In this article, the authors summarize nine mega-trends that have emerged on a global scale and how they will shape the future of the metauniverse. Most trends are the result of a combination of technological and social change.
By Jon Radoff
Link to original article:
Medium.com/building-th…
The third power — Jiang Yufei Mily
1. The rise of virtualization
The virtual world is increasingly seen as just as real as the physical world.
In the physical world, trust is how relationships and institutions work. It is the basis on which businesses thrive in the legal system, money markets continue to function, and a way of measuring the connections between people. Trust allows these systems to develop and extend.
As trust increases in the “virtual” space — having online friends, virtual goods, crypto assets, smart contracts, and real-time online experiences — so does the scalability of the meta-universe and the industry space that underlies it.
But under the general trend, there are always countercurrent. The importance people attach to the virtual world can also make those who try to exploit it restless.
Cybercrime is a familiar example, such as phishing attempts to steal your account information, various online scams, ransomware attacks and the spread of virus software.
Cyberbullying and abuse, cheating in games and cheating in relationships will all increase because people believe virtual relationships and virtual assets are real. These practices will get worse as the value they can bring increases, and the costs for companies that aim to combat crime and abuse will get higher.
Products alone will not solve these problems. Education, training, virtual literacy, community and parent support are needed.
2. Low-code platforms
The Low code and Zero Code Application Platform (LCAP) provides more advanced programming tools, such as visual development scaffolding and drag-and-drop tools, to replace manual coding of process, logic, and applications.
The most obvious benefit of this trend is that non-programmers can do some of the work that programmers used to do. But the impact of low-code platforms goes far beyond that, and companies are adopting them for more than just these reasons.
The magic of LCAP is the amount of automation that takes place at the visualization layer: workflow, deployment, security monitoring, extensions, and integration of various data endpoints. In general, achieving this level of complexity and scale is equivalent to completing a large part of the development of Internet applications.
This not only changes who does the work, but also significantly reduces the amount of work required to create the application.
Gartner, an information research and analysis firm, predicts that by 2023 more than 50% of large enterprises will be using LCAPS to run at least part of their enterprise infrastructure.
Similarly, many of these developers are moving toward a serverless architecture (a somewhat confusing term, since you usually have servers, but you don’t have to deploy, manage, or code them yourself).
At the other end of the enterprise, people have a growing number of creation tools that make it easy to create metaverse content, write complex behavior, and engage in business activities.
People always think that products are for either big business or small business, but that’s not the case. While technologies that serve large enterprises are often difficult to scale down to individuals, there are many examples where individuals can take control and it becomes the easiest option for the enterprise. That’s pretty much everything Adobe has ever done. More recently, codeless/low-code platforms like Shopify have been able to support everything from small businesses to some of the biggest brands in the world (like Hasbro, Budweiser, etc.).
A wider community of creators will build more and more meta-universes, which will be supported by deeper plug-in applications and logical directories.
3. Machine intelligence system
Machines are doing more of what humans used to do, including fields sometimes called deep learning, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
We live in a world in which advertising messages, merchandising and online dating are tweaked by learning algorithms. But such natural language processing and image recognition are still in their early stages. In the physical world, applications like autonomous driving are just around the corner.
In the metauniverse, machine intelligence is like all the other trends you see here.
It will affect creativity, as computers become collaborators in the creative process — look at how AI Dungeon stories are generated, or how Promethean AI builds virtual landscapes — and imagine how far this will go in the next decade.
Ai will be used to design microchips that start the metauniverse and generate code to assist programmers.
Machines will translate gestures, predict where our eyes are, identify emotions and even identify our nerve impulses.
Machine intelligence will be built into our code-free and low-code application platforms, which will run together as part of the service architecture as well as design consultants.
Agents driven by our preferences and interests will present the information we want when we need it. At the same time, more and more virtual elements will spread throughout the worlds we visit.
The rise of cybernetics
Cybernetics has arrived quietly, and its application is not yet large-scale, nor developed and surprising, but it will be in the future.
Cybernetics refers to the combination of the human sensory system, motor system and computer. Current use cases are implemented using video game input/output devices, wearables, phone acceleration sensors, VR headsets, etc.
Miniaturization and high-speed networks have transformed devices in fixed workstations into mobile supercomputers in our pockets. These computers are getting closer and closer to our bodies.
We are moving from the present, where we only see computers from an external perspective, to a future where we occupy virtual space and live in a world surrounded by computers.
“Smartphone” already feels like an archaic term, because these aren’t phones — they’re highly portable computers that just happen to come pre-installed with mobile apps. We can already take up virtual space with VR headsets from brands such as Oculus, which respond to the position of our eyes, heads and gestures. When these become smart glasses, we will be able to bring those experiences into the wider space around us. In the future, we may even have functional smart contact lenses.
Light field technology even allows us to project photons to the retina with their corresponding field depth, allowing your eyes to focus on different parts of the virtual scene for a true holographic experience.
Increasingly, these devices will recognize our voice commands, gestures, and biometric information. Neural interfaces can even allow our devices to understand our intentions — even faster than we know ourselves.
The result? The metauniverse will become not just a place for us to go, but our “everywhere”.
The convergence of wearable technology and mobile technology is not only a technological change, but also a social change. It will change the fabric of our homes, public transport, communities and workplaces. It will change the way you meet people, order food, discover the world and collaborate on projects.
5. Challenges facing open systems
The Internet was originally built with the intention of a highly distributed, decentralized, collaborative network of computers and applications.
Today’s Internet consists of a few very large platforms that act as gatekeepers and toll booths.
But technology and open standards are emerging that could make the future of the metauniverse more democratic.
