Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and love all things tech. But boy, that that less phrase comes with a lot of qualifiers, doesn't it. You know, I think that I might need to create a sub series of tech Stuff episodes called the Grumpy Old Man Episodes. Um and in which case, maybe we need like some sort of grumpy old man music, maybe something you know, like hill billy esque playing in the background, considering my my my own background in southern culture. But um yeah, this is gonna be a grumpy episode in many ways. And it's because I thought I would talk a bit about the concept of the metaverse and what that is besides being kind of using. And the reason I'm bringing it up at all is there have been a few recent examples of companies committing to building out a type of metaverse. One of those is Facebook, which you know, if you're listening to this in the future, might not be called Facebook anymore. The company that is. I'm sure the platform will still be called Facebook, but the company is looking at a rebranding at least according to rumor, and I'm sure I'll talk about that more in tomorrow's news episode, but first let's talk about some general concepts, because we're not just going to talk about Facebook's metaverse here. So the term itself has its roots in science fiction, similar to the term cyberspace. In fact, we should first consider cyberspace before we move on to the metaverse. Now, cyberspace, at least the version of cyberspace that became popularized within mainstream culture, originated from the works of cyber author William Gibson. Gibson himself was no programmer. He was not even a technologist. He has said that he picked up terms and expressions when essentially eaves dropping on conversations at a science fiction convention back in the early nineteen eighties, and he found certain phrases and you know, jargon, really captivating and they became part of his work and he used them liberally and loosely. One of the terms that he used with cyberspace, and he kind of coined it. Now, to be fair, other artists had actually used the term cyberspace before Gibson, but in a different context. So I'm not really including those in his short story Burning Chrome He called cyberspace a consensual hallucination. So it was a thing that took abstract data and ideas and turned it into stuff you could actually see, like visualize. And that sounds pretty trippy, but stick with me for a second, because honestly, this is how we interact with a lot of our technology today. It's just you know, mundane to us. So take the typical computer user interface or even smartphone interface. Most systems that the average person comes into contact with these days are some variation of a graphical user interface or g u I or gooey. In other words, there are obviously alternatives, and I mean if you're working on Linux systems with line code and things like that, you know that's different. But most of us tend to encounter systems that are using some form of gooey. So the graphics on screen represents stuff like programs and processes. So for example, if you have a uh your desktop up and there's a Chrome icon on the screen, you can click on that and it opens up the Chrome web browser. Uh. If you were to click on an icon that was for Minecraft, it would open up Minecraft. You get the idea. The process of executing a program, which you know that's kind of abstract. The idea of telling a computer, hey, I need you to execute this specific code. That has made more understandable by representing that process with the icon. You click on the icon and the computer does the thing. You don't have to try to figure out how to tell the computer to do the thing. The computer knows how to do the thing. All you had to do is click on the icon. Gibson's description of cyberspace was kind of like that, but on a global scale. It was an extension of how we already used various methods to try and visualize data. I mean, we've been doing that for ages, you know. We use tables and charts and graphs in order to do this. Humans are not super good at processing big numbers, like we can't really conceptualize big numbers effectively. But if you break it down into a picture, then we typically get the idea, ah ha, that piece of the pie is much bigger than this other piece of the pie. You know, mm hmm pie. That's a that's a throwback for the long time text stuff listeners out there. Well later people would specifically interpret Gibson's description of cyberspace to mean computer networks in general, and then the Internet in particular. Cyberspace was this kind of nebulous location. It wasn't physical, but it was possible because of these interconnected computers. It was the the abstract idea of space represented by these computer connections. Cyberspace was where data could flow from one source to another, or from one source to many others, or from many sources to one destination. As the general public became aware that there was this thing called the Internet, the term cyberspace would sometimes be used to describe it. In fact, a lot of us still use it today. I would argue that Gibson's original concept was a little more poetic than the Internet, that it was less about the actual interconnections and more about this experience of the abstract taking a synthetic form that we could interact with in some presumably meaningful way. But there you go. Well, by the time we get to the nineties, the Internet was a known thing, at least to a slightly larger number of folks. It wouldn't really take off in the public consciousness until the Worldwide Web started to gain speed. Really, by the mid to late nineties, it had