Metaverse. A word with which we could associate an infinity of definitions, an incalculable number of notions and various functionalities. However, we can try to explain what it was, what it is now and what we could envision for its future. When we talk about the Metaverse, we hear
video games, NFT, cryptocurrency, virtual reality,... We especially hear the word “complexity”, mostly because we don’t understand it. Sometimes we even fear it because it constitutes a significant change, a kind of fuzzy
digital revolution that seems to once again upset everything we thought we knew. Yet it is only a revolution if it is sudden and violent. The metaverse, on the other hand, has developed quite slowly, and a bit secretly.
The idea has been lingering in the minds of avant-gardist minds for decades. An
interlacing of virtual universes ? A copy of our world where we could create our
own universe with infinite possibilities ? An
escape from our so rational surroundings?
This subject therefore raises many questions, which we asked ourselves as we gradually discovered what this concept is on its own. It was then necessary to understand how our communication and advertising will adapt to a progressive switch in our link to the virtual. How are brands and agencies going to
adapt, how are they going to
innovate and use these tools and this access to bring
new creative opportunities.
Many questions arose during our research process and we’ve gathered them and their answers in a folder named
Breaking the codes of Metaverse. The following articles have been written by
Ana Alexandrescu,
Lena Baranzini,
Erin De Rouck and
Zoé Guyon. These four Master’s students in Advertising and Commercial Communication (IHECS) will guide you through their discovery journey surrounding the metaverse.
Avatars created with
Ready Player Me.
1950s - 1970s
In line with the era, various authors and film writers fathomed over the future. During these decades, many visionaries depicted a highly connected and gadget-filled lifestyle to which any common man would become accustomed to. As if the hyper-futuristic projections that former generations made about the years 2000 weren’t extravagant and far enough from the reality of the mid-20th century, it seemed as if men would have become one with technology, therefore forever tied and constantly tethered to the machines they had naturally developed and indulged in.
- 1962 - Sensorama : Morton Leonard Heilig (1926 – 1997) was an American pioneer in virtual reality (VR) technology and a filmmaker. Applying his cinematographic experience, with some help, he developed the Sensorama. It is known as one of the earliest examples of immersive, multi-sensory (or multimodal) technology. Heilig saw theater as an activity that could encompass all the senses in an effective manner, thus drawing the viewer into the onscreen activity.
In 1962, he built a prototype of his vision along with five short films for it to display. The device was big, bulky, and shaped like a 1980s era video arcade game, and quite impressive and avant-gardist for 1960s technology. Heilig could generally be considered as a modern-day "multimedia" specialist.
During the 1960s, another important development was occurring on the State’s side, the US. In memos describing the idea of the
Intergalactic Computer Network, computer scientists developed the first concepts for a computer network designed to facilitate widespread communications among computer users.
- 1963 - ARPANET : J. C. R. Licklider developed the first concepts for a computer network, in which many of the components of the modern Internet were included. Licklider was named director of the Behavioral Sciences and Command and Control programs at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Defense Department in October 1963. Before ceding his work title, he persuaded Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor about the project and passed on the importance and the urgency of its development.
With the intent of
sharing knowledge, in order to make way for more efficient communication, this network of computers slowly grew in number and quality. This network allowed for the first time a possibility to
decentralize information, making it accessible not only remotely but without the necessity to go through an institution to obtain it.
- In 1969, the first computers were interconnected, and in 1971, the network was deemed operational. Email, file transmission, and remote login were made possible by further software development. Future research and technologies made the ARPANET program a forerunner to the Internet that the US Department of Defense funded for strict use in academic and research facilities.
Virtual worlds have been around much longer than computers. Amongst other preoccupations, even dating back to the Greek lyrical poet Simonides of Ceos or the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, perceptual illusions and
memory palaces have been on the menu. Discussions surrounding the
human imagination and our
mental storage capacities have continuously preoccupied philosophers and modern thinkers. This explains in some sorts our fascination and our search for mediums that would mend both.
