You’re thinking of the metaverse all wrong, says Matthew Ball
In the future, the metaverse won’t be called the metaverse. It will simply be the internet.
In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, announced that his company was changing its name to Meta Platforms and pursuing the development of the three-dimensional internet, as the successor to mobile computing. He called it the “Metaverse,” borrowing the term from the 1992 Neal Stephenson sci-fi novel Snow Crash. Since then, the metaverse has become increasingly synonymous with Meta, and most laypeople — if they understand it at all — assume that partaking in it means wearing a virtual reality headset so that we can spend all our time in a colorful, corny-looking 3D world, where we all live as avatars resembling Pixar characters.
Three years later, consumers haven’t exactly been jumping into it. Meta spent $46 billion on its Reality Labs division during that time but it only produced about $6 billion in revenue. And sales have been flat or declining since 2021. Has the metaverse died before it even arrived?
Not so, says Matthew Ball, the CEO of Epyllion, a diversified holding company that makes angel investments, provides advisory services, and produces TV, films, and video games. Ball, formerly the Head of Strategy for Amazon Studios, has been writing about the metaverse for years, even before the term exploded into popular lexicon. In his 2022 bestselling book, The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything, he explained in detail that the metaverse is much, much more than a 3D world independent from our own. And it will not belong to one single company: it is the next evolution of the internet itself. We won’t be living in the metaverse; it will be all around us. And yes, it will change everything.
But so much has happened since Ball’s book was first published. Generative AI seems to have supplanted the metaverse as investors’ (and even Meta’s) primary focus. Cryptocurrency has grown more mainstream, despite weathering multiple exchange failures. Apple has released its Vision Pro in pursuit of “spatial computing.”
Thus, Ball has revised and updated the book. The Metaverse: Fully Revised and Updated Edition: Building the Spatial Internet, arrives July 23rd.
Freethink spoke with Ball to discuss, among other things, why the metaverse’s current situation is reminiscent of the internet’s past, and why it is still likely to be the internet’s future.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
RP: What are some popular misconceptions about the Metaverse?
MB: I think that there are three primary misconceptions today. One is that it really is isolated to Meta’s view of the metaverse. When Meta changed its name, nearly all of the products designated as for the Metaverse were virtual reality only, despite the fact that they are working on augmented reality glasses and have a series of different wearables. But the inability to see and touch these products led to quite a bit of conflation.
The second area of conflation tends to stem around crypto and blockchains. This largely is due to the fact that many in the crypto community use the term “Web3.” We have these parallel visions of the future emerging around the same time around 2021 that both use the word “three”: the metaverse, a 3D medium, and Web3 a new version of the internet in contrast to today’s Web2. There are many in the metaverse community that view Web3 technologies such as blockchains as essential to constructing the metaverse. There are others who believe they’re not essential but they are likely to produce the most collectively prosperous version of the metaverse. And there are those who believe it’s a totally inessential technology. And yet many in the public believe them to be the same thing.
The last misconception is that we will spend most of our lives inside VR headsets.
The last misconception, and this is perhaps the most important, is that subscribing to the metaverse means believing that we will spend most of our lives inside VR headsets, removed from the world around us. The internet has myriad expressions, different experiences, different content, but it’s an underlying technology which enables scores of different devices, experiences, content, and interactions. The metaverse is best described as a 3D augmentation of that which can be experienced through VR, mixed reality, through traditional 2D interfaces, and often passively through digital twins and autonomous vehicles.
RP: So the way you’re describing it, the metaverse is really just the next evolution of the internet. I’m curious how online human interactions will change compared to current online interactions. People behave pretty terribly on the internet today. Do you think human behavior will change for the worse, for the better?
MB: There’s a product that is expected to be deployed later this year called Starline. Starline is essentially a version of a traditional telepresence booth. It’s produced by Google. It actually creates a 3D avatar of you that is hyperrealistic. I’ve used this technology. It’s utterly remarkable. You can see hair falling down from someone’s hairline. They can eat an apple and you see every aspect of this apple. Now why do I talk about this? When Starline is tested, we see remarkable advances in human behavior and experiences. There’s a roughly 30% increase in nonverbal forms of communication, and we see a 20% increase in memory recall and up to a 40% increase in eye contact. We do know that these technologies will show substantial benefits to human existence.
I’ve used this technology. It’s utterly remarkable.
RP: I recently spoke to a professor who was concerned that the internet is reducing in-person interactions to the point that younger generations are not developing their theory of mind properly – their ability to see others as having mental agency. Do you think that interacting within the metaverse could reverse this trend?
