What is the Metaverse?

Unknown: This is Building the Metaverse with Jon Radoff. John, how are you?

Guest: Awesome. Thanks, Josh. I'm so glad to hear it. We are going to be defining the Metaverse today and I'm going to just let you take it away. Yeah, it's a big task.

Jon Radoff: A lot of people are talking about the Metaverse and I think people mean different things by it when they're talking about it. So I'll share with you how I think about the Metaverse, which I think will capture a lot. But I think, first and foremost, the Metaverse to me is it's the next generation of the internet. And it should also be said that it's a next generation that's already in progress. We're building it. We're living in the Metaverse already. It's not just a future state that we're going to get through down the road. It's something we have right now. And I'll cover a little bit about what some of those experiences are, how it's put together, what the structure of the industry looks like. But I think kind of that some of the defining characteristics is it's decentralized. It's about activities and experiences, more so than transactions. And it's really driven by this enormous number of creators that are making content, making experiences for the Metaverse. So that's the headline. I guess to move it into

Unknown: the language of the concrete, I think it's easiest for people to start thinking about the Metaverse

Jon Radoff: in terms of what does it do. So in terms of what it does, it's about having experiences, having activities to do. It's about being a person in a space, being yourself there. And that's a little bit different than most of the internet so far. So most of the internet, it's about transactions, about buying stuff, it's about accessing information. With one notable exception, which is very, very relevant to how I think about the Metaverse and how it's going to continue to proceed forward, which is games. Games are an activity that we've had in the Metaverse for quite a few years now. And that's where you're in a place and you're a self there. You're a person doing stuff activities, often with other people, sometimes by yourself, but it's activity based as opposed to just transactionally getting information. So as we think about the Metaverse growing from here, it's going to be very, very informed by games and gaming technology, the immersive, the real-time nature of it, the idea that the Metaverse is a place for activities as opposed to information access. And that leads to a lot of things that you can do. Of course, games, which I've already mentioned, is going to be a big part of it. There's going to be more and more games. Games are a $200 billion industry today. It's going to be some multiple of that, not too far future. But game technology continuing to inform a lot of what's happening in the Metaverse, whether it's the third place for communities and social interaction, immersive social experiences that you have with your friends online, whether it's collaborating with people, zoom conferences, real-time work, learning, training, that's going to be a big part of it. But also just even the way we traditionally use the internet is going to be transformed by it, so the things that are informing you or telling stories, experiencing stories, escaping, that's going to be a big part of it as well. But increasingly supported by real-time technology, immersive stuff, and being in places and spaces is a big part of where the Metaverse goes next. So that's kind of what the Metaverse does. I think you can reduce out of that a few of the properties of the Metaverse, like how do we define

Unknown: the features that support those kind of experiences? So number one, I said it has this emphasis on

Jon Radoff: activities. It's not that you won't be transacting things and accessing information, but it's really going to be defined by the activities that you do. And activity is almost by their nature. They are real-time. They're things you're doing as opposed to an asynchronous activity where you're just access information that could have been done in any order. They're in immersive places, which means it's everything from worlds and virtual worlds that you access through 2D devices to virtual reality, to augmented reality, which is essentially the Metaverse bleeding back into the real world that surrounds us. You're going to have linking and embedding of this content. So the internet was built on the premise of LinkedIn Embedded Content, first with the original domain name system that linked all these internet services together. And then the worldwide web that built upon that, it was the idea of having information resources that were linkable and embeddable with each other. Now you'll be able to have LinkedIn Embedded Real-time Systems and Content. So what goes along with that is really this exponential rise in creators, which I think is another feature of the Metaverse. So for years now, we've made it easier and easier for creators to craft the more

Unknown: transactional aspects of the internet. So making a web page with blogs and wikis and website creation

Jon Radoff: tools or making an e-commerce experience a lot easier, like Shopify, for example, makes it very easy today for anyone really to launch a shop online. But that was the transactional phase of the internet. The Metaverse being much more activity-centric, it gets harder because we're talking about crafting spaces and experiences and 3D graphics becomes part of it. And real-time connectivity between people and social interactions really adds a lot of complexity to crafting these experiences. So that's requiring a whole new set of tools to help creators make stuff for these spaces. And many of these tools are coming along already. And we can talk another way about the Metaverse, which is the layers and the technologies are essentially industrial structure around the Metaverse that's making this possible. And if I jump to this graphic that I've put together, which is this

Unknown: onion diagram of the seven layers of the Metaverse, I think of it as experiences at the top or the