- 1973/1974 - Maze War : Amongst others, Maze War can claim to be the first 3D client-server networked game, broadcasted on the ARPANET. The multi-user first-person shooter game popularized the idea of Internet users as "eyeball 'avatars' chasing each other around in a maze”. The users had the option to embody an avatar in order to play. This marks the first instance of role play in digital gaming.
The initial edition of Maze War had been designed and coded for a specific type of computer used at that time, the 1970s Imlac.
The user-driven success of this game played an important role into the further development of computing technologies, even though the graphics remained rudimentary at best.
Screenshot of the game
Maze War played on an Imlac PDS-1D at the Computer History Museum event (2004). Later on,
during the 1970s,
communities and
chat rooms were the first virtual worlds to be offered on the ARPANET.
- 1978 - Multi-User Dungeon (M.U.D.) : some of these communities later developed into MUDs (Multi-User Domains), virtual environments where lots of players communicate in real time.
Early versions were text-based, and only provided a limited amount of graphical representation. Users can read or watch descriptions of the universe and other participants and can type commands to interact in role-playing or competitive games.
The
original 1978 M.U.D. found inspiration for its storyboard from the 1976 Cave Adventure game.
Screenshot of the game
Multi user dungeon (still online since 1996).
1980s - 1990s
Although the original version of the Internet appeared in the distant past,
during the 1990s, after collaborations with the computer and telecommunications industries, the private sector guaranteed the
expansion and the future commercialization
of an extended global network known as the Internet, therefore formally discontinuing the
ARPANET project.
Techno-utopians promised that the Internet will
provide everyone access to all of the world's knowledge. It actually did that in several regions of the world. However, the Internet was still mostly a novelty for most.
- 1987 - Habitat : Created by LucasFilm Games for the Commodore 64 computer and operated on the Quantum Link service, Habitat is typically credited as the first online virtual environment, the first large-scaled graphics-based virtual community. Habitat can be considered a true precursor to MMORGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game), equally announcing the genre’s impending fame.
Check out its
1986 promotional video.
Similarly to the advent of Maze War in the 1970s, games are still being coded and developed in particular languages and made specifically compatible to certain operating systems. Almost 10 years later, Habitat confronts itself to the technological limitations of its times. The arrival of the Internet will change the tides, unifying coding languages and their interpreting machines.
- 1989 - World Wide Web : At first intended as a document management system, the Web was co-created by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, and Belgian engineer Robert Cailleu (BE) at CERN. A workable system, which included the World Wide Web browser and an HTTP server, was implemented by the end of 1990.
Web 1.0 was a static, read-only experience. The pioneering spirit of "freedom" and decentralization, however, was there. Although a new digital future held promise, most people could not access it, even though it became
demilitarized and public in 1991.
The Internet experience remained mainly a one-way interaction though, outside of certain chat niches like
Usenet newsgroups (discussion groups). Although its first iteration was mainly focused on making information accessible at the fingertips of a growing number of users, all through the 1990s, a plethora of
chat rooms and
virtual worlds made
peer-to-peer communication between every corner of our globe possible. These were the places-to-be, where techno-utopians could exchange their ideas about freedom, expression, decentralization, and what the future could look like.
Most notably, Snow Crash turned out to be a rather realistic view into a future of digitization that is currently manifesting itself, despite being published while the Internet was still in its infancy.
- 1992 - Snow Crash : science fiction novel by Neal Stenphenson, where the term metaverse was born (as a blend of the words meta and universe). It imagined a futuristic VR-based Internet. In addition, Stenphenson envisions a subculture of people who choose to use portable terminals, goggles, and other devices to stay constantly linked to the Metaverse. These characters are known as "gargoyles" due to their bizarre look.
The year
1992 is equally marked by the surpassing of a symbolic threshold :
1 million computers are connected to the Internet and to each other, worldwide. Most people could only hear through different news outlets about this promise of a digital future, very few had yet the means or the urge to join the Internet frenzy.
- 1995 - Active Worlds : collection of hundreds of unique user-created virtual worlds that may be accessed using an avatar, the user's customizable digital duplicate. Since there is neither a purpose nor a goal, neither a point nor a classification, it is not a game strictly speaking. It allows users to connect with individuals from all over the world to play games or communicate, even through the microphone.
