Game worlds offer fantastical escapism - at a price, as players are coerced into expensive purchases that remain locked within that game. Virtual offices provide environments for networking that are more or less simulations of real life. One corporation might offer a virtualized simulation of a wind turbine far out at sea, so that maintenance engineers can train without expensive trips offshore.
Proprietary technologies and separate business domains have created virtual spaces that, while they are shared, are completely separate from each other. In The Value Chain of the Open Metaverse, Packy McCormick likens this fragmentation to “walking around a city and changing outfits and ID every time you enter a new building”. If William Gibson’s often repeated assertion that “the future is already here - it’s just unevenly distributed” is more true now than it has ever been, then one could say the same about the Metaverse: it's currently way too fragmented.
#Boson x game id software#
There is one area where our brains simply cannot fill the gaps at the moment, and that is the fact that these worlds currently exist in a patchwork of separate software environments developed by different companies, rather than the all-encompassing virtual world with which we are presented in fiction books and films. So much is different about this alternate reality which is rapidly moving out of the realm of science fiction movies like The Matrix or books like SnowCrash… one can’t help but wonder: Is the Metaverse really like science fiction? It turns out we are very good at compensating. Objects do not have to be contiguous or spaced at a realistic scale either. For example, how our visual field does not have to be continuous for our eyes to perceive it as such. How do we, as humans in the physical realm, interface with worlds that have been conjured from the imagination, where the laws of physics do not necessarily constrain us, and where governments no longer have control?ĭawn of the New Everything, written by one of the true pioneers of the field, teaches us a lot about how the human brain and nervous system perceive this new way of being. In truth, this is only one of dozens of different VR definitions in this important book, but it is crucial because it raises so many questions.
In Dawn of the New Everything, his seminal work on virtual reality, Jaron Lanier describes Virtual Reality as “the substitution of the interface between a person and the physical environment with an interface to a simulated environment”. First things first - the Original paper can be found here:
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