been around for a while, but mostly it was college students who were aware of it before then. But in those early nineties we got another concept from science fiction, and this would be the metaverse. Now, this time the author was Neil Stevenson and the book was Snow Crash. That book, by the way, is a darn entertaining read. There's no way I could give a synopsis of that book and do it justice. It would just sound like gibberish if I try to explain it. But it includes stuff like cyberpunk elements, the concept of human language being somewhat synonymous with programming languages, the idea of corporations becoming the dominant force in modern life, and stuff like that. Also, the main character's name in that book is Hero Protagonist, which is just playing awesome. But the part we want to focus on is the metaverse. So in the books No Crash, there is this online virtual space that exists in tandem with our own physical world. Using a computer system like a terminal, you can log into this persistent virtual world, and in that world, each person has an avatar to represent themselves, just like you would find in your typical massively multiplayer online role playing game or m m O RPG. Now, this kind of gets back to Gibson's description of abstract data taking forms. So in this case, the abstract data would be all the different kinds of interactions you would have within a virtual space, and the form would be the avatar. Right. So let's say that you're in a virtual pub, and this virtual pub has a dartboard in it, and you decide you want to play a game of darts, so you direct your avatar to the dart board. Then you begin a game, and the whole process of your avatar walking to the dart board and pulling the darts out and getting ready to throw the darts is kind of analogous to how you would click on an icon on your standard computer or smartphone gooey like, when you want to play a game on your phone, you just touch the icon for the game on your screen and it launches and then you're off. In this version of a metaverse, a virtual representation of you seems to go through these stages that a real person would go through in our physical real world to play the real version of that game. So again it's giving form, it's mirroring the real world in that case. Now that's just a simple example, of course, And in snow crash. The metaverse includes not just avatars that represent people and not just like entertaining diversions. There are also representations of programs and processes that take a form like akin to a physical form in the metaverse. Again, let's think about your computer. One thing you might have on your computer is an anti virus program that, right, the anti virus is designed to keep your computer protected from malware threats. Well, in the metaverse, you might have something akin to malware protection, but it takes the form of like a security guard or maybe a personal bodyguard, and you actually see a representation. You wouldn't have to do it this way, right, You wouldn't even have to have a visualization of that process, but you could. So some of the things in the metaverse would not be representations of other people, but of specific processes or programs. On a similar note, maybe you've got a personal assistant in this virtual world, and the assistant isn't an actual human being using an avatar. Instead, it's a computer generated conduit for things like notifications. So instead of seeing like something pop up within your vision telling you, hey, you've got a message, maybe you've got this personal assistant who says, hey, boss, I got a message for you, like, that's another way you could have this implementation. Now, that is the tippiest tip of the iceberg when it comes to metaverse implementations, of course, And I should also add that the concept lumps and a few other things as well. For one thing, stuff like virtual and augmented reality bleed into the idea of a metaverse. The metaverse becomes something that one can experience within the virtual environment, or sometimes the metaverse can bleed in to the real world through technologies like augmented reality and the Internet of Things. Really, the metaverse is an evolutionary step and how we interact both with the world of computers and computer systems and our real world around us. Now, let's talk about augmented reality for a second. I often think of augmented reality or a R as being kind of an isolated experience. So, in other words, I frequently take a fairly narrow view of a R. I imagine glasses or maybe a headset. Then lets me do stuff like see virtual overlays like directions displayed on top of my real world view. So maybe I'm desperately trying to put together a piece of IKEA furniture and I'm having real hard time just following the paper directions. So I put on my A R headset that has a program that has all the different Ikea furniture programmed into it, and the headsets camera is looking where I'm looking, so it identifies the various pieces is of Ikea furniture in front of me, and it gives me directions step by step on what I need to do next. It tells me if the piece I'm working on is backwards or not right, might say, hey, you need to flip that around, which is very useful. It prevents me from doing what I otherwise will do practically every single ding dang darn time, which is that I will install the drawers upside down in my desk. Anyway, with the A R glasses, I'm not just getting instructions like I would from the paper book. I'm getting contextual, relevant instructions for what's happening at that moment, where I am and how everything is oriented from my perspective. The glasses interpret what it is I'm