The 3D environment is interactive and combines text, image, sound, and video, basically most senses that you can stimulate through a computer. To create various initiatives, such as the planning of meetings, games, tournaments, exhibitions, or weddings, users gather together in communities.
The
90s decade welcomed the term
cyberspace which refers to a
system of widely used, interconnected digital technology. The phrase was initially used during the first decade of the Internet's widespread use. It describes the online world as a "world apart" from reality as we know it. According to Don Slater, is "the notion of a social environment that exists exclusively within a space of representation and communication... it resides entirely within a computer space, diffused over increasingly sophisticated and fluid networks”, as he defines it. During the 1990s, particularly
in academic settings and activist societies, the term
cyberspace simply became a
synonym for the Internet and eventually the
World Wide Web.
Amongst other authors,
John Perry Barlow is credited as having used the term initially to allude to "
the present-day nexus of computer and telecommunications networks". This all-present, all-knowing meaning of the Internet was popularized by author Bruce Sterling. This thought occurred to him while considering that 150 years ago, people used the telegraph to play chess; those fictitious chessboards weren't situated at each end of the wire. In his essay published in June 1990 to announce the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Barlow explains it as follows, using a spatial metaphor :
All conversation in this silent world is typed.
- 1996 - Netscape : before the first browser war, more than 90% of Internet users were using the Netscape browser. The browser war is a struggle for supremacy in web browser usage. The first commercially available web browser with a graphical user interface was Netscape Navigator. It made using the World Wide Web simpler. Navigator temporarily held the top spot among web browsers, a turning point in the years of the internet boom.
The same year, Microsoft released the initial iteration of Internet Explorer. Microsoft enjoyed a significant advantage since it could bundle Explorer with its widely used operating system and place it prominently in the majority of newly sold personal computers. Since the release of Internet Explorer, which came with Windows for free, its market share has been rapidly declining.
2000s
We have grown to entrust our every move even more intertwined with technology. Our latest stages of
modernisation have indulged in
digitalisation. We’ve transformed the very foundation of our
goods-based economies, forever
untying monetary systems from precious metal reserves, rendering money into free-floating currencies. As far as
economic bubbles go, they have happened throughout history, and they're most probably bound to happen again : dot-com-, property-, housing-, cryptocurrency-bubble,... to name a few.
Watch more regarding the events of the early 21st century, and how it isn’t as
unique as it was thought to be.
At the dawn of the 21st century, a speculative bubble known as the Internet bubble or technology bubble afflicted "technology stocks," or companies involved in the computer and telecommunications industries, on the stock markets in the late 1990s.
In 1998–1999, low lending rates encouraged a surge in new businesses. Even while some of these new business owners had practical plans and managerial skills, the majority lacked these qualities but were nevertheless able to pitch their ideas to investors due to the novelty of the dot-com notion.
The railroad in the 1840s, the automobile in the early 20th century, the transistor electronics in the 1950s, computer time-sharing in the 1960s, and the in-home computers and biotechnology of the 1980s are all inventions that can be considered as impactful and socially changing as the dot-com boom.
Watch the "Dot Con", a documentary by Frontline, a PBS production (2002).
- 2001 - Animal Crossing : social simulation game designed for the Nintendo GameCube, where the player's character is a human living in an anthropomorphic animal town who can engage in a variety of hobbies like fishing, insect capturing, and fossil digging. The series is renowned for its open-ended gameplay and use of the internal clock and calendar of the video game console to simulate the passing of actual time.
- 2003 - Second Life (then and now) : multi-player online multimedia platform that enables users to design their own avatars and then engage with other users and user-generated material. The users of Second Life, sometimes known as "residents," construct virtual versions of themselves, known as avatars, that they may interact with in real-world settings as well as other avatars and things. Resembling a MMORPG, the proprietor Liden Lab assures that in contrary to those games, Second Life doesn’t manufacture any conflict, neither contains any set objective or mission.
Check out what the founder has been up to in order to maintain an interesting game experience, maybe immersive even without VR-headsets.