MB: We have abundant data now showing how screen time, especially with the young, can adversely affect brain development, behavior, and socialization. More broadly, we’re cognizant of many challenges in the digital era – data privacy, data literacy, security, mis- and disinformation, radicalization, toxicity, abuse, harassment, isolation – and there are many ways in which the 3D internet is likely to improve those conditions, but there are doubtless many ways in which it will make many of the current problems harder.
RP: When you originally wrote the first version of your new book, the Metaverse was all the rage for investors and Big Tech. Now, companies seem to be shying away from the term metaverse. In a recent essay, you mentioned Apple’s strict use of “spatial computing” and Nvidia’s “Omniverse.” The title of your updated book even refers to the metaverse as the “spatial internet.” Why do you think companies are turning away from “metaverse”?
MB: Metaverse is so inextricably linked with Meta, and to a lesser extent virtual reality, that any company who deploys the term is often perceived as subscribing to the same vision of the future as Meta, and perhaps worse, trying to catch up and compete. So that’s why we see Nvidia using a trademarked term in “Omniverse.” Roblox, an original pioneer in using the term metaverse, has dropped the term altogether. And then separately you have a company like Apple which has always tried to strike a chord with new terminology.
RP: A widely read piece in 2023 declared the Metaverse dead and described it as “arguably one of the most historic failures in tech history.” I assume you think this conclusion is dead wrong. Can you explain why?
MB: I think the best way to respond to it actually came from Tim Sweeney, the founder and CEO of Epic Games, which makes Unreal Engine, perhaps the most important simulation technology globally. He quote-tweeted that piece and said that a wake should be held for the metaverse, and in attendance should be all 600 million people per month that participate in it. His point was to sum up the number of people that are using Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft – these networks that truly span hundreds of millions of unique worlds.
It’s like saying no one has any interest in social networking because they don’t use Google+.
The piece that you’re referring to was primarily contrasting the size of Meta’s investments in VR hardware with the struggles of its hardware to see much user adoption, and actually, the subordinate struggles of its own virtual world, Horizon. Now, to characterize the performance of the metaverse with Meta is already wrong, but to suggest that consumers have no interest in the metaverse based on the success of Meta’s own virtual world service would be like saying no one has any interest in social networking because they don’t use Google+. You are effectively picking the 20th-ranked service to characterize the overall trend.
RP: In your book, you compared the Metaverse today to the internet in 1995. What do you mean by that?
MB: In 1995, the world population was around six billion. You’ve got tens, approaching 100 million people by the end of the decade who have gone online, but they’re not online often. When we’re looking at the ‘90s, the internet was predominantly leisure oriented, obscure, niche, and had yet to really proliferate into industry or commerce. You didn’t really do work on the internet; you exchanged communications on it.
Of course, decades later, nearly every aspect of that has changed, and that’s how we should look at the metaverse. True, the metaverse has proved harder and taken longer to produce than anticipated. The relevant technological constraints relating to both mixed reality headsets as well as the changes to the internet required to support the metaverse have been way harder holistically. And yet we should think of this as a progressive transformation, one that is definitively underway.
RP: In your book, you mention that building a head-mounted device to provide wide access to the metaverse could be the “hardest technology challenge of our time.” Can you delve more into this statement?
MB: The challenges relate to many different factors. One is that we’ve found out the specifications for a minimum viable product are higher than anticipated. So, for example, we talk about the incidence of nausea that many experience with a virtual reality device. We have discovered that most of this nausea goes away when you reach an 8K or 16K resolution and when you go from a 90 frame rate refresh to 120 or 240. Just to put it in basic terms, the avoidance of nausea means producing a display that has at minimum twice and potentially 16 times the pixels of the giant TV you have on the wall, and each one of those pixels needs to be generated up to ten times more, all of this on a device that fits on your head and has a portable battery.
The second challenge relates to the difficulty of pulling this off. The more pixels you have, the more battery you need, the more powerful a processor you need. The larger, the harder working the battery, the larger, the harder working the processor, the more heat you’re generating. And this is a device worn on your face, inches from your eyes. The tradeoffs required to pull this off – it’s hard. We have a good sense that the cost to produce these devices is in the tens, if not 50 to 100 billion dollar level. It’s a sum that seems ludicrous to many, and yet, we have ample proof from the Android and iPhone that if you can operate and develop the dominant computing system for the world, that produces one of the most powerful, protected, and lucrative businesses in human history. Apple is doing roughly $400 billion dollars a year, the foundation of which is the iPhone.