looking at and what it should look like, and then it is able to tell me what I should do next. I mean, the earliest versions of A R were meant to do this sort of thing. One very early implementation of augmented reality was to help people who are putting together commercial air craft. You know, there's a lot of stuff that has to happen correctly to build a working commercial aircraft, for example, wiring up the aircraft that you're putting together so that all the electrical systems work properly. So one early implementation of the ARE was to create a guide for technicians to follow when they were wiring up aircraft to make sure that the correct wires were going to the correct places. Well, these are kind of isolated examples of a R. In a metaverse implementation, the a R glasses could tap into this shared, persistent universe and create experiences in our real world connected to that virtual universe, and it could do so in a lot of different ways. I mean, maybe it allows you to travel within both the real world and the metaverse at the same time, which I think would probably be a little bit confusing at least for me. Or maybe it lets you tap into stuff that enhances your experience in both realms in some way, Like you could think of ways that marketers could create real world experiences that enhance your experiences in a virtual world or vice versa, like you could have it go both ways. When you pairent with things like the Internet of Things and ubiquitous computing, you really start to blur the lines between where the virtual world ends and the real world begins. And that's kind of the point. Now. I mentioned that in snow Crash there's kind of a social system in this metaverse um and it depends partly on how good your avatar looks like. That's a big part of it. And the idea here is that you typically need to be pretty talented as a programmer or a hacker in order to make a really cool looking avatar. Uh. And the way you tap into the metaverse and snow Crash is reliant on what kind of terminal you are using. What's your end point, your your access point. The folks who are really well off in the real world have their own personal terminals with powerful computer systems and sophisticated electronics, so the look great when they log in. Their Their avatars aren't just cool, they're like high resolution, detailed avatars. But you could also access the metaverse using publicly accessible terminals, but these run on much older pieces of hardware, so you look kind of jankie when you log in like a low resolution version of whatever it is you're trying to be, and that means that the folks around you will look down on you like your status is lower because you're accessing the metaverse using some publicly accessible terminal, not like through some fancy sh fancy one. Now that's an interesting concept. It's one that I think we would have to tweak a little bit today for it to translate properly. And the reason I say that is because of cloud computing. Most of the time online worlds rely on cloud based servers to do the heavy lifting. So the device you use, whether it's your computer or virtual reality setup or even your smartphone, that device doesn't need to do as as much work. Has to do some it's got to render stuff for you, but a lot of the heavy lifting is done on the server side, not on the client side. So some processing has to happen at your side, but a lot of it needs to happen in the centrally located cloud. So in this case, what's really important is that you have a good Internet connection in order to have a seamless experience. But then the servers do the rest. So I think if Stevenson were to write snow Crash today, he might put more emphasis on connection speed versus the actual physical hardware you're using to access the metaverse, and that the speed would end up being something that affects your perceived status within the metaverse. Anyway, the metaverse plays a really big part in snow Crash, but it plays an even bigger part in a novel titled Ready Player one by Ernest Klein, which also was famously turned into a movie. Now. In that novel, there's an online world called Oasis that is in many ways a metaverse. It's where people go to escape the harsh and mundane challenges of the real world. Like snow Crash, how you experience the Oasis depends largely upon the equipment you have at your disposal. If you have a basic setup, you get a taste of it, but to really get the most out of it, you need really high tech and expensive gear that not only lets you navigate this virtual environment, but you get real world haptic feedback. Haptic in this case, that that's talking about your sense of touch. So you have some sort of technology that can give you touch feedback to stuff that you're encountering. In this virtual space, which creates your sense of immersion, right, and you can physically experience the stuff that you're virtually encountering. The two realities, you know, the reality of the real world and the reality of this virtual real world kind blend into one another. Also in the metaverse and Ready Player one, that metaverse mostly exists so that you can endure countless references to nineteen eighties pop culture like a lot. Now, I know this isn't a literary criticism podcast, but I have to say that the one thing I found Ready Player one to really be was irritating, both because I felt that Klein was leaning way too hard on references to kind of stand in for story, and also what little story there actually was once you peeled the references away, amounted to very little more than a juvenile male power fantasy, which is kind of a key for me. And because all the references