The metaverse is a virtual world that combines aspects of digital technologies such as video conferencing, games like Minecraft or Roblox, cryptocurrencies, email, virtual reality, social networking and live streaming. It also suggests that, for all the expertise developers have in creating virtual worlds, any metaverse that takes off might not come from the games industry. Some believe that the definition (and success) of a metaverse requires it to be a strongly decentralised platform, built largely on community-based standards and protocols (such as the open web) and an "open source metaverse operating system or platform (this does not mean that there are no closed platforms dominant in the metaverse). Where technology is sufficient, broad cultural changes are needed to drive the development of a true Metaverse.
While the metaverse has the potential to succeed the Internet as a computing platform, its underlying development process is likely to have little in common with its predecessor. Roblox, a platform where independent developers create games popular with children, may be the closest and most expansive vision of the metaverse. Stephenson's metaverse is presented to its users as an urban environment, developed along a single hundred-metre-wide road, the street, which runs the entire 65536 km (216 km) circumference of a featureless, black, perfectly spherical planet. In addition, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) would allow users of the Metaverse to own unique, bespoke objects, just like in the real world, and cryptocurrencies provide a roadmap for how a Metaverse economy could take shape.
Open source projects with a non-corporate ethos will continue to play an important role and attract some of the most interesting creative talent in the Metaverse, but there are only a few likely leaders in the early Metaverse. Heyning, 45, has joined a few volunteers to form the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group, which aims to establish technology standards for "linking virtual worlds, in the hope that players in the metaverse will adopt them". Since many massively multiplayer online games share features with the metaverse, but only provide access to non-persistent instances, which are shared by up to several dozen players, the concept of multiverse virtual games has been used to distinguish them from the metaverse. At no point in time will there be a coup de rudder to ignite the Metaverse, but rather the Metaverse will emerge gradually, as cultural changes and technological upgrades give Internet users the ability to move more and more freely and to more easily create and share bespoke content on the web.
Without the oversight of a Metaverse government or other regulatory body, blockchain technology would ensure that transactions and identities in the Metaverse are secure and public. Just as no formal change marked the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, the development of the Metaverse will occur naturally as people spend more time online and link more of their identities to their digital lives. The similarly named company Singularity6 is building a virtual world that, unlike Fortnite, aims to become a metaverse from day one. Many blockchain-based metaverse platforms continue to develop Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technology that will allow users to fully interact in the space.
