Looking at major metaverse events, major players’ definitions, relationships between virtual and reality, and building our own definition framework.

Writer, Editor: VaporAviator (M), Jiahui (F)

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Hello and welcome to our first episode of the Meta Potatoes podcast :)

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🥔 {Meta Potatoes} is…?

As the podcast title suggests, we study the Metaverse. But we are different from the others.

• First of all, we try to study the metaverse in an interesting, fun, and down-to-earth way.
• Secondly, we hold an open, inclusive, and continuously iterative attitude, aiming to obtain cutting-edge Metaverse information through research and dialogue. In other words, we are also studying. While presenting and teaching is the most effective way to learn, we decided to start this podcast and share the periodical outcome of our research.
• Finally, we hope to provide a global perspective, especially Chinese and English-speaking perspectives, and invite everyone to learn and make progress together with us.

👩🏻 🌾 Who are we?

We are hard-working potato planters in the Metaverse.

• Jiahui (F) | based in New York, is an art industry practitioner. Her past experience was in venture capitals and startups and is currently exploring the intersection of art, technology, and business.
• VaporAviator (M) | Futurist, Strategic designer. With experiences in the fashion and immersive industry, her interest is to remain on the cutting-edge of innovation and technology, and introduce fresh perspectives that allow new ideas to evolve.

🪐 Why do we choose to look into the Metaverse?

1. First of all, the past two years of pandemics reminded us of the need to connect with others. The question “How to break the constraints of time and place, and maintain the connections without being physically present?” is what led us to research the concept of Metaverse.
2. Secondly, at the forefront of art and capital, we notice that lots of new ideas are emerging and old concepts are being renovated. These include topics of NFT, VR/AR, Blockchain, Avatar, etc. They can all be considered as part of the general “Metaverse”.
3. Finally, we learned that much of the current research on Metaverse is either illogical, incomprehensible, or utilizes this concept for cheating.

Should we deliver our own research, and contribute our values to a more exciting future? That’s why Meta Potatoes was born.

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In this first episode, we talk about the definition, properties, and value of the Metaverse.

Before diving deeper into the Metaverse, let’s take a look at 🕰 the timeline of events that are relevant to “Metaverse”.

Here, we chose influential events from the perspectives of arts, film, television, games, hardware, software, etc.

🪶 Through looking at these major events, we found the following three key themes:

1. In China and abroad, gaming-related events count for the majority in metaverse news, which indicates that metaverse is still strongly related to gaming from the public’s cognition. In other words, gamified digital engagement is the easiest pathway or carrier for the public to understand and imagine metaverse.
2. Since 2021, especially with the entry of Meta (formerly Facebook) in October 2021, the intensity of “metaverse” related events has increased exponentially, which officially broke the niche market and entered the public conversation.
3. Although the above events did not mention, “metaverse” in China is still in a conceptual phase. The word is popularly used in the primary investment market and in the marketing strategy, but real products and services have not yet taken shape. This is our first audio, which will talk about the definition, properties, and value of the Metaverse.

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💨 So, how do major players define the Metaverse?

Let’s start with the tech giants.

We looked at top companies such as** Meta, Microsoft, and Google. Domestically within China, we pay attention to **tech giants such as Tencent, ByteDance, and Alibaba.

Meta focused on the Social Metaverse. As Mark Zuckerberg mentioned in an interview that “You can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet — — where instead of just viewing content — — you are in it.” This definition is similar to the description of “metaverse” in Snow Crash, where people are immersed in the visual content.

Microsoft is approaching Metaverse as Enterprise Metaverse. Satya Nadella (CEO) said in Microsoft Inspire 2021, “This platform layer brings together IoT, digital twins, and mixed reality. With our metaverse stack, you can start with the digital twin, building a rich digital model of anything physical or logical, whether it’s assets, products, a complex environment spanning people, places, things, and their interactions.” It is stated that interactions between people, products, and places in the enterprise metaverse are key elements defined by Microsoft.

Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, once said, “The way I think about it is evolving computing in an immersive way with augmented reality.” Thus, Google is focusing more on an AR immersive metaverse, which also stands for “immersive, interactive virtual worlds.”