were for the nineteen eighties, I couldn't help but feel that Klein was really writing this book for folks who belonged to kind of my generation, the same as Klein's generation. You know, people who were kids in the eighties like those references wouldn't have the same appeal to people who were born and say the late nineties, for example. But then you've got a juvenile male power fantasy that was written in a book that was mostly geared for people in their forties. Anyway, I'm off track, you know what. Actually, I think we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk more about the concept of the metaverse. One thing that we need to take into consideration when we're talking about the metaverse is the idea of what comes next, because that's kind of what the metaverse is. And it helps if we think of some of the technologies that were emerging at the time that folks first started to think about stuff like the metaverse. For one thing, you had the emergence of virtual reality or VR. Now, VR in the nineties was pretty primitive, but folks latched onto this concept like Gangbusters. The hype was out of control. The general public was familiar with, at least, you know, to some extent, of computers, and they were at least aware of computers. Stuff like video game systems, personal computers, and digitized workplaces. Meant that pretty much everybody had at least some awareness of what computers are and what they can do. Virtual reality had this promise of bringing what computers do into a new kind of experience, a really immersive, enveloping experience like the gooey, like the graphical user interface. Virtual reality we were told would revolutionize how we interface and access computer information and programs. So rather than sitting at a desk and using a keyboard and mouse, we would use a virtual reality set up and we would virtually walk around environments and interact with virtual objects. Would be the next step up from having icons, right, And this was the era where Hollywood kind of envisioned a very different, unrealistic version of what using a computer was all about, and an even more unrealistic depiction of what virtual reality experiences were like. If you take a look at films from the early to mid nineties that involved computers, there's usually some sort of scene where someone is, you know, at a computer and they're going through a file system and they're navigating through some sort of three dimensionally rendered virtual structure. They might even be avoiding viruses or or security programs that are represented in some way like it's like you're playing a first person shooter game that all you're trying to do is, you know, run a simple program. It's nonsense, but it was a way to bring about that abstract idea into something that was, you know, filmable, because it's not very exciting to see someone either type in code into a computer or click on an icon on the screen. Well, VR would end up having a drastic decline, largely because people became disenchanted with where the technology actually stood versus where people thought it was based upon these like Hollywood films and stuff. So VR fell off the edge of the hype train and it would take another decade or so before it would start to re emerge to make another go at it. The VR would be one of the many components we would see incorporated into the concept of the metaverse. Then we've got the idea of web two point oh, which ties into this general idea of whether the Internet, or to put it less whimsically, what comes next, what's the next evolutionary step. So web two point oh was essentially a marketing buzz term. It was a way to reduce a lot of different important concepts into something that was easy to reference, even if you weren't being particularly precise with your language. It's unfortunate that people went with two point oh as a designation because it suggests that we first had Web one point oh, and then at some point some developers somewhere pushed out an up date to the web and we got Web two point oh. But that's not what happened. Instead, Web two point oh was a kind of collective term to describe websites that embraced stuff like dynamic, interactive experiences instead of a static web page. These experiences didn't have to be you know, thrilling, edge of your seat kind of things. For example, shopping sites that let users post reviews of products and then future visitors will see those reviews. Those are considered to be interactive and dynamic. The users are adding value to the experience of visiting the website through their activities. They're changing things over time, and future users can take that and say, oh, this person gave a really good review for this particular item, I'm going to go ahead and order it. Then you contrast that with some of the early web pages that were nothing more than just text. I mean, maybe you've got a table, maybe you've got a picture or two if you were lucky, if you were unlucky, maybe you also had a MIDI file playing in the background. Because I built some of those pages and and I am sorry anyway. These early pages were more like a physical catalog or a reference book. It's something that had inc committed to paper kind of approach to it. You know, the books and the catalogs, they never change. The publisher might send out an updated version further down the line, but the ones that they send out originally, those don't change. Right. If you buy a book, a physical book, and you put it in your bookshelf fifty years from now, it's going to have the exact same words on it as it did the day you bought it. That was kind of how web. A lot of web pages were in the early