The commercial potential of the metaverse was so potent that it compelled Mark Zuckerberg to rename Facebook to Meta heading into 2022. But this year, rather than rapidly redefine the internet, the metaverse stalled.

The word of the year, per the annual (and now semi-democratically awarded) designation from Oxford, is … “goblin mode.” Seriously?

What happened to “metaverse,” the distant runner-up to “goblin mode” with less than one-tenth of the votes? As recently as August, I could’ve sworn we’d never hear the end of the metaverse, the buzzword encapsulating the potential for a deeply embodied internet with unprecedented connectivity and interoperability; essentially, virtual reality. We’ve come a long way since Snow Crash, and now the metaverse is, supposedly, the very near-term future of the internet. The apparent commercial potential of the metaverse was so potent that it compelled Mark Zuckerberg to rename Facebook (parent company), if not also Facebook (website), to Meta, thus reimagining his social-media business as “a metaverse company” heading into 2022. But this year, rather than rapidly redefining the internet, the metaverse stalled, and user counts on the formative platforms have struggled to break into the tens of thousands, much less millions. Read More

An exciting multiplayer Discord game asks you to find things in the multiverse through an AI image generator. The hallucinatory results could mark a new frontier for AI art

The Bureau of Multiversal Arbitration is an unusual workplace. Maude Fletcher’s alright, though she needs to learn how to turn off caps lock in the company chat. But trying to deal with Byron G Snodgrass is like handling an energetic poodle, and Phil is a bit stiff.

Sorry, that was unclear. Byron G Snodgrass is an energetic poodle. Phil is a plant. A peace lily, I think.

… The BMA is the setting, and title, of a … thing, created by game company Aconite, helmed by Nadya Lev and Star St.Germain. I say “thing” because it’s not clear how best to describe what the pair have made. Calling it a video game summons up all the wrong impressions, but it’s hardly an experience or a toy, either. A larp (live-action roleplay) might be closer if it was live action, but it’s not: BMA is played in a Discord channel, the gamer-focused chat app standing in for the Bureau’s internal slack. St.Germain calls it a “Discord game”, which works well enough.

The Multiversal Search Engine at the core of the game is actually a carefully managed version of the Stable Diffusion AI image generator. Players are given assignments – like finding that dessert – which they use as prompts for the image generator, competing with enough others to generate the best responses, with the winning creation, voted on by all players, being stuck on the virtual fridge for everyone to see – and, if you’re lucky, praised by Maude. Read More

Creators are crafting accessories, avatars, and entire worlds in social virtual worlds, and often making a living doing it.

I walk slowly around the Hidden Heights mansion holding a glass of red wine. No one’s home, and it’s nighttime, like a party has just ended or is about to begin. Inside, the stairway railings and arms of modern metal chairs gleam in the light cast from dripping chandeliers overhead. White couches and wall-to-ceiling windows, stainless steel appliances, dark wood, a glass wall-length wine rack—it feels expensive in here. Outside, fronds of a palm tree stir over the shifting pool that overlooks the city skyline, all lit up in white lights. I pick up an inflatable donut and fling it across the pool. 

I can’t actually touch any of this, or smell the night air, or drink the wine I’m holding. It’s a custom-made world created by Elaine, a digital designer who makes places like Hidden Heights and commissioned spaces for people to use in virtual worlds like VRChat, Horizon Worlds, and Altspace. Her work can bring in thousands of dollars a month; for corporate clients who want to commission a space, she requires a $10,000 minimum.  Read More

Your boss wants a metaverse strategy, but what would that be, and what does metaverse even mean? If we strip away the noise, what can we say about this, and what can we predict?

Sometimes it seems like every big company CEO has read the same article about the same tech trend, and sent the same email to their team, asking “What’s our strategy for this?!” A couple of years ago there were a lot of emails asking for a 5G strategy, and now there are a lot of emails asking about metaverse.

Answering the 5G email was actually pretty easy, partly because almost no-one needs a 5G strategy at all (I wrote about this here), but also because we knew what 5G meant. We probably don’t know what ‘metaverse’ means. More precisely, we don’t know what someone else means. This word has become so vague and broad that you cannot really know for sure what the speaker has in mind when they say it, since they might be thinking of a lot of different things. Neal Stephenson coined the word but he no longer owns it, and there’s no Académie Française that can act as the tech buzzword police and give an official definition. Instead ‘metaverse’ has taken on a life of its own, absorbing so many different concepts that I think the word is now pretty much meaningless – it conveys no meaning, and you have to ask, ‘well, what specifically are you asking about?” Read More

The metaverse can’t succeed if no one wants to be there, which Meta and other big metaverses seemingly don’t yet understand.

… At the 1990 SIGGRAPH conference for computer graphics and interactivity, where he appeared on a panel titled “Hip, hype and hope—the three faces of virtual worlds,” John Perry Barlow, a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was quoted as saying that bullshit is “the grease for the skids upon which we ride into the future.” As we watch Mark Zuckerberg click his avatar’s heels to show off virtual legs that don’t yet exist, and people clamor to pay too much money grabbing virtual land to immediately recreate entrenched landlord-tenant structures and financialized real estate, everything about the new metaverse hype seems to be riding that grease.

Corporations like Meta are attempting to manufacture enthusiasm for the metaverse (more specifically, its own metaverse). Clearly, it isn’t working. In its recent earnings report, Meta’s Reality Labs unit, which operates its metaverse and virtual reality projects, reported an almost 50 percent decline in revenue and an operating loss of $3.7 billion in the last year. Meanwhile, virtual social spaces like Roblox, VRChat, Rec Room, and Second Life already have loyal, active, creative user bases. People who were involved in these successful spaces told Motherboard what modern pushes toward a corporatized metaverse are missing.  Read More

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t subtle about picking a fight with Apple over the future of the metaverse.

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg sees the metaverse as a wondrous new stage of tech’s advancement, filled with opportunities to work, play and communicate in completely new ways than we do today. You could be watching an IMAX movie on the moon, or you could be holding a work conference in a Pirates of the Caribbean-inspired tavern. Or maybe you could be rocking out on stage with your favorite band. 

But while you look forward to how the tech industry’s vision of how the metaverse plays out, Zuckerberg is preparing for what appears to be the fight of his life. And it’ll be against Apple. Read More

…Digital Twins and Metaverse are both dynamic topics

…In a nutshell, digital twins can be seen as building blocks to the metaverse

In practice that means

1) Through an immersive mechanism, the metaverse provides a way to experience a digital twin
2)  the metaverse provides a way to collaborate through a digital twin
3)  Causal machine learning is an interesting area that I am interested in

Read More

The metaverse is full of promise. People are hopeful that this shared, interactive, immersive, and hyper-realistic virtual space will revolutionize the internet. Goldman Sachs has estimated that the metaverse could ultimately be an $8 trillion opportunity.

One particular promise of the metaverse is that it offers an opportunity to remedy some of the mistakes of Web 2.0 — in particular the failure of social media platforms to safeguard and protect marginalized and underrepresented people from hateful behavior online. Read More