RP: So the metaverse is a new “mobile computing” opportunity, potentially even much larger. It’s a brand new platform, not just a toy or a new virtual world to inhabit. It’s a new economy.
MB: That’s quite right. The examples are actually manifold. Nine of the ten largest oil and gas companies have publicly affirmed their use of VR headsets. An executive at one of them told me a little bit more about how they use them. Oil and gas offshore platforms are among the most dangerous working environments in the U.S. They average about 35 deaths per 100,000. These VR headsets are being used to improve training, to familiarize these individuals to this extraordinarily unfamiliar and complex environment.
Back in 2020, the first live patient surgery was performed in the U.S. using a mixed reality device. The physician who performed the surgery likened it to using GPS in the 1990s. I like this example for two reasons. Number one, we think of GPS not as a substitute for driving and experiencing the world but as an accomplice. And the second is that GPS in the ‘90s was primitive. It has now become a platform that enabled the construction of services such as Tinder, Uber, and DoorDash.
I believe deeply in the potential of these technologies as do many of the largest companies on Earth, and the belief is that it’s a fundamentally better way to experience and to interact with digital information. When the sufficient hardware and tools are available, remarkable things will be built on top of it.
RP: When we get to what you call a “full-spec” metaverse – rich, immersive experiences, the true 3D spatial internet – what will be the energy, material, and bandwidth requirements for that sort of technology? Will it even be able to reach its full potential? Could infrastructure be a limiting factor?
MB: We have no idea, partly because we don’t know enough about what we will want to do in it. I use this example from John Carmack, the founder of 3D, later the CTO of Oculus. In 2000, if you told him with 1,000 times modern computing power, could you build the metaverse? He said yes. He’s now realized we’re nowhere near able to do it. We have learned over the last 40 years of the internet that we always need more bandwidth, we always need more computing power just to do the things we know we want to do in the near future. And we do that because we have proven ourselves woefully incapable of understanding what we will use those resources for, how significant the products of those resources will be, and how frequently we will need them. More importantly, we can’t fathom the intersection between those various products and what they build anew.
Advances in AI are essential to the construction of the metaverse.
RP: Since your book was initially published in 2022, generative AI has undeniably supplanted the metaverse as Big Tech’s primary investment focus. This seems to suggest that the two technologies are competitive. However, in your updated book, you argue that they’re complementary, and you outline six ways AI will enable, accelerate, and steer the metaverse. Can you briefly describe them?
MB: It’s unquestionably true that, in many areas, AI is competitive in investments with the metaverse – on a dollar basis, on an attention basis, and on a talent basis. But it’s also true that advances in AI are essential to the construction of the metaverse and will accelerate its emergence.
I can reduce those six examples into three. The first is hardware and physics. During our discussion we talked about some of the ways in which the reality of head-mounted devices or the requirements of computing power and bandwidth far exceed what we have available today. AI is helping to path through that problem, partly by predicting our needs to reduce the load.
The second is to recognize that the construction of the metaverse is today extraordinarily costly. We’re talking about virtualizing nearly every aspect of the physical world. But we are seeing companies producing tools that with only a few dozen photographs can virtualize an environment, using neural networks to assume information that it doesn’t know but with high accuracy. Roblox has talked about the fact that within four more years, anything you want to create will be possible semantically. You can speak an entire world into existence.
The third area is populating the metaverse itself with artificial intelligent agents that we can interact with.
RP: A final question. We talked earlier about how the metaverse is really Meta’s term. Apple favors “spatial computing.” If you had to come up with a term yourself for this new 3D internet, what would you call it?
MB: I don’t know what I would call it. What I will tell you is that I have a reasonably high degree of confidence that the most likely characterization is the “internet.” The second most likely is probably the “3D internet.”
RP: So you think that the metaverse will simply be the future of the internet?
MB: Yeah, mobile is a pretty good example of that. While the mobile internet is generally understood, most people don’t think about the internet in the context of the device that they access it. They don’t say “I’m on the mobile internet” or “I’m on the WiFi internet.” It’s just access to the internet.
When you talk to most people on metaverse platforms today, like Roblox, you find generations where 75% of children aged 9-12 use Roblox, a single metaverse platform, each week. Essentially none of them know what the metaverse is. Fewer know that Roblox uses the term metaverse. And fewer still are probably interested in understanding what that is.
To them, it’s part of life and they’re growing up using it. There’s no utility in knowing why the term is what it is. The underpinnings of it; what it means for society; which technologies will power it; and how that’s going to shape not just the most powerful companies on earth, but in fact how it’s going to shape modern societies – to shed light on that is the goal of the book.