days, and these were seen as kind of boring and un engaging, and there was no reason to go back to them. You visit it once and you got it right. If it's never going to change, there's no point in going back. And the idea was that the future of the web was really going to be more insights than included rich experiences and ways for users to have meaningful interactions. So Web two point oh was less about here's where the web is going and more about here's how you can make your web presence impactful. Here's how you can stick around. But there were very early versions of Web two point oh at the same time as the quote unquote Web one point oh pages. It's not like it's not like we saw things change over time, but rather we saw which strategies worked in the long run, more like more like a web version of natural selection than anything else. Um. But it also set the stage for people to start talking about Web three point oh as then what's the next evolutionary step. Well, opinions about what that was gonna be varied. Some folks thought the next version of the web would be a virtual experience that you would travel through the web as if you were navigating real space, like you had a virtual environment and you're traveling around and you're interacting with stuff that way, sort of the wrecord Ralph version of navigating the web. The world of the web would be modeled in some ways on our real world, but we wouldn't be restricted by the laws of physics. Maybe in Web three point oh you can virtually fly around, or teleport or do any number of things. Maybe experiences on the Web would go beyond clicking on a link to go to a page. Maybe you would take a more active role in some way it could transform how we work and play on the web. Now, that was one concept of what web three point oh might be. Another involves the idea of the semantic web. And I've talked a lot in past episodes about how natural language processing is a non trivial challenge for computers. Now, we humans use language in odd, wonderful, and often confusing ways. Uh, And now I'm going to play the part of old persons speaking in lingo here, which I get it's cringe inducing, but this is to prove a point. Let's say I see that you pull off an amazing stunt of some sort. I might say that's cool. Or I might say that's bad. Or I might say that's sick, or I might say something else that ultimately means I am very impressed with what you did, and I applaud your efforts. But words like cool, bad, and sick don't just inherently mean good. I mean, I might say something is cool, but what I mean is that the temperature of that thing is lower than the temperature of the stuff around it. I might say it's bad if it's you know, not good. I might say it's sick if it's I don't know, puking it scuts out. Computers are not so good at picking the meaning out of what we have to say, even if what we say is straightforward. Computers cannot do that on their own. It requires a lot of work to create natural language processing, but we have seen big advances in that field, with systems getting better at parsing language, determining what was said, what was meant, and then formulating a response to that. Well, the semantic web would be able to interact with people using human language, and at least in some visions of the semantic web, the browser itself would pull from various sources to create a unique presentation of information based on whatever your query was. So not only would the semantic web understand what you were asking for, it would be able to go, well, look at all the different depositories of information about that subject and pull the relevant information for you, understanding what it was you were actually looking for. So, let's say you were doing a search on William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. The semantic web might actually generate a unique web page for you based upon what it knows about you, and that page contains information about the play, maybe some video clips of different performances, maybe some passages from critical analysis about the play and so on. So it's not sending you to a specific web page that has all these things. It's actually generating that content itself, pulling that information from all these other sources. Then there's yet another web three point idea that relies on stuff like machine learning and artificial intelligence. This is the concept of a web experience that that really customizes itself to the individual user. So think of all the times you encounter stuff online that's a targeted ad that's targeting you. Maybe you've done some web searches about like a particular style of coat, and then the next time you're on a website you start seeing ads for companies that make the type of coat you were interested in. Stuff like Internet cookies allows for that kind of collaboration that's going on behind the scenes. There's a lot of money going on back there too, and the result is that we feel some of the experiences we have have been curated for us. That can sometimes be good and often it can be pretty intrusive and creepy. Now that extends beyond ads. Obviously, sites like Facebook and YouTube use algorithms to choose which pieces of content you're more likely to encounter based upon your past behaviors. If you engage with one piece of content, that's like sending a message to the algorithm saying, Hey, I really happen to like topic X, so send me more stuff relating to topic X. Web three point oh would, in theory, take this concept and move really far forward with it. The browser for Web three point oh would anticipate what it was you wanted. It would draw conclusions based on what it knows