Roblox, a platform where independent developers create games popular with children, may be the closest and most expansive vision of the metaverse. Lebardian and others argue that USD is to the emerging metaverse what hypertext markup language, or HTML, was to the web: a common language that can be used, and advanced, to support the metaverse. Since many massively multiplayer online games share features with the metaverse, but provide access only 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. Many blockchain-based metaverse platforms are still developing Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technology that will allow users to fully interact in the space.
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. The similarly named company Singularity6 is building a virtual world that, unlike Fortnite, aims to become a metaverse from day one. Heyning, 45, has teamed up with a few volunteers to form the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group, which seeks to establish technology standards for "linking virtual worlds, in the hope that metaverse players will adopt them". Stephenson's metaverse is presented to its users as an urban environment, developed along a single 100-metre-wide road, the street, which runs the entire 65536 km (216 km) circumference of a black, featureless, perfectly spherical planet.
Open source projects with non-corporate ethics will continue to play a big 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. Some believe that the definition (and success) of a Metaverse requires it to be a strongly decentralised platform built primarily 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 dominant closed platforms in the Metaverse).