Nvidia released their Omniverse platform in mid-2021. On Omniverse’s official website, there is a sentence saying, “The metaverse is a shared virtual 3D world, or worlds, that are interactive, immersive, and collaborative.” Nvidia has a similar definition to Google, except that Nvidia centered the idea of collaboration in the virtual world and defining a 3D shared metaverse.

☄️ How does Elon Musk look at this?

• Haha, Elon Musk is always at the forefront of technology, but he has a very distinct view regarding the trend of the metaverse. He once said in an interview, “I am unable to see a compelling metaverse situation currently.” He is not attracted by metaverse. It may also be because his heart is not on Earth, but breaking the boundaries of the Earth and entering outer space. Therefore, he is relatively negative on the concept of “Metaverse”.

🌞 How do Chinese tech giants view it?

Pony Ma (founder/CEO at Tencent) once said in an internal journal, “An exciting opportunity is coming. The mobile Internet has been developing for ten years and is about to usher in the next wave of upgrades. We call it the All-real Internet.” Therefore, Tencent equates metaverse with this “All-real Internet”, which is the next iteration of the Internet in which we are living right now.

Alibaba DAMO Academy’s XR Lab Director, Ping Tan, once delivered a speech at the Apsara Conference, “The metaverse is the next iteration of the Internet based on virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).” It is shown that Alibaba and Tencent aligned on the point that *“metaverse is the next iteration of internet.”

ByteDance did not define metaverse up till now, but they believe that participating in the metaverse industry has strategic meaning. Through Yiming Zhang’s letter to employees before he stepped down as CEO of ByteDance, we learnt that “the impact of virtual reality, life science and scientific computing on human life has now dawned, and these need us to break the inertia of our business and explore.” We may interpret that metaverse may be one of ByteDance’s future directions.

Huawei, as a major hardware manufacturer, mentioned the concept “holographic Internet”, specifically interpreted as “turning the world into a panel for information displaying; turning the world into a clickable desktop; turning the world into an empty palette that can be doodled; turning the world into a playground where everyone can play; turning the interactions between people and machines into the interactions between people and the world.” Huawei imagines metaverse as an information network in which people can interact with the world in real-time.

It is interesting to find that major players in China and in the US are defining the metaverse with different terms. Chinese giants tend to use words such as** “Internet” or “next-generation Internet”, while US tech companies directly use words such as “Metaverse” or “immersive worlds” **when describing the metaverse.

By using the term “metaverse”, tech giants in the US tend to create a space that can be altered by everyone’s own imagination. After all, “metaverse” is a new field and people can hardly define it with simple sentences at present.

Chinese companies tend to define metaverse in a relatively conservative way. A familiar concept is given in the first place (internet), and metaverse is then defined through the public’s expanded imagination of this familiar concept (next generation of the internet). On the contrary, companies in the US adopted a new term for the public to see it with a new conceptual framework.

Public acceptance is important in the Chinese market. Everyone knows what the Internet is, and then I am telling you that you can add a dimension to the current Internet, and render it as a 3D Internet, which becomes a form of metaverse that everyone can imagine.

On the contrary, metaverse seems to be a void, a blank space, interpreted from US companies’ definitions. Because it is so empty, it becomes a container that can bear anything. Thus, this is going to break the public’s unconscious perception of “metaverse” and make it more than “the next iteration of the Internet”. (Of course, this may also involve cultural appropriation as the concept of “metaverse” was translated into the Chinese market from abroad)

After looking at all these definitions of the metaverse, we found that,

💻 the current metaverse definitions can be roughly categorized into three types:

1. Following the concept introduced by Snow Crash, the first type believes that metaverse is a virtual world parallel to the real world, where people can act in the tangible world, including but not limited to trade, social, gaming, etc. Companies that support this concept also include Roblox, the first metaverse stock, along with a few other gaming companies. It is written in Roblox’s prospectus that metaverse is “persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces in a virtual universe.”
2. The second type states that metaverse is the next generation of the Internet. Unlike Web 2.0, where people interact in a 2D space, “Web 3.0” is an upgraded version of 2.0 which allows full sensory immersion in the digitized 3D world with a richer virtual experience. Internet giants such as Tencent and Alibaba all consider this to be true.
3. Third, the concept of the metaverse is still unclear and will continually evolve over time. Therefore, current discussions are focusing on the applications that are most likely to be realized. As of right now, they are gaming and future collaborative work, etc.

