Is it Time for the Metaverse?
An interesting discussion broke out at the end of the pre-lunch panel here at SDForum. Daniel James of Three Rings (makers of Puzzle Pirates) took issue with Philip Rosedale’s earlier statement that “the time is now” to build the metaverse. The tools available now are “rickety,” at best, James said. He sees ten years from now as the time when there will the kind of ubiquitous adoption of metaverse technologies in the way that people use the Web today. Furthermore, he argued, the metaverse will move to an open-source model. Until then, we’ll see tooth-and-nail Darwinian evolution and eventually survival of the fittest. Will Harvey of IMVU disagreed.
When he founded There.com, he said, “our phone wasn’t exactly ringing off the hook with calls from people looking to start companies in our world.” As Harvey put it, the metaverse isn’t a virtual world in itself. “There will be a collection of companies that will offer pieces of the formula,” he said.
Sibley Verbeck of the Electric Sheep Company also saw the mature metaverse as being ten years off. “This is like 1994 on the Web,” he said. In contract to Harvey, “My phone is ringing off the hook now, and it’s not because i’m in any better posotion than you were a few years ago, it’s just timing.” With the advent of Web 2.0 tools and sites, moving into the metaverse is not as big a leap, Verbeck pointed out. Things are still in an early stage, but Verbeck saw things coalescing in the five-year time frame, rather then ten.
Shital Mehta of Shanth Interactive argued that it would largely be up to the resiodents of virtual worlds to make the kinds of decisions that are on the horizon.
Daniel James wound up the conversation with an excellent point: “The residents will decide, but it’s the residents who aren’t there yet who will make that decision.” He’s absolutely right. The decisions about what kind of metaverse we’ll have in the future will be made by the vast body of people who will be its everyday users. The people now in the metaverse are the early adopters. They’re responsible for getting things going, but control will eventually pass out of their hands.
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[…] No doubt, liberation remains a tough strategy to swallow in these early years of corporate transparency, but it’s the shortest path to obtaining the best service. (FWIW, here’s another great graphic from Genuine Incorporated.) Not to repeat Mark Wallace, but the questions of how long it takes for the metaverse to gain traction, and which platforms will emerge or converge in that time will be, as Daniel James concluded in the SDForum today, up to the users. […]