Jon Radoff: outside of the onion, which is, you know, again, that's what people do with the Metaverse. That's why someone would care about the Metaverse. Everything else really just supports it. When I talk about games, immersive social experiences, the way shopping and immersive theater and eSports and all these other things are going to be transformed by the real-time nature of the Metaverse and the immersiveness of the Metaverse. Below that experience layer, there's a whole bunch of other things that makes it all possible. So right under experiences, the discovery layer. So this is part of the Metaverse as well. And that's everything that helps someone discover the experiences that they're going to have. So that's everything from curated portals that give you the lists of things that you could consume, ad networks that lead you to the next thing that you might want to try. All the forms of curation, ratings, stores, agents that are going to recommend things to you, that's the discovery layer. And that's very, very important. Otherwise, people aren't going to find much of anything on there other than what their friends might tell them, which of course, itself is a really important part of discovery. And there's things that will in fact support the word of mouth nature of Metaverse experiences. But that discovery layer is the second piece down under experience. So what I was mentioning on the minute ago was the creator economy layer that sits beneath that. So to really enable all this content that we're going to be experiencing in the future, the creator economy is everything that makes it easy to go direct from imagination on to people's screens and devices. So already there's a lot of technologies that support that certainly for 2D graphics. That's everything Adobe has been doing for years, for example. And then there's now a lot of 3D technologies as well that allow the creation of the front end of that experience. So that's unity, unreal, everything that supports that ability to create that immersive content that people are experiencing. But it also includes everything that's below that as well. So for example, my own company B-Mobile is in the business of creating all that business infrastructure that helps you create a business around this online game or immersive content that you've been creating in Unity. And there's a whole host of companies that are attacking different parts of the puzzle, whether it's managing virtual goods, economies or creating even AI technologies to support parts of that. That's the creator economy that that enables millions and millions of people to create the content in the experiences of the metaverse. Below that, you've got spatial computing, which I think of as the software layer that supports a lot of the immersiveness. So it's not the creative tools. It's the stuff that the creative tools are built on top of. So that also includes unity and unreal, the 3D environments, what they call 3D engines. It's VR, AR, AI technologies for things that will enable the interactions you have in these spaces. It's the multitasking user interfaces, like all that cool stuff inspired by like minority report, augmented reality interfaces, for example. You're going to see more and more of that just enabling the multiple layers and data feeds that are happening within the metaverse. Below that, decentralization, very, very important, fundamental concept that the internet was built on. So the domain name system that I mentioned earlier, the domain name system was one of the earliest forms of decentralization on the internet. It allowed different domain names and services to be deployed on the internet that could connect to each other and operate within one internet, but without a central authority. Well, over time, that has been expanded to include other things, such as the World Wide Web, is essentially decentralized blockchain technologies for the exchange of crypto assets is very fundamentally decentralized for most applications of it. Cloud computing has allowed decentralization of the computing infrastructure in certain ways. So decentralization, very, very important part of the way this stuff is actually technically built. Below that, you've got the human interface hardware technologies. So of course, our screens, our mobile devices that we carry around with us are part of the human interfaces into the metaverse. But over time, we're going to see more and more of this bringing closer to our bodies. So whether it's like this wearable technology that I've got on my wrist or in the future, smart glasses that we wear to project us right into the augmented reality of the metaverse, whether it's VR technologies that we actually put on our heads and like build the computing experience completely around us. We're bringing the experience of the metaverse closer and closer to our bodies hardware. Way down the road, that might even be like neural technologies and things like that, but brain computer interfaces. That's like way off. Even smart glasses, frankly, are a few years away in terms of really getting long battery life enough and immersive enough, the ergonomics really ready enough to be used at scale for most consumers, but it's waiting out there. That's part of the metaverse that is going to be built in the future. And then at the very core of this in the seven layers, the metaverse, the infrastructure layer. So everything that we're actually talking about here requires higher and higher speed semiconductors, smaller and smaller chips, higher speed networking, of course, 5G, which a lot of people talk about, but 5G is just one step on the way to 6G and much faster speed networks. It's about the transformation of the cloud, not only to a bunch of big cloud computing resources that you can get access to, but pushing it further and further out to the edge. So edge computing will be down the street to in your house to maybe even just in your pocket, right? So the smart glasses I was talking about might actually just talk to a very powerful device that sits in your pocket, so you don't have to wear it on your head. You know, it's all of that stuff. It's batteries, it's things like that that enable the metaverse to be a bigger and bigger part of our lives. So that's the that's the seven layers of the metaverse. And then another way you could talk about what the metaverse is is who are the companies that are building it. So I put together this market map that characterizes many of the companies that are already building it. Of course, there's many, many more people tell me about more companies that I've got to add to this all the time and I'll continue to update this regularly with more companies. But this metaverse market map is just a way to make somewhat I've just described somewhat tangible in that. You can start to think in terms of who are the companies that are building at say the experience layer. So certainly, you know, people like Epic with games like Fortnite or Niantic, you know, they're building experiences that are very much part of the metaverse. Right now you can experience the metaverse today, but that is not the metaverse. Those are individual metaverses that make up this whole what I sometimes call the multiverse of metaverses that are going to exist. You've got companies like my company, Beemable or Unity or Epic that are building that creator economy. So this is just kind of a road map of some of the companies that are already investing heavily in it. And of course, some of the large big tech companies like Microsoft and Facebook and whatnot are really occupied many tiers of the market already. But to sum it up, really, the metaverse is the next generation of the internet. And it's going to have real-time experience activities that you do. And it's very much powered by this decentralized network of creators that are going to be going direct from the imagination, right to the screen and right to your experiences. That's the metaverse.

Guest: John, thank you so much for taking the time today to share this information and defining what

Jon Radoff: the metaverse is. Yeah, I had a lot of fun. I love talking about the metaverse and I'll be talking about it a lot more. I think one of the things you're going to see as I talk about things is just how important games are, not just as entertainment, but games are going to inform everything that's built in the metaverse for like the next 20 years.

Guest: Thank you so much for listening to Building the Metaverse with Jon Radoff. For more information on the metaverse, head over to jradoft.medium.com to check out all of John's articles. If you want to jump into the conversation about the metaverse, connect with John on Twitter

Unknown: at JRadoft.