about you, and a truly sophisticated version might be able to serve stuff up before you can even be aware that you wanted to see it in the first place. It also could be either magical or super creepy. Now, some of these ideas have filtered into our real world experiences, some of them are still outside of our realm of capability. Nothing has like truly transformed the Web, and some of the ideas have made their way into the concept of the metaverse. But really the whole reason I brought it up is that, at least in some ways, people are looking at meta versus as another answer to the question what comes next, At least as with regard to to how we interact with the online world and online experiences, all right, So a metaverse is more than just a virtual space. It's even more than an experience that can cross over from virtual world into the real world via stuff like the Internet of things devices, actuators are being a reality technology, et cetera. We generally think of a metaverse as being something that has the capacity to support its own society, at least to an extent. That can involve stuff like having a role within the metaverse and having the ability to perform certain types of transactions. And I think you can make a persuasive argument that a lot of m m O r pgs incorporate aspects of the metaverse concept, but I think that they don't get to full metaverse level. And that's largely because m m O RPGs have a certain immutable structure within them. So what do I mean that by that? I mean? Was that actually mean? Well, let's take a specific example and we'll talk about World of Warcraft, probably, you know, arguably the best known M m O RPG. It certainly was the most popular for many years. This game will be coming up on its twentieth anniversary in just a couple of years, so it is huge players have lots of options when it comes to picking a race and a class. They play a part in a grand, sweeping narrative, except it's a narrative that doesn't actually progress, at least not on a real level. See in games like World of Warcraft, players can take on quests to gain experience and loot and that sort of stuff. They progress as characters within this world. Their individual story can advance a little bit. But that quest you just did, let's say it's a quest that you know was to save a villager's child, that quest still exists for other players. Like you just rescued that one villager's child from a threat, But guess what the next player is gonna end up doing the same thing. That villagers child is perpetually immortal peril, and no number of rescues are ever going to change that. The world around you remains the same. Occasionally, you'll get an update to a game like this and that will incorporate really big changes that affect everything. But this isn't a consequence of player actions. It's something that the developers came up with as the next phase of this otherwise immutable world. When you really boil it all down, it doesn't matter what you do or don't do within the game. It doesn't make a difference in the grand scheme of things. It might have the illusion of mattering, but it doesn't really. It just gets pretty heavy, right. So, because the world has these ultimate boundaries, there's a limit to how much it can be a metaverse. It can have qualities of a metaverse, but otherwise it's kind of stuck. Now, that doesn't mean that players can't create new methods of play within the game. They can, and they do. There are always players who will find ways to play that weren't intended by developers, and that emergent gameplay can be a bit closer to a true metaverse in some ways. But there are other environments that are even closer to the metaverse concept as it originally appeared. When we come back, we'll talk about one of them. But first another quick break. Let us now take into consideration Second Life, which means first we need to talk about Linden Lab, the company that made Second Life. Now. Lynden Lab, founded by Philip Rosedale, did not set out to create a metaverse, at least not at first. Linden Lab's original focus was in hardware, with the goal of creating a system that was called the RIG that would provide like haptic feedback for virtual experiences. It was meant to be like a fully fledged virtual experience. It's piece of hardware that would uh create an an incredible, you know, experience for the user when they were going through VR. Taptic feedback, as I said, refers to the sense of touch, and a rumble pack in a video game controller is an example of a simple haptic feedback device. The RIG ultimately proved to be impractical, but one thing to emerge around this same time was this idea to create a virtual environment that would interact with something like the RIG. I mean, hardware like the RIG only does something interesting if you compare it with software that powers the experience, right, So in some ways I kind of think of this similar to how J. R. R. Token created the mythology and history of Middle Earth. Not Tolkien was a linguist, and he set out to make a few languages. Specifically. He first really started with a couple of versions of Elvish, but then he needed to have a world where these languages have existed, where they would have come from, and and so he started creating Mental Earth. Second Life, an online virtual world, sort of has a similar origin story. Now. Rosedale has said that while he had red snow Crash, or at least he was familiar with snow Crash, he had already been thinking about a persistent virtual online world before he encountered that book. And that's entirely possible because lots of folks were looking into these sorts of things around that