The
Web 2.0 era, which spans
from 2000 to 2010 and for some even continues nowadays, is also known as the social web or read-write web. It is characterized by websites that enable user-to-user communication and information. Today, any user can create material, and it is distributed and shared across websites. It still constitutes a
one-way communication system where users complete forms or platforms and then submit their data to web servers. Databases have sluggish network connectivity and little bandwidth.
Web 2.0 provides
interaction to users in certain ways
but does not allow them fully interact with the web, to put it in layman's terms. Popular Web 2.0 applications include Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and others.
Web technologies like HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript, among others, empower entrepreneurs with fresh concepts that empower users to participate on the social web. Web 2.0 is designed with the user in mind; producers only need to create tools that will enable and engage them.
Illustration of the
differences between the Web 1.0. era and the Web 2.0. era (increase in number of web sites, user generated content, global users and change in interactivity with the Internet) by Lipika. (2016).
What is Web 2.0? ZNETLIVE. Information architecture consultant Darcy DiNucci conceived the
term Web 2.0 in her article
Fragmented Future. It was popularized by Tim O'Reilly and MediaLive International in 2004.
- 2006 - Roblox : Erik Cassel and David Baszucki developed the renowned online game platform, which offers user-made games programmed in Lua. Roblox was a relatively modest firm and platform for the majority of its existence. In the second half of the 2010s, Roblox started to expand quickly. The COVID-19 epidemic has hastened its expansion.
- 2007 - iPhone 3G : At the Macworld 2007 event held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Steve Jobs unveiled the first-generation iPhone to the general audience. The iPhone had a 3.5-inch multi-touch display with few hardware buttons, ran the touch-friendly iPhone OS operating system, and was touted as a Mac OS X alternative. This marked the incredible soar in mobile telecommunications. Thereafter, mobile gaming and software development have noticed the same success.
- 2008 - PlayStation Home : Sony Computer Entertainment created a virtual 3D social game environment for PlayStation 3. Users of Home could design their own avatars and cultivate them realistically. They could customize each avatar's personal abode with stuff they had won, purchased, or received for free. Users may go throughout the Home world, which Sony and its partners periodically update. Public areas were designed for networking, entertainment, presentation, and advertising. The main advertising mediums in Home were the venues themselves, video screens, posters, and mini-games.
- 2010 - World of Warcraft : Blizzard Entertainment launched a MMORPG in 2004. Similar to other games of this sort, World of Warcraft is set in the Warcraft fantasy universe and takes place within the realm of Azeroth. Players can create a character avatar and explore an open game world in third- or first-person view while observing the scenery, slaying various monsters, completing quests, and interacting with non-player characters or other players.
The game may be played alone without interacting with others, but it encourages teamwork to accomplish quests, explore dungeons, and participate in player versus player combat. Its great economic and critical success depended upon its initial release, and over time, the most well-known MMORPG ever. In 2010, the game reached a pinnacle in popularity with 12 million subscribers.
2010s
These days, thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning, our machines havec can be qualified as thinking, in a sense that they are capable of comprehending data similarly to humans. They can support the intelligent creation and dissemination of helpful information adapted to a user's specific needs.
The Web 3.0 period, from 2010 and later, refers to the web's future and is also known as the Semantic Web or read-write-execute. 2011 marks the beginning of a new period that is anticipated to last till 2020. The Web 3.0 age is teaching us about a variety of technological legacies that will help us go forward in daily life.
Web 2.0 has been completely reinvented by it. It constitutes the latest model for web interaction, and marks a fundamental shift in how programmers build websites and, more importantly, how consumers interact with them. It has greatly improved people's online lives because it has rendered searches more intelligent, enabling them to precisely find the information we seek.
Graph predicting the
Future Internet by V. Madurai, in his
article about Web Evolution From 1.0 to 3.0.
We are accepting somehow that computers could
comprehend the underlying meaning of data. What if they could discover
what we are truly interested in, and therefore might be able to assist us in finding what we desire. It may identify individuals, places, events, businesses, products, movies, etc. It can comprehend how objects relate to one another. Wolfram Alpha, Google's Cloud API, and Apple's Siri are a few instances of web 3.0.
