So what’s this, a buzzword or a new basic technology. Who knows? Below/overleaf are my notes and links. Enjoy!
Wikipedia has a limited definition , and perhaps this McKinsey article offers more. I am unclear how much publicly funded research has been done, there’s very little in the citations list on wikipedia and most of that is on health risks for children. I also found What is the metaverse? at sproutsocial the first time round. i.e. the sources are either consultants, journalists or product vendors. I think that the reality-virtuality continuum might be helpful in understanding what it can do, either today or tomorrow.
One of my big things, is that unless we change the sensory metaphors for many problems, a 3D metaverse will not help in human problem solving. How does one make Doom a trading application? I couldn’t work it out, nor could I work out how to use a real world 3D metaphor work for a data centre, the vectors of interest were too many to deal with in 3D.
There;s just over two minutes of this.
Wikipedia, of course, offers a bunch of citations, some of which interested me,
- The technology of the metaverse, it’s not just VR on Medium by Doug Antin
- Did Facebook invent it? Lessons from 2nd Life, to what do today’s metaverse innovators owe 2nd Life! By the BBC and Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen ‘shocked’ by Metaverse investment i.e. $10bn p.a. reported in Oct 2021. This is a lot of money; compare it with various UK govt. commitments, on supercomputers, or 6G fighter warplanes. It’s double the last year of Horizon expense in the UK but ⅓ of what was wasted on Track & Trace.
- Fashion is moving into the metaverse here’s what to expect from rolling stone in Dec 21. It’s taken some time to get there, but an obvious application.
- Lee, Lik-Hang & Braud, Tristan & Zhou, Pengyuan & Wang, Lin & Xu, Dianlei & Lin, Zijun & Kumar, Abhishek & Bermejo, Carlos & Hui, Pan. (2021). All One Needs to Know about Metaverse: A Complete Survey on Technological Singularity, Virtual Ecosystem, and Research Agenda. 10.13140/RG.2.2.11200.05124/8.
- Who is going to police the metaverse? by Dr David Reid – Professor of AI and Spatial Computing at Liverpool Hope University – who is adamant it’ll change all of our lives immeasurably, in the same way the Internet did. Obviously I am not convinced, but we know its name, “The Turing Registry”.
- Petit, Nicolas and Schrepel, Thibault and Teece, David J. and Heiden, Bowman, Metaverse Competition Agency: White Paper (December 9, 2022). VU University Amsterdam Legal Studies Paper Series Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4297960 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4297960