Race for the metaverse: Zuckerberg, Microsoft and gaming giants make plans for the Internet of the future

If the word “ecosystem” has already set your teeth on edge, rejoice: big tech has a new promising concept. This summer, Facebook announced that the future of the company and the entire Internet belongs to the metaverse - the metaverse. This week the company showed the first related project. Not only Mark Zuckerberg is going to build their own metaverses, but also Microsoft, gaming giants and entire countries. We figured out what it is in general, how it will be arranged and who will get the laurels for success.

What's happened

This summer, Facebook announced a big revolution that will affect the company itself and, as Mark Zuckerberg is sure, the entire Internet. At the end of June, the CEO of Facebook told his employees that in the future the company will switch from social networks and various gadgets for them to something much more. Facebook's new goal is an entire metaverse, a complete digital world from sci-fi novels.

Zuckerberg immediately got down to business: in late July, Facebook began to assemble a large development team for the future metaverse. The team will become part of the AR and VR development department at Facebook, said its head Andrew Bosworth. An important feature of the Facebook metaverse, he says, will be the ability to feel the physical presence of another person through digital spaces. As Bosworth explained , to make the idea a reality, developers must remove the restrictions associated with the laws of physics and allow participants to "move" between different spaces as easily as "from one room of their house to another."

This week, Zuckerberg showed reporters the first project for the future metaverse - the Horizon Workrooms service. This is a VR meeting room that you can connect to using the Oculus Quest 2 headset, which is made by Facebook. All call participants in the VR space are shown as cartoonish digital avatars, and the main difference between the service and existing VR games and spaces is that you can digitize and move your own computer to the meeting room, continuing to work during the meeting, and there is also a digital whiteboard on which you can write and add data from your computer. So far, as the participants in the conversations with Zuckerberg say , the avatars are raw, look specific and sometimes move, even if the person himself did nothing, and the eyes get tired of the helmet pretty quickly. But the result is still quite interesting.

What is the metaverse

The metaverse is a term that first appeared in Neil Stevenson's 1992 science fiction novel Avalanche. In the novel, this is a VR space that duplicates the real world, in which people communicate and interact in the same way as offline, and most importantly, the digital and real worlds influence each other. Interestingly, in Stevenson's fictional world, the real world is a very fragmented space run by corporations and the mafia, but the metaverse is a digital 3D reality common to all. By the way, the same novel popularized the word "avatar".

It was not Zuckerberg who first spoke about the metaverse in relation to the future of the Internet and IT business. Different people described their metaverse concepts, and venture investor Matthew Ball created the most detailed one . Back at the beginning of last year, he described what characteristics the metaverse should have. She must:

• be constant and never end, the action within must continue indefinitely;
• be synchronous - the action inside should take place autonomously and be a living experience in real time for all participants;
• have no restrictions on the number of users, so that anyone can participate in the events taking place inside;
• have a full-fledged economy in which you can create things, own them, invest, sell, receive money for various works and services, and create “value” recognized by others;
• be an experience that simultaneously spans both the digital and physical worlds (much like the new Facebook service, where you can use a real laptop in a VR meeting room);
• ensure unprecedented compatibility of data and digital assets: for example, it should be possible to use an item from Counter-Strike in Fortnite or give it to a friend on Facebook;
• content within the metaverse must be able to create an unlimited range of participants (both companies and individuals).

Zuckerberg did not reject Ball's ideas, but he explained in detail his vision of the metaverse as applied to Facebook. According to him, it is:

• the next stage in the development of the mobile Internet - a space that no company can create alone. In the future, it will be developed in partnership with many companies and individual developers;
• the embodied Internet, where the user does not watch content, but is inside it, feels close to other people, as if he is really close to them, and also gets experiences and experiences that he could not get in a 2D application or on the web -page (for example, in dancing or fitness);
• not necessarily VR, although Facebook specifically believes that virtual reality will be an important part of the metaverse. It will be possible to access it from any gadget, and its main purpose is not only and not so much a game, but a new incarnation of existing social platforms.