time. Second Life would emerge in two thousand three as a kind of metaverse. In Second Life, users create an avatar to represent themselves in the virtual world. They then can visit this virtual world that lives on real world servers. They could own space within that virtual environment, so you would purchase virtual real estate using real world money to do it. And then you could create objects. You could code and DESI mind stuff for yourself, or you could create stuff and then offer it up to other users. You could even sell it within the game. They had an in game currency, I call it a game, it's not a game, then an in world currency, and you could interact with other people in Second Life, and you know, you had this shared online space, this community that existed. Virtually. Social structures began to form, so people actually did create communities within Second Life. You had the economy come about as a result of all this as well. Second Life wasn't constrained by the rules we face in reality, so it was a type of realization of a metaverse. Now you weren't required to encounter this by wearing you know, VR equipment. You could use a computer and you had a simple interface and you would navigate it like you would if it were like a first person shooter game or a third person perspective game. You could navigate the world that way, So it wasn't necessarily that you were all kidded out with a headset and gloves and all the kind of stuff we see in science fiction. But it was a metaverse, and it also came with some pretty big problems. Some of them were in ways that Lyndon Labs tried to monetize the platform. So, for example, the company once tried to initiate a tax system in which users would have to pay a certain amount of tax based on the amount of virtual stuff that they owned within Second Life. So let's say that you had purchased some virtual real estate, and let's say that you had, you know, the knowledge and talent to be able to code stuff in Second Life, you can maybe make something like a castle in the sky if you wanted to. Uh. Lyndon Labs said that well, in an effort to rein in some of the more extravagant displays and could serve server processing power, it would end up taxing folks for building that kind of stuff. So the more grandiose in large your design, the more you were going to have to pay. Folks found ways around this. They essentially they did the effect of deleting their stuff on the days when taxes were going to be assessed and then reinstating it the next day. It was not going smoothly, and Lyndon Lab of that ultimately chose other pathways towards monetization than that. But there were a lot of other issues within Second Life as well. Uh. Like again from the economy side, there were copy bots that would create counterfeit versions, like copies of user creations because we gotta remember everything users created was digital and digital files are easy to copy. It's it's kind of like the issues that cryptocurrency had to work around, like how do you prevent people from copying the same thing endlessly? And because some users were actually making a living by creating and then selling virtual items within Second Life. This was a big problem. There were other issues that were user generated issue use like there was there was very taboo content. Taboo is putting it lightly. There was illegal content on Second Life as well, and it got a really bad reputation for that. That's not to say that everyone on Second Life was engaging in illegal practices, but the fact that they were happening and they were not particularly secret made it a stain on the reputation of the platform. Now, Second Life gained popularity for a while, kind of peeking around two thousand thirteen or so, and then it kind of declined. It still exists today. There are fewer than a million active users. Some estimates hover between half a million and nine thousand users, and a million is a lot of people, but when you compare it to platforms like Facebook, it's not even a drop in the ocean. Right, So Second Life is still around. It hasn't gone away, but I think the rise of social media platforms, primarily Facebook, led to a decline in usage. And that doesn't mean that In Life was the only attempt at creating a metaverse. There have been several others, and in some cases it wasn't even a conscious attempt to create a metaverse. For example, I would argue that Minecraft didn't set out to be a metaverse. But there are Minecraft servers that are themselves their own little metaverses. So there are Minecraft servers where players create communities. They might have specific roles in those communities, they have different ways to interact with each other. The virtual world itself is persistent. Player actions can have a meaningful impact on these virtual worlds. So, assuming whoever is running the server hasn't prevented users from you know, the basic mechanics of Minecraft, the players get to shape the world however they like. You know, maybe they create a subterranean uh community and the surface of the world is only occupied by animals and monsters. All the people are below ground, or maybe everyone's living up in the sky and they don't have flight turned on, so if you make a bad step, you're gonna faul to your death. You get the idea. And like I said, there are a lot of metaverse examples out there, and most of them have had a fairly limited impact. So there are subcultures that spend a lot of time in these metaverses where there are meaningful communities out there, but this experience hasn't become anywhere close to being ubiquitous. I guess it's not nearly as popular as just going online to check your