Three Shortcomings of current Metaverses

Hardly a month goes by, since the year 2020, when there isn’t YAM (yet another metaverse) being announced. Everyone wants in — from Real Estate companies, to Retailers…to government depts. — all rushing in, fueled by Venture Capital funds that are slowly realizing their folly when not doing due diligence on the many startups they’re throwing millions($) at. Sounds familiar? It should. That’s what the dot com boom felt like before it… well, we know what happened.

Yet, as those who’ve been around since the first iteration of #Bubblenomics know, this current race to build metaverses that collectively will form the Multiverse -makes them experience a strong sense of de-ja vu. Here’s three areas that could be rectified to set things right:

Metaverse Purpose: NTFs and Crypto blocks or a Higher Calling?

Almost every pitch deck to Venture Firms today has to have Crypto, Block Chain or NFTs (or all three mashed together) to gain investor interest. From healthcare startups (perhaps encoding human DNA on the blockchain has merit?)… to digitizing grandma’s cross-stitch patterns and selling it as “pixel art” while touting “scarcity” as the reason people will buy in. Not such a bad idea, if indeed it was grandma’s real one-of-a-kind hand crafted labor. However, what is bringing in huge VC funding is pixel-art generated by algorithms and computer programs given instructions to alter a few pixels to make each “art piece”….rare.

The Metaverse is so much more than this — the reason Facebook [Meta] has survived where Google (google+ anyone?) and Apple and others have failed is, Facebook knows how to build community and ease social interaction. The recent pandemic was a case study on their prowess in that department.

THIS is the higher calling of the Metaverse. If pitch-decks can prove they can ease communication and interaction in more immersive ways than what Web2.0 is offering, they are on the right track with their need for funding.

There are metaverses already being built; Decentraland and The Sandbox are just a couple of examples. But as we’ll see in the next two shortcomings… it might not be enough proof of success.

World Building: Editing and Navigation

Why is Sansar, one of the new generation Metaverses failing? In my opinion one of the lesser known reasons is short sightedness in interface design and ‘world building’. Did you know once you export a 3D model or world, painstakingly created in either a third party creation tool or within the Sansar Worldbuilder, there in NO way to export it out in any format for further finetuning. Even your own model once uploaded cannot be downloaded.

Navigation: The purpose of the Metaverse is immersion and interaction of a level beyond keyboard, mouse and touch-screen. We have to figure out a way to get this done or there’s no real point in re-branding 90’s quick time technology or Google’s “lively” metaverse navigation method, by adding voice and expecting large numbers of audiences to jump in.

Immersion via a 7 inch cellphone screen can only go so far. While it’s good for watching Netflix and two of the largest populations on the planet consume content on these devices, as this graph shows… there is still a higher level of immersion needed for Metaverse1.0 success.
Again, it’s my opinion that we need to revisit cellphone holders; “Metaverse spectacles,” so we can see better at a scale we should, for immersion. Samsung’s GearVR needs to be resurrected, perhaps a light-weigh 2.0 foldable version with glass lenses. Cellphones already have all the processing power built in. I prefer watching a Netflix movie in one of these outdated holders and admit I do not reach out for the current Oculus Quest unless it’s a blockbuster and I’m travelling.

These areas of design need to be addressed on a war footing and funded by Venture Capital, rather than the next “evaluated at over 2 billion” startup with yet another NFT idea.

Avatar Interoperability:

Or…the Emperor’s new cloth. It’s a free-for-all reign right now, thanks in part to bored apes, pimped out hippos, crypto kittens and a myriad other expensive avatars floating around looking for Metaverse dominance, vying for your crypto or fiat currency to then become ‘you’ in the Metaverse. Yet imagine one’s embarrassment say, in a couple of year’s when wearing a pair of expensive Apple AR-eyewear or Meta-Glasses or some other brand…and entering non-compatible metaverses, only to be seen stark “naked” because, well, your avatar “skin” is not recognized by the gatekeepers running that particular metaverse.

How are new Startups planning on addressing these stumbling blocks to maximize revenue and more importantly, create smooth customer experiences? These are questions that Venture Capitalists should be asking when funding startups with multi billion evaluations.

Oh yes — the Metaverse will spill out into the real world. That’s the whole point of it. Gen-Z will choose to walk in the real world, while interacting with digital twins of their friends seen in-situ augmenting their world-space. The world you walk on could be planet earth, the moon or Mars — Metaverse to Multiverse.

The first step to not avoid the plague that was the dot com bust, is to address these issues.