The metaverse is now mostly talked about in the context of Zuckerberg's statements, but this is not only his idea. Even before the head of Facebook presented the concept, Satya Nadella, head of Microsoft , spoke about his vision of the metaverse for business . According to him, a set of cloud services Microsoft Azure can already be considered a metaverse - however, corporate. According to him, Azure already has a set of services that allow you to mix the digital and real world - create digital copies of any objects, use the Internet of Things to synchronize them in the virtual and real world, and organize remote work in mixed reality in real time.

Gaming companies are also actively building their own metaverses: for example, in Roblox, almost from the very beginning, they built their gaming platform precisely as a prototype of the metaverse - a digital space where users can not only play, but also communicate, meet, work and study (more about the company's plans to become more than a gaming service, we talked about here ).

EpicGames is also betting on the metaverse, which is already experimenting with different non-gaming offers for users of its flagship online game Fortnite. In April 2020, at the height of the pandemic, rapper Travis Scott hosted a Fortnite concert with 12 million simultaneous viewers around the world. A year later, in April 2021, Epic raised $1 billion to develop the metaverse. Matthew Ball also wrote about Fortnite as an example of the metaverse.

The problem is also approached at the state level: South Korea decided to create an alliance with the participation of large businesses that would develop their own national-level VR platform. They also consider the metaverse to be the next step in the evolution of the Internet and rely on virtual reality.

Problems of the Metaverse

None of the ideologists of the metaverse in big business denies that no one can create such a thing alone - but everyone still wants to close the “future of the Internet” to themselves. on the development of AR and VR devices - almost a fifth of their total number. are focused Facebook is clearly betting on its VR ecosystem, and this is understandable - the company has been buying virtual reality assets for many years in a row, and about 10,000 Facebook employees Epic Games says in the same way that any brands and companies will participate in the metaverse, but at the same time they mean that their Fortnite will be taken as the basis.

In Stevenson's Avalanche, the real world is in complete disarray and is run by many different corporations and factions. The metaverse, on the contrary, is centrally controlled, but at the same time it works according to the principles of the Internet - a market economy works, and anyone can buy a piece of virtual space. This is perhaps the most unrealistic idea of ​​the work, writes analyst Ben Thompson in his Stratechery mailing list: now any Internet service provider can cut you off from any particular content or reduce network bandwidth, national regulators are increasingly trying to control content, and use any cloud service implies compliance with the rules of private corporations. In addition, the very access to the vast majority of mobile devices depends on two companies - Google and Apple, which not only regulate content, but also take commissions from the entire domestic economy.

“Facebook has full control over Facebook, Apple has iOS, Google has Android, and so on. Yes, HTTP, SMTP and other protocols still exist, but it is no coincidence that they were developed before anyone thought that you could make money on the Internet, ”concludes Thompson.

Facebook, in this sense, has the best chance of becoming the Internet operator of the future: its social networks are used by 3.5 billion users - half of humanity. But it is unlikely to be a universal metaverse - rather, one of them, Thompson believes. Just like Facebook - although the largest, but not the only social network in the world. But even with the creation of a project of this level, the corporation may have difficulties. First, about the same big revolution Facebook promised when it bought Oculus in 2014 - but has not yet achieved overwhelming success. Secondly, a technology of this magnitude requires its own chips and software, but Facebook does not have special competencies in either one, writes Bloomberg. But Apple has its own chips, and it is also preparing to launch its own VR headset. And in the development of Facebook, the same Epic Games is head and shoulders ahead. There are chances to snatch a piece, for example, from Nvidia, which also sees prospects in the metaverse and launched its own 3D collaboration platform.

But an even bigger obstacle to Facebook's ambitions could be antitrust cases in the US. Back in December, the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against the company asking the court to oblige Facebook to sell Instagram and WhatsApp, and in the future to go through a draconian approval process for such deals. So far, the court has rejected this claim, but given that has become Lina Khan, almost the main fighter against technomonopolies in the United States, the new head of the FTC, the matter will not end there so easily. Two days ago, the commission again went to court with the same demands.

But even if we dismiss these risks, the question remains: who and how will make money on the metaverses, and it is still open, say analysts . Even though more and more people and companies are beginning to believe in the very idea of ​​how exactly large investments will turn into profits, it is still not clear, writes WSJ.

Material cover photo: Pexels