Three Constraints of the Metaverse

Imagine you’re a venture capitalist in the 1960s. You’ve got money to invest and you’re presented with two pitches. The first is for a device that works just like a Star Trek communicator. You can video chat with friends and loved ones all around the globe. Instant face-to-face communication with anyone on Earth right in your pocket. The other pitch is for text messaging. Now who gets the money? In the competition between phone calls, video chat and text messaging, nobody would have guessed that Americans of the 21st century would be five times more likely to text than call on the phone. And video chat is mostly relegated to employer-related Zoom calls or the occasional hello to aging relatives in another state. As of 2021, less than half of all internet users polled made any video calls at all in the previous month. This is the exact opposite of what would have been expected back when Star Trek first came out. And though this result could probably have been predicted with a few days of user testing back in 1966, nobody apparently bothered to test because video chat just seemed like the future. It was too cool not to be the future. But the future doesn’t care about cool. The future works kind of like evolution, in the sense that it has nothing to do with perfection or improvement or what’s cool. It’s about adapting to circumstances.What might at first seem like limitations are actually text messaging’s strongest benefits. It’s almost completely free from the cognitive burdens created by the sort of face-to-face human interaction that a video call simulates. There’s none of the formal acknowledgement of each other, none of the required ‘what have you been up to?’, none of the non-verbal cues that you have to be aware of sending and receiving during every moment of a video — let alone face to face—interaction. Texting just makes your life easier. And at the end of the day, for technology to be widely adopted, it needs to make our lives easier, better or more fun. Enter the Metaverse.It’s all the rage and billions are being spent on it, but is it going to end up little more than the video chat of the 21st Century? Will the Metaverse become an integral part of our daily lives like texting, or be wheeled out every generation or so like 3D TV to a brief wave of excitement followed by years of general apathy and neglect? First of all, the Metaverse isn’t one thing, it’s an overarching concept that includes all sorts of different things, some of which might succeed while others fail. It could very easily Balkanize into a half dozen moderately lucrative niche markets (which might test the definition of the word ‘Metaverse’ but then the future doesn’t care about definitions either).As far as human activities that might get ported to the Metaverse, you’ve got gaming of course, but also buying and selling, flirting and dating, all kinds of job-related interactions and services, local politics, and the long sought after ‘third place’ for hanging out that Starbucks or your local pub might provide. We know gaming will be successful because it’s already succeeded. Fortnite is basically a small, constantly cycling Ragnarok Metaverse where everyone kills each other, and it has become the most successful game on Earth, with a cumulative playtime of over 10.4 million years (which is the length of time modern Homo Sapiens have existed on Earth times 34 —nobody’s betting against gaming). So sure, that works, but we do have to ask the question ‘what about the other stuff?’ If you aren’t hoping to slake your bloodlust in a societally-acceptable manner, will you even bother to log in to whatever passes for the Metaverse five years from now?One way to unravel that would be to look at some early examples, like Second Life. Nobody seems to want to admit this, but Second Life, a platform where your avatar can wander around aimlessly in a virtual browser-based world, has been around for over 15 years. If the Metaverse is so great, why aren’t we all living in Second Life right now? At the time of its creation, Facebook was little more than a twinkle in the eye of the coed-rating Harvard student and yet Facebook currently has roughly 45 times Second Life’s user base. Why does Mark think a metastasized version of this early oughts relic is the future of the internet?It might be the true three dimensional experience that can be had through headsets like Meta’s Quest. But is the addition of an extra dimension enough to help Second Life 2.0 take over the world?Another possible reason for Mark’s excitement could be the bounty of data that can be mined from human beings whose every movement, eye blink and intake of breath is being recorded, as they traipse around a virtual boardwalk or interview for a job with their heartbeat serving as a virtual lie detector. Imagine if Facebook was a full body wetsuit that data-mined everything you did or said as you went about your daily life. Seemingly that’s the apotheosis of the Metaverse from a marketing perspective, and that would absolutely be worth the multi-billion dollar cash spigot Zuckerberg constructed in order to make that vision a reality. So sure, his motivation makes total sense, but for the billions of us who aren’t him, that’s probably not a Metaverse we’d want to live in. Luckily, other people are positing a more decentralized experience that could use blockchain technology, interoperability and sovereign identity to sidestep the dangers that a walled garden like Meta presents. And yet, even that does not answer the question of whether —at this point in time— people will actually show up. If you want to predict a given activity’s likelihood of success when ported to the Metaverse, I think you have to apply a logical sieve based on how well our currently available technology can address the basic human need for simplicity, comfort or engagement. Which leads to three constraints of the Metaverse, circa 2023:

1.0 You will not get mass adoption for any behavior that is easier, better or more fun to do somewhere else.

This is user testing 101, but the reason lame-ass texting beat out supercool video chat is because texting makes your life easier. We didn’t want phone calls to be more like real life, it turns out we really needed them to be more like handwritten notes. In retrospect this should have been obvious, but this is the sort of lesson that technocratic society seems to need to relearn every five to seven years. Remember Juicero? This was a wifi connected juicer that provided proprietary, single-serving packets of pre-chopped fruits and vegetables sold exclusively by subscription. Tech people gave this startup $120 million dollars in human money before a YouTube video showing how you could just squeeze their packets yourself destroyed their entire business model. It failed because there was an easier and cheaper way forward. 