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Looking at these definitions, we realized that the relationship between virtual and reality is the core to defining metaverse.

In this regard, we have summed up the three major relationships:

• Virtual and reality are intertwined;
• Virtual is the duplication of reality;
• Virtual is the transcendence of reality.

1. Virtual and reality interweave. This is not the metaverse, this is the world we are already living in. We receive news, browse social media, shop, and play games through the mobile internet every day. We are already at the junction of virtual and reality. We are already in the “metaverse” that people from decades ago had imagined it to be. Probably the current version of “metaverse” is just a more “real” version than the metaverse which was imagined before.
2. Virtual is a replica of reality, which is also the ultimate form of metaverse defined by most organizations and individuals. It includes all contents and interactions in our real world, but it still is not the metaverse that we believed in, because there is no point to recreate the current tangible world in this new dimension. People want to satisfy their boundless desires, and in the virtual world, they always want to be capable of doing something that is impossible to do in the tangible world. This is the main reason why people are looking forward to the metaverse.
3. That’s why we came to the third type of relationship — — Virtual is the transcendence of reality. In MetaPotatoes’ perception of the metaverse, the virtual world is transcending our reality. As said in the trailer of Ready Player One, “People come to OASIS for all the things they can do, but they stay because of all the things they can be.” The metaverse provides a more imaginative place for everyone to become anyone. This is what we believe the metaverse to be.

For example, in the OASIS, “Las Vegas” also exists. There may be various obstacles to going to Vegas in the physical world — — time, money, and psychological barriers. However, in the game, you can enjoy the city anytime, anywhere, and at will.

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🙆🏻 Here, we try to define “Metaverse” by constructing our own framework.

We learned that different institutions have different definitions of the metaverse, and the definitions also evolve over time. It is clear that metaverse is a world similar to reality, but exceeds reality.

On one hand, in the metaverse, people require a sense of familiarity and similarity with reality to help them adapt to this new environment. On the other hand, they desire new things to happen in this new environment that generates a sense of strangeness and thus energizes their further explorations.

The metaverse is a collection of many concepts. No single sentence can draw the whole picture of the metaverse. We consider it to be another social system, composed of four elements: Technology, Space, Participants, and Interactions.

1. Technology. The technology* builds the underlying layer of the metaverse. *These include computing power that supports ultra-large data transmission operations, high-bandwidth low-latency reliable networks, + consumer & industrial devices that access metaverse (e.g. popular consumer devices include VR headsets, AR glasses, brain-computer interfaces, etc.).
2. Space. Space is the platform where metaverse operates, and it determines the upper limit of the metaverse scale. *In the 2D network, the flattened World Wide Web is our “metaverse” platform. In the 3D network, the space modeled upon physical scenes or even outer space scenes could all become the platform carrying this “metaverse”. This space has its own set of operating standards and support functions such as rendering, import & export, format compatibility, information management, etc.
3. Participants. Participants can be individuals or organizations, humans or AIs. They are “points” in the metaverse that have subjective initiative, and can create or develop content. They are scattered or clustered. Contents here include assets, services, and even economic systems.
4. Interaction is an essential composing part of the metaverse. Interactions include interactions between participants, interactions between contents, and interactions between participants and contents. Similar to our tangible world, there are different layers:

1) Interactions between participants: as participants, we can trade, socialize, play games, etc.

2) Interactions between contents: building blocks of content are forming the “architecture” in the metaverse.

3) Interactions between participants and contents correspond to the relationship between people and objects in the tangible world. We either own them, use them or exert other influences on them.

The virtual social system composed of these four elements is the ultimate form of metaverse that we imagine in an abstract sense. It has infinite possibilities.

In the relatively distant future, it may even break the boundaries of human languages or human neural networks, and reach an unimaginably open metaverse form.

Additionally, the next step for metaverse to develop is to realize the “presence” more. The existing internet technology can achieve real-time communication, but yet to realize co-experience. For example, people can send messages and make camping appointments with friends, but we cannot camp with friends on the current internet. Perhaps, the all senses co-experience with stronger immersion will bring us one step closer to the metaverse we imagined.

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Finally, 🌈 We are going to talk a little about the characteristics of Metaverse to better support our definition.