- 2013 – League of Legends : another multi-player battle arena (MOBA) is witnessing a staggering amount of fame and recognition as a top-teer game but also as a sought out and watched event. Riot, the company at the head of League of Legends, sells out its tickets for the game’s finals, in one of the US’ most prestigious facilities, the Staples Centre. For the first time in history, an online occupation that could barely get recognised as an e-sport is not only establishing itself in the gaming industry, a promising market, but also inviting the entire world to join.
These sorts of events multiplied over the years. Since the early 2000s and later in the 2010s, with the success of video renting (Blockbusters, Netflix),
streaming has been introduced through different mediums to consumers. May it be for movies and shows, through the service providers’ on-demand offers or personal computers and mobile phones, consumers are getting more accustomed to
being in charge of what they watch and enjoy.
- 2014 – Twitch : Amazon takes that leap of faith and bets on the gaming industry by becoming an important component in video and gaming streaming. Beating YouTube’s offer of acquisition to the punch, with the $970 million purchase of Twitch, Amazon acquires the online platform allowing peer-to-peer streaming and watching, users can enjoy others’ game plays by broadcasting their screens directly to the viewers, interacting with fanbases via comments and hosting meetings with their communities outside of strictly playing games.
- 2014 – Minecraft : A "sandbox" style adventure video game (totally free construction), Minecraft was created by the Swedish developer Markus Persson, often known by the alias Notch, and later by the firm Mojang Studios. It is a procedurally generated environment made of voxels (contraction of “volume” and “pixel”), that includes a crafting system based on the extraction and subsequent modification of natural resources (mineralogical, fossil, animal and vegetable). Microsoft reportedly purchased the firm and the game for $2,5 billion.
- 2018 – Fortnite : online video game developed by Epic Games, with different game modes that share the same gameplay and motor (software components that calculate geometrical and physical formulas needed in video games). There are 2 main game modes :
- a cooperative 3 person-shooter game conceived for 4 players maximum which scope is killing zombies and defending objects with various fortifications, and
- a battle royale free-to-play mode where 100 players fight to their defeat, leaving a sole survivor.
Although both games have been of tremendous success for Epic Games,
Fortnite Battle Royale has become a true
societal phenomenon, appealing to more than 125 million users and generating hundreds of millions of dollars per month in profit. In 2018 alone, Fortnite netted $3 billion in sales for its firm.
2020s
We can only imagine all the activities we pursue online today, from acquiring information and learning, to socializing and playing. Over the last 2 decades, the building blocks of what was merely fathomed in fictional worlds, in sci-fi books, in discourses from various avant-gardists (like David Bowie once predicted in 1999 during an interview for BBC Newsnight), have slowly become our surrounding reality.
- 2020 – Decentraland : 3D virtual reality platform composed of 90 601 parcels, each being a non-fungible token, bought using the MANA cryptocurrency and coded in the Ethereum blockchain. A non-profit organization with the same name has overseen the platform since it was opened to the public in 2020. It is regarded as the metaverse's forerunner.
A year later, on a similar platform named
Sandbox, virtual land adjacent to
Snoop Dogg’s estate sells for $450.000 in ETH.
- 2021 – Facebook : The social media site that first gained notoriety more than 20 years ago reveals its rebranding, with a nod to its upcoming digital frontier metaverse. Meta Platforms, or Meta, will be a merger of many virtual realms. The conglomerate’s products and services include Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Meta Quest (the latest VR headset developed by Meta after acquiring Oculus in 2014).
At a virtual gathering to highlight Facebook's future technology goals, Zuckerberg said he had been considering the company's identity a lot. "I hope we become known as a metaverse company over time", he strongly believes. Following the pandemic, the term metaverse gained popularity as augmented, virtual, and online realities merged to offer people new experiences.
The metaverse - the overlapping of the digital and physical worlds - is still a concept in development that depends not just on supporting technologies like VR and AR, but also on the innovative ideas and content it can give. Shared virtual worlds are designed to be experienced in a variety of ways, and the bigger the diversity of activities they can support, the more users will be drawn to participate.
Although
no formal definition of the metaverse has stood out amongst the rest, there are some traits that all virtual worlds will share. We can summarize a metaverse’s traits with the following adjectives :
persistent and
synchronous,
immersive,
decentralized,
interoperable ,
functional economy and
accessible.
Graphically illustrated here bellow and stated in this Sensorium
article.
The main descriptions illustrate these traits of what metaverses are and would be :
- Boundless, it has no limit. As it is code, you can do anything you want with it.
- Persistent, it will continue to exist in the long term. Even if it will have an update or maybe problems to it, it will persist because we can find a solution to it thanks to the technological codes that it is based on.
- Immersive, it is generalized by a computer or a virtual reality device that generates a three-dimensional image which appears to surround the user. The point of this new virtual world is really to have an immersive way to experience something new.
- Decentralized because of the blockchain that it was created on, it is controlled by several local offices or authorities rather than only a single one. Multiple people can change or add things to the code.
- An economic system, there is an economical exchange on the platforms. The most frequent currency used in the metaverse is the cryptocurrency or NFTs. There are cases where the platforms allow people to pay in euros or other forms of money that we all use in real life but that does not happen often. Usually the people that are really invested already in these kinds of advanced worlds and technologies are also interested in crypto, that is why it is used as money in this technological world. If you do not understand what crypto-money or NFTs are, do not worry, we will do an article about it soon.
- A social world, to be used by you and your friends. A new place where you can join your friends, chat and live different activities and experiences. It is a world where you can meet your friends even if they are far away from you. A new way to hang out with them, to meet new people without having to go stray too much from your comfort zone.
One of the first people to foresee the metaverse's rise was renowned
venture capitalist Matthew Ball, who describes it as a "massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds which can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments." (more information explaned by M. Ball himself in this
article)
2022 – Activision Blizzard :
Microsoft plans to buy yet another gaming enterprise for $68,7 billion.
In January of 2022, the enterprise announced its intentions regarding Activision Blizzard (a merger between Activision and Blizzard, two video game developers and editors, at the head of major game franchises).
As for all industries, there are institutions that monitor and watch out for firms and multinationals, that protect consumers and that speak out against possible monopolies. The gaming industry marks no exception to this rule of exclusivity. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission is planning on
blocking Microsoft’s deal to buy Activision Blizzard in
fear of them owning too much of the industry.
They could inhibit surrounding competition, therefore dragging innovation downwards and placing even higher prices, ultimately suffocating the market and driving gamers away. Microsoft could decide to
exclude other consoles and users, such as their competitor’s Sony Playstation, making future Activision Blizzard games solely available on Xbox and PCs.
As we're writing these lines, in Europe, as of the 17th of March 2023, sources have told Reuter Press Agency that the company would most probably
win the deal and obtain clearance from the EU.
Where do we stand today ?
We are already witnessing the emergence of the initial iterations of the metaverse by overlapping all these digital evolutions. At some point, the metaverse will fully transform the internet from what it is now, Web 2.0, into Web 3.0, with several highly functional, networked, and
decentralized virtual environments. Each will have its own infrastructure, community, economy, and places of interest.
The Web 3.0 is the third generation of the web which refers to a certain evolution, including specific innovations and advancements. As mentioned previously, it’s related to the semantic web (advanced form of keyword online searches for a smarter navigation), artificial intelligence (as in reasoning and learning through machines), connectivity, 3-dimensional representations of data and universality (all-present and ubiquitous).
Graphical representation of
Web 3.0 key features (more from this
article)
The
idea behind Web 2.5 is to address the actual and
practical transition between Web 2.0 and 3.0 that is taking place in our time period. As we go toward Web 3.0, a few players, including Amazon, Google, and others, offer a service model in cloud computing that enables online application developers to build web apps for their users' ability to connect on any devices, at any time. Mobile computing and the advancement of mobile technology are the primary topics of Web 2.5. We can see more and more apps entering the mobile market to create their presence by addressing mobile consumers, since we are all aware that mobile computing plays a significant part in engaging a bigger audience via native apps as well as mobile web apps.
More about mobile apps trends in this
article.
Written by Ana Alexandrescu,
Master's student in Advertising and Commercial Communication (IHECS)
To listen to the podcast it's here.
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