2.0 Just because it’s cool doesn’t mean people want it.

3D video is cool. But for a host of reasons such as lack of color vibrancy, user headaches, limited viewing angles, and the fact that parallax isn’t that noticeable beyond 13 feet, it’s not yet cool enough for your average consumer to bother with. It might work someday, but that day keeps getting pushed back, year after year. And remember a while back when snorting atomized chocolate was a thing? Probably not, because it was yet another of those interesting ideas that no one asked for, needed, or wanted, and it disappeared after one news cycle.  In fact, it’s super easy to sit in a room with your fellow thought leaders and Dungeon’s & Dragons yourself a collective narrative where everyone relates to each other in a perfect virtual world, but if the reality of the situation at this moment in time is frustrating or tedious, nobody’s going to log on. It doesn’t have to be super high resolution or zero latency or achieve any other technical baseline, it just has to conveniently address a basic human need better than whatever people are doing at the moment. 

3.0 No one is going to wait around for you to get your shit together

Remember the Apple Newton? You probably don’t because statistically speaking you’re like 23 years old, but the Newton was one of the first digital assistants. It was essentially the ‘cave drawing’ version of an iPhone. It had one percent of the functionality in the form factor of a desktop computer’s power brick. In this case, the folks at Apple likely understood what we all wanted and needed, but they were sorely unable to deliver it because consumer tech couldn’t yet support their vision. You know what worked better than an Apple Newton? The tiny spiral-bound notebook I kept in my back pocket for phone numbers.And this, in the end, could be the biggest threat to 2023’s version of the Metaverse, the danger that our brilliant vision of the future could be hobbled by the limitations of the age. It’s very easy to imagine a cyberpunk world and to convince yourself that you’re building an on-ramp toward it, but if you’re programming for that future while your product looks like bad Flash animation from the early 2000s, you’re going to have a hard time getting my mom to sign up.Perhaps the best way forward at this particular juncture would be to take a hint from the success of text messaging and suss out those areas where our current technical limitations are a feature rather than a bug. I think you have to ask, in which behavioral circumstances does the simplicity of the low-res three dimensional avatar-based interaction model prove more useful or fun for people than their current popular use cases? Take romance for example. If you want people to hook up inside the world you’re building, your competitors aren’t other Metaverses, it’s Bumble, Hinge, , etc. You have to provide an environment that addresses those companies’ Web 2.0 limitations without introducing new ones of your own. Maybe you’re imagining a kind of futuristic meta-cafe where anyone can log in and hang out. But remember Chat Roulette? There are some intrinsic problems to this format, even if your avatar doesn’t have a penis. Just because you’re building the future doesn’t mean that the requirements of the human use case will suddenly disappear.You’re going to need to know who people are and what they are like. And it’s a heartwarming human interest story if some person from Uruguay discovers true love with someone from Srebrenica, but most of us don’t want to work that hard. When I was single and living in the Silverlake area of Los Angeles, a woman from Santa Monica was geographically undesirable, let alone Estonia. To beat out Tinder, your cyber cafe will need to improve on their baseline functionality. You’ll want geolocation and interest filters, and if you are serious about addressing the romance market, you’ll need user photos in addition to avatars. Sure, true love is the perfect melding of two souls blah-blah-blah, but I’m guessing your average 24 year old coed is not prepared to commit herself to a purple bunny avatar belonging to Marcus the 62 year old bail bondsman with limited mobility and three estranged kids. The Metaverse could beat out the Tinders of the world by providing a gentle onramp, not to any cybertech future, but to real world interaction. Your meta cafe could serve as a low stakes environment where folks who live relatively close to each other could log in and work to achieve some kind of collective goal, play pub games or contribute to common interests. You know how kids will get together and play with dolls or action figures, creating scenarios and conversations on the fly? This is the adult version of that. It might sound simplistic, but these days it seems like we could all use a little remedial education in how to socialize. The limitations of our  low res 3D environment could be beneficial to engagement in this scenario, perhaps providing a less anxious intermediate state between an in-person blind date, which can seem like a job interview for getting laid, and the cold brutality of a swipe left. In fact, what this sounds like, apart from the getting laid aspect, is Roblox, the social media gaming platform that already has approximately 1.3 million years of collective gameplay under its belt. Of course Roblox is a walled garden and focuses on the youth market, but sooner or later those kids are going to grow up, and so the Roblox folks could very well be positioning themselves for a future of mass adoption. The danger of course would be that they might become the America Online of the real Metaverse and be left behind by subsequent innovators such as Sandbox or an even less centralized competitor (if you’re under 30, just Google ‘America Online CD’). At the end of the day, whether it’s dating or selling shoes, no one is going to sit and wait for technology to catch up with your William Gibson dreams, so if you want people to log in to the Metaverse right now, in an attempt to address the non-gaming realms of human need, you’ll probably want to work on small improvements to the Web 2.0 status quo rather than attempt to build the world that we ultimately all want but won’t have the technical chops to deliver for another decade or so. The alternative is to become the Metaversical equivalent of my 3D LG TV, which has been used stereoscopically maybe a dozen times, playing Cars 2 and Killzone for an audience of one.

Reference: