises promises
Right now most of this is about a future vision. The reality of today’s XR environments are a world away from what investors are being asked to buy into. The gap matters — we all remember the fanfare for Google Glass.
A lot of things have to change not least of which is collective computing power which Intel considers needs a 1000-fold increase to support the vision [7] (for instance in bandwidth and latency avoidance.) That scale is hard to get your head around given today’s gargantuan computing demands.
Computing power equals energy usage of course. If the metaverse is to be blockchain based then it will create massive demand (right now, a single blockchain-based Bitcoin transaction has the same carbon footprint as over 140,000 hours of YouTube views [8].) Given the desperate need for worldwide climate change action, who would countenance such a cost?
By comparison, the basic task of designing headsets to avoid cybersickness — the motion nausea experience of today’s VR — seems minimal by comparison. In reality, it won’t be.
None of this will happen overnight — Zuckerberg thinks it will take 10–15 years — but the issue here is clearly far more than just investor’s time and money. There are impacts on our planet.
The Best of Humans, The Worst of Humans
The impacts are on the very essence of our lives too. Channel 4’s reported experiences were not unique. Second Life users have been hit by financial scams (a failed bank and fraudulent casinos) and Roblox has acknowledged sexual content generated by its users that even its moderators cannot regulate. Given this reality, it’s no wonder that there are widespread concerns that a full metaverse will vastly increase today’s social blights of misinformation and fakery, child grooming, harassment and bullying. As Toby Shulruff of the National Network to End Domestic Violence says — “XR does not solve human problems like bias, fear or violence — it accelerates and amplifies what is already present in society” [5]
Reality — Running from it or running to it?
Ultimately, the appeal of creating another — parallel — life will depend on how we feel about this one. A 2021 study [9] of attitudes by post lockdown Gen Z’s (born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s) found that over a third wanted to use social media far less because of information overload and a desire to go back to simpler ways of living. Whilst this was clearly driven by experiences in lockdown (where much of the information fatigue was pandemic related) it mirrors other general studies suggesting that limits are being reached. This is surely one of the demographics for which the metaverse would be considered most appropriate so it hardly bodes well.
What, if anything, might persuade enough of us to seek out a new virtual environment? USA Today Tech reporter Edward Baig says that the new environment must provide — or promise to provide — “experiences and benefits that are otherwise impractical if not impossible to achieve in the real world.” [5] That’s a high bar. University of California, San Diego senior fellow, Michael Kleeman puts it slightly stronger — “unless we see a large-scale desire to escape from reality, the virtual space will not add much to human experience” [5]
It may well be that the negatives of today’s digital life — ubiquitous poor advertising, profligate surveillance/data collection, poorly policed social environments, narrow algorithmically driven social conversation bubbles — will hinder its extension to the metaverse. A new frontier blocked by the current one.
The Big Gamble
A recent estimate of the commercial opportunity represented by the metaverse puts it at US$ 13trn [10] and we’re already seeing investments of eye-watering numbers by companies including Microsoft (e.g. its US$ 69bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard.)
As has been observed by many, the fact that this is a bet on something still nebulous in definition and therefore with no known revenue stream, is of little consequence. The same could have been said of the original internet and, over time, the big money found a way to make more.
This time though the canvas is not quite so blank. There are precedents and expectations in business models and — importantly — boundaries in consumer tolerance.
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[1] Daniel D. Bryant, Co-founder of Educators in VR, quoted in ‘The Metaverse in 2040’ by Pew Research Center, June 2022
[2] ‘A Whole New World’ by Deloitte, April 2022
[3] Dr Jens Grubert, Coburg University, June 2022
[4] The Centre for Countering Digital Hate quoted in Channel 4 Dispatches’ ‘Inside the Metaverse — Are you Safe?’, 25 April 2022
[5] Quoted in ‘The Metaverse in 2040’ by Pew Research Center, June 2022
[6] The New Statesman, 22 April 2022
[7] Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President and Head of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group
[8] Digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
[9] Covid 19 Information Overload and Gen Z Social Media Discontinuance During the Pandemic Lockdown by Hongfrei Liu (University of Southampton), Wentong Liu (Zhongang University, China), Vignesh Yoganathan (Sheffield University) and Victoria Sophie Osburg (Montpellier Business School, France)
[10] Metaverse & Money: Decrypting the Future’ by Ronon Ghose et al (Citi Global Perspective & Solutions, March 2022)