WebAssembly (Wasm) promises fast, secure, sandboxed binary applications for open networks. WebGL and WebXR will provide computer graphics and immersive experiences outside the app store. Platforms such as Unity Data-driven Technology Stack (Unity DOTS) are leveraging these platforms to provide efficient binary compression at the level required by the meta-universe (especially Unity’s Project Tiny).
Open systems are also a social phenomenon because they allow extensive collaboration between software engineering projects. Reed’s Law, which predicts the exponential value of apps like Slack or WhatsApp, can also be applied to the open source movement — essentially a social network where software developers don’t need permission.
Open source and open platforms like Wasm can maximize the number of potential partners and create more value than all licenseable platforms put together. Permission-free platforms like Linux and PC should also flourish in the future.
Similarly, people can use technologies such as zero-knowledge proof and decentralized digital identity systems to regain sovereignty over their data. This could encourage consumers to submit more personal data to Internet applications with confidence — simply because they don’t need to trust anyone.
If we can open up applications and data, we have the potential for exponential growth in network effects.
6. Blockchain adoption
As a distributed ledger technology, blockchain can do for assets and data what open source does for software and applications.
Blockchain allows untrusted data exchange; Decentralized authority, history and source of record, provable assets are scarce. When they are decentralized, blockchains support participation by the unauthorised, or governance through decentralization.
Programmability is a key feature of blockchain. While not all blockchains can be programmed, it is a key aspect of Ethereum and other “smart contract” chains.
Why is this so important? Again, network effects. The more nodes that can participate in a network, the higher the value of the network, and because the group can plan certain activities (such as games, financial building blocks, etc.), the value of the network increases further according to Reed’s Law.
These value contributions are exponential. The integration of more individuals, more applications, and more components means smarter contracts and more decentralized applications.
Blockchain is considered “untrusted” because you don’t need to trust any one authority; Trust exists in the blockchain itself.
The overall long-tail distribution of all these untrusted applications, contracts, and components gives blockchain its social scalability.
Network effects have paved the way for on-chain data sources (predictors) that can serve as conditions for smart contracts; This, in turn, has led to decentralised lending, finance and asset swaps. The emergence of blockchain computing could replace some aspects of cloud computing; The rise of NFT (Non-homogeneous Assets) could become the foundation for a new generation of virtual goods, skin customization, and meta-cosmic experiences in games.
When you open up assets, data, and programmable contracts on an open source network, the possibilities are endless.
7. Walled garden ecosystem
Walled gardens — I like to use that word because gardens can be beautiful and orderly at the same time — benefit from all the other mega-trends affecting the metauniverse.
Not every app or every world will be open. Sometimes licensing, integration, administration, and control are desirable features of a platform or application. Without the integration of these features, Roblox would never have caught on.
Ironically, walled gardens also benefit from the open systems that challenge them. They use the same open source and blockchain as everyone else, and many customers may feel more secure inside them.
Walled gardens in themselves are not the problem; too few are the problem for the ecosystem in 2021. You should be able to easily create your own walled garden and invite other creators to participate, add, modify, and interconnect according to the rules you define.
As the number of walled gardens grows, the question arises of how each garden will be discovered. Some rating discovery systems, such as Roblox, a “YouTube for games”, are driven by search and popularity. This will continue because people like to manage and developers are keen to link more visitors. But portable avatars, portable social networks, and interoperable approaches are already on the horizon — potentially connecting walled gardens through open platforms, while opening up new opportunities for discovery and management.
In the future, we may have a hypermedia-like structure, where portals connect different worlds and different experiences — just like web hyperlinks in virtual worlds, or metacosmic superportals.
8. Faster distributed networks
5G networks increase and improve the speed, number of concurrent connections and latency of mobile networks by several orders of magnitude. And 5G isn’t the end of the road either, as 6G will boost those numbers by another 10-100 times. We could see 10Gbps speeds and latency dropping to 1ms within a decade.
Faster speeds are necessary to support the metauniverse, but it is also the network effects that occur when all participants in a network can share real-time data that give rise to some of our most interesting applications.
Since the LAN layer is no longer the bottleneck, the focus will shift to moving more computing power directly to the “far” side of the network. Sometimes it’s at your local cell tower, sometimes it could be right in your home, where the information will be preprocessed and displayed on your control device.
A lot of the AI that drives the application will run at the edge because it is still too slow to process all the information remotely/centrally. The future requires fast interoperability between local computing devices and data sources. This sometimes means making predictions at the edge about applications in the metauniverse, where predictions about behavior and physics are very accurate.
9. Simulate reality
For years, almost every game with 3D graphics has used a software system called Shader programming to generate real-time graphics. Raytracing technology, which uses optics to simulate how photons bounce and travel between different materials to form an image, can create more beautiful and realistic images — which is why it is used for pre-rendered content such as movies — but it also requires more processing power.
But real-time raytracing is not that far off.
This is just one example of how we can simulate reality inside a machine. One of the use cases for the NVIDIA Omniverse platform, for example, is to simulate fluid dynamics: imagine it accurately showing what a river looks like, or simulating a heating, ventilation and air conditioning system (which can be used to identify a building’s resilience during a respiratory pandemic). Then imagine that all of these simulators and ai engines are embedded in an interoperable architecture that allows logic and prediction to simulate a world with virtual machines, objects, environments, and people.
Data will also come from the exponential growth of data in the physical world. This includes geospatial and traffic data, digital twins of physical objects for reporting attributes, Oracles for reporting financial data to smart contracts, and real-time data about people and processes.
We will have not just an Internet of things — but a web of the “Internet of everything” — combined with predictive analytics, artificial intelligence and real-time visualization.
These innovations will enable the meta-universe to transcend and predict the real world, while also powering the next generation of physics-based games that will be more beautiful and immersive than anything to date.