A couple of weeks ago, Fortnite creators Epic Games announced $2billion in new funding, reserved for Epic’s metaverse plans. Facebook’s parent company Meta, said it would charge creators 47.5% on sales made through its virtual reality platform, Horizon Worlds.
So what does that mean and why should you care? These are some of the largest companies in the world and they are making sure their vision of the metaverse is what will be seen. However, don’t lose hope, we mere laymen on the ground floor with our Web3 skills will be able to actualize an effective metaverse.
I know it sounds daunting but there is already a general blueprint for making an open metaverse a reality and we can break it down into five characteristics of this general blueprint to understand first.
But first a quote:
“A single virtual reality domain, like Fortnite, is a virtual world.”
“A cluster of culturally or economically linked virtual worlds is a metagalaxy, e.g. Ethereum’s rising VR projects.”
“Then the totality of metaglaxies makes up the metaverse, i.e. a universe of VR spaces set to become increasingly interconnected and intertraversable as time goes on”
The fully grown version of the metaverse described above doesn’t exist yet…..the fate of the metaverse is being forged at this very moment. There is a growing number of us that are concerned with companies like Meta invading and dominating the virtual spaces with money centric goals but people like jin @dankvr are laying out pillars for us to move forward.
- Freedom of expression
We thrive on freedom of expression in our daily lives and we will want to express ourselves just as freely in the metaverse. Customizable avatars and customizable virtual worlds will be the key for freedom of expression in an open metaverse. Some examples of contemporary projects that have open source servers and fully customizable avatars include JanusXR, Vircadia, Webaverse, and XREngine.
- Freedom of transaction
The metaverse needs a neutral payment infrastructure so that people can effectively transact amongst their peers. Ethereum is the most decentralized and neutral infrastructure for digital payments today. Adding L2 scaling solutions and the efficiency and security of PoS into the mix, Ethereum is well poised to be the leading payment infrastructure for the freedom to transact IRL and metaversally for years to come.
- Open interoperability
The metaverse needs to thrive on open standards and open source technologies. Corporate worlds will soil the metaverse. Ethereum NFTs and Interplanetary File System (IPFS) are examples of promising open tech. And there are great things outside of the Web3 ecosystem like VRM, an open file format for 3D avatars, and WebXR, a series of standards for powering VR content on browsers. If we allow all these open innovations together, things will be very metaversal in no time.
- Right of exit
In an open metaverse, migrating your content to a different platform, e.g, customized avatars should be inexpensive and relatively easy. If a company creates projects that silo assets and discourages its users from portaling, then the company is working solely in self interest and not the interest of the open metaverse.
- Strong privacy guarantees
We need as a community to fight for the open metaverse. We need to counter mainstream corporate elites from harvesting data through their siloed VR activities. We can do this by building and supporting foundational privacy guarantees, i.e., the ability to self host servers. If we can ensure our own metaversal spaces outside of mainstream panopticons, we will maintain our privacy, and that is the main point of this type of technology now isn’t it?!