The most convincing discourse of the six characters regarding Metaverse is Sustainability, Real-time-ness, Creativity, Compatibility, Connectivity, and Economic attributes.

👀 Who introduced these six characters?

It was summarized from Matthew Ball’s blogs on the metaverse (in the original article, he suggested more than six). Matthew Ball is a well-known American venture capitalist. His investment covers many projects that were later categorized as “metaverse projects”. Matthew actually summarized these characteristics of the metaverse very well and fit our study.

Here we will explain each of these six characteristics:

• Sustainability: The digital world is non-stopping and can exist forever.
• Real-time-ness: Although in our definition, the metaverse is beyond the tangible world, it may still keep synchronized with the tangible world in real-time.
• Creatablity: Content in the virtual world can be created by any participant.
• Compatibility: Allow people or objects of any size to enter this network.
• Connectivity: There is a conversion system between the tangible world and the intangible one represented by the metaverse. Whether it is currencies, commodities or social relationships.
• Economic Attributes: There should be a fully functional economic system in the metaverse that supports all transactions and payments, etc.

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So far, we have shown you a preliminary framework we built to understand Metaverse. At the end of this episode, we would like to talk a little bit about 🕶 why should we (public audience) pay attention to metaverse? —— Its revolutionary nature.

We can understand this “revolutionary” from historic and current perspectives.

The progression of Metaverse has something in common with past revolutions in world history. We refer to Matthew Ball’s comparison of the metaverse with the second industrial revolution during the late 19th to early 20th century. Before electricity was widely used as consumer-scale applications, most people could hardly imagine what changes it would bring.

Similarly, the materialization of the metaverse will also impact everyone’s life. The arrival of this materialization will not only rely on breakthroughs in one technical field, but will definitely depend on the joint efforts of technology, content creations, social movements, and other fields. The metaverse will allow ultra-large-scale participants (in theory, anyone or anything on earth can access it) thus benefiting every society.

In fact, the accessibility of the Internet today is still uneven across the world. People living in many non-privileged areas still can not have a stable network connection or even no network connection. Metaverse is going to be revolutionary in this sense with its goal to include all. As we know, some new businesses have already started to build on decentralized wireless infrastructure which could be applicable for wireless environments. (e.g. Helium)

We can also see the revolutionary nature of the metaverse in the present day.

• First of all, as mentioned earlier, we consider metaverse to be the transcendence of reality. Therefore, in the metaverse, we are not passively reacting but actively engaging and creating content. Everyone’s story can be told — — which is hard to achieve within the current centralized infrastructure.
• Secondly, the metaverse creates another possibility to make profits. **For most Web 2.0 Internet companies, metaverse can be another entrance to increase sociometric popularity. **As you may all know, the current network traffic is expensive and difficult to obtain. At present, in pursuit of high-quality content, companies are paying a lot to purchase high-quality content or encourage creations from creators, but this is unsustainable. The metaverse is becoming a new network traffic entrance, which means that businesses that have been done in the real world can be done again in the virtual world. Moreover, the economic scale of the combined physical and virtual world will not only double but could even triple or quadruple, creating the effect of 1+1>2. Because there will be digital native assets in addition to the physical assets and the physical-to-digital assets. Therefore, the interaction between the physical world and the virtual world will produce a completely new economy and social form.
• Third, thinking from a broader perspective, **metaverse will enable us to broaden the forms of digitalization from “social relations” to “the relationships between human beings and the world or worlds”. **In the metaverse, there will be interactions between people, between AIs, as well as between people and AIs. This will be a comprehensive digital revolution that exceeds the current one, and can become an opportunity to learn more about ourselves and the world — — although it is still unknown whether this is a good thing or not — — it is indeed a brand-new and exciting opportunity.

In addition to the revolutionary perspective, metaverse will permeate every aspect of our daily lives — — making life easier, equitable and sustainable.

“Easier”: in the metaverse, people can go as far as they want without physically traveling in the distance. As long as they use the devices to connect and enter the metaverse, they can go anywhere, and talk to anyone.

“Equitable”: encourage more people to become content creators and receive corresponding benefits.

“Sustainable”: metaverse as a digital medium, requires less natural resources to keep it functioning and thus will help reduce