Metaverse: Ein ideologischer Krieg?

 

The Metaverse is engulfed in an ideological war. What is at stake for Big Tech?

Das Metaverse: eine zukünftige Version des Internets, über die jeder gerne prahlt, die es aber noch nicht wirklich gibt. Wie wir im ersten Teil erörtert haben, ist ein Großteil der technischen Infrastruktur, die für den Aufbau des Metaverse (jenseits des heutigen Hypes) erforderlich ist, noch in Arbeit. Die monumentale Aufgabe, verschiedene Technologien auf eine noch nie dagewesene Weise zusammenzubringen, ist nicht einmal die größte Herausforderung beim Aufbau eines voll funktionsfähigen und wirklich offenen Metaverse.

Interoperability an important key

Interoperability can be explained as the ability of different systems and platforms to interact seamlessly with each other. This ability is fundamental to the creation of a "metaverse" as opposed to several distinct "metaverses" in their own right. In a fully developed metaverse, users should be able to carry their avatar from platform to platform, along with any NFT objects associated with that avatar, such as clothing and accessories.

These should be fully owned by the user and not under the control of any particular centralized platform. For this to become a reality, many key players must first agree on the basic rules and language that will make up a working metaverse.

The technology sector is stepping on the gas!

The technology sector has recognized this challenge and is making various efforts to meet it. The effort was launched in 2022 by the World Economic Forum in an initiative titled "Defining and Building the Metaverse." According to the WEF, the initiative will accelerate the sharing of insights and solutions that bring the Metaverse to life among global business leaders, civil society and governments. Another project is the Metaverse Standards Forum, which defines itself as "a place for collaboration between standards organizations and companies to promote the development of interoperability standards for an open and inclusive metaverse".

The Forum launched in June 2022 with 35 launch companies including Meta Platforms, Microsoft Corporation, Sony, Adobe, Autodesk, NVIDIA Corporation, QUALCOMM, Unity and Epic Games. Two weeks later, the forum, which is open to all organizations and there is no charge to attend, had 1,000 participants and the number is still growing. "This is the first time we have attempted to achieve this level of coordination between multiple standards bodies and for-profit stakeholders," said Neil Trevett, the Forum's Chair.

What exactly is the Metaverse?

Trevett is vice president of developer ecosystems at Nvidia, where he has worked for the past 17 years, and president of the Khronos Group, a nonprofit consortium of organizations developing royalty-free interoperability standards for 3D graphics, virtual reality, augmented reality, and more. “What is the metaverse by definition? The answer is we don't know,” says Trevett. "The only thing we know is that it will bring together a range of technologies that have never had to work together before."

The creation of open standards is a central element of this endeavor. "We're making the building blocks for the Metaverse, even though we don't know what the 'Metaverse Cathedral' will look like in the end," Trevett said. The most obvious technologies that need to work across platforms relate to the seamless operation of 3D and virtual reality.

Ein Beispiel ist die Übertragung von 3D-Objekten oder Avataren von einer virtuellen Welt in eine andere, was zu einer noch größeren Herausforderung werden kann, wenn man bedenkt, dass im Metaverse die meisten Objekte als vom Benutzer erstellte Inhalte generiert werden. „Wenn Sie viel Mühe in die Erstellung Ihres Avatars oder eines anderen Objekts, Ihres Rennwagens oder was auch immer, investiert haben, werden Sie es mitnehmen wollen“, sagt Trevett.

A 3D object has a typical visual appearance

A typical 3D object in a game usually has a specific visual appearance, geometry, set of textures and animations that make it e.g. B. make it a sword and not a dog. The 3D object also contains meta information about how it behaves in a specific virtual world. "If it has a physics engine running on it, the runtime assigns properties to that object," says Trevett. These properties include weight (or how it is affected by gravity), density (does it float or sink?), and other characteristics.

Today, most platforms and video games deal with these problems in different ways, ranging from the file types they use to host these objects to the programming language in which the objects themselves are written. In Trevett's words, 3D assets need to be turned into "metaverse assets," and standardization is key, "so that everyone can agree on a portable way to map these behaviors to 3D assets.

„Dafür gibt es noch keine offenen Standards.“ Eines der aktuellen Projekte des Forums konzentriert sich auf die Einigung auf ein Dateiformat für 3D-Objekte, das plattformübergreifend funktioniert und alle Informationen enthält, die der Benutzer auf das Objekt anwenden möchte. Die Bemühungen des Forums beschränken sich jedoch nicht nur auf die Technik hinter einer 3D-Version des Internets.

The challenge of data protection

In addition to many other technical problems to be solved (e.g. networks that can host thousands or millions of users at the same time), rules for ethics and privacy in the metaverse must also be established and agreed upon. For Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu, the technical aspects of a fully functioning metaverse are not the main problem to solve. Rather, it must be ensured that all digital property rights are enshrined in law.

According to Meta, a key aspect of the Metaverse is that it transcends national borders while creating a whole new economic ecosystem, with its own currencies and a range of incentives for users and other stakeholders to want to participate, contribute and use the platforms .

In a truly open and decentralized metaverse, stakeholders need to agree on what incentives to apply to deliver value to users while allowing businesses to make a profit. "The challenge of universal metaverse standards is solved when incentives are similarly aligned between all groups," says Siu.

Communities should be created

Ideally, these incentives will not mimic today's classic Web2 model of offering free products and services to monetize and sell private user data. "There are absolutely a lot of new business models being introduced with the advent of Web3, and they're more about creating communities and allowing those communities [and individuals] to interact with each other," says Saro McKenna, co-founder of the Alien platform worlds

One possible model that circumvents these dynamics works by charging platform fees on user transactions, similar to taxation in a real economy. Being a person who exists in the real world has no cost per se, but there are costs associated with maintaining that existence, which is the basis of the human economy. This dynamic can be emulated in the metaverse. If the metaverse becomes truly decentralized, users will not be forced to trade their NFT assets on a specific platform, which is an advantage over a tax system that, in many cases, functions as a monopoly. "When I say free, I mean free at the level of the rules of the game, not necessarily that every single thing is free," says McKenna.

"When you create these communities, people feel very loyal to these communities and are willing to buy things." McKenna explains the model isn't that different from a freemium model, but "it's also about selling goods and services to people within this metaverse economy."

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