social media right. Like tons of people use Facebook, a very small percentage by comparison, actually spends time on one of these metaverses. But Facebook itself is actually trying to change that. Facebook acquired the VR company Oculus back in and in twenty nineteen, Facebook announced the development of what was then called Facebook Horizon Um. Now it's called Horizon Worlds. There's also a a work related one called Horizon Workplace. These are virtual environments in which players can actually create their own virtual spaces and even program their own games within those virtual spaces. So Horizon world comes with tools that let users make gameplay elements, and then as a user, you can navigate around and explore this virtual space. You can go to these different user generated worlds and try out the stuff that they've programmed. But it's currently just in a beta phase, and it also requires either you know, an Oculus Rift or an Oculus Quest as in the Oculus Virtual reality systems. As such, this is limited to a fairly small group of beta testers. For right now. I mean, first you have to limit it to just the folks who own an oculus system. Then you have among those the subsection that got a personal invite to participate in this beta. But that's just the start. In June of this year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed to employees that the company had a plan to develop its own metaverse. Such a platform would incorporate vr are and a are, along with aspects of social networks and online shopping sites. It's essentially an effort to create the next thing for online spaces. It would be a thing that Facebook would own, which I mean, it's kind of hard to overstate how big a deal that would be for the company. After all, Facebook has billions of users. If it can even you know, managed to support of those people to this, that alone would be enormous because imagine for a moment that Facebook wasn't just a big player on the Internet. Imagine if Facebook was synonymous with the Internet. Imagine if every link, every interaction, every purchase, all of that. Imagine all of that filtered first through Facebook's systems. That's kind of what I think the company is hoping for with the creation of this metaverse. Experience to create something so compelling and immersive and interesting that folks migrate to it as I or the next phase of what it means to be online, or more likely, as you know, an additional way for a subset of people to interact online. Now, if you're like me, you probably think that doesn't sound great. Facebook has a pretty bad reputation when it comes to stuff like ethics and concern about users safety and privacy, And you can easily imagine a system that relies on stuff like VR and ARE hardware to provide even more opportunities for Facebook to gather information about users, information that Facebook would then leverage when working with, let's say advertisers. And think for a moment about the conversations we've had about Facebook's algorithm and how it's exacerbated problems like the spread of misinformation and hate speech. Now imagine the same company, which has shown at the very least a lack of urgency in addressing those issues, is literally in charge of every aspect of your online experience when you're inside It's metaverse. That's kind of chilling when you think of it that way. In fact, there's one science fiction film that has a metaverse in it that I think is a pretty fair analogy, and that's the matrix, because in the matrix, nearly all of humanity is actually inside a computer simulation, and their real bodies exist solely as an energy source for machines. Well, I feel like Facebook metaverse would be kind of similar, except we'd be the source of money while occupying this virtual space. Anyway, I don't want to get too alarmist in that. It's true that I am beyond skeptical of a Facebook metaverse being, you know, a good thing. But it's also true that even if Facebook launches such a product, it's not guaranteed to succeed. So far, these metaverse experiences tend to appeal to a limited number of folks. Even in the Minecraft examples, I was giving like, there are plenty of Minecraft players who play on a private server who never interact with anyone else. That's not really much of a metaverse in that case. So it's not like any of these examples has reached a broad mainstream audience. They're all sub audiences. So in some cases people might not gravitate towards a metaverse because of the aesthetics of the metaverse, or it might be because the experience itself doesn't appeal to them, like maybe navigating the world is not natural to them and they don't enjoy it. Or in others, it might be because the equipment you need in order to even take part in it is prohibitively expensive. They can't afford to give it a shot. So there's no guarantee that the Facebook metaverse will become a huge hit, or that it's going to, you know, somehow replace the way we go online now. Uh So, no one has really made a metaverse on a scale like what we saw in the fiction of snow Crash already player one. No one has built something so amazing that practically everyone is already on it. No one has built the Facebook of meta verses, and we don't even know if Facebook will be able to pull that off. I'm skeptical, I am. Iagine whatever Facebook makes will not be my cup of tea. But then I also thought that my Space would beat Facebook, So what the heck do I know? Anyway, that's this episode about meta versus. Hope you enjoyed it. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me on Twitter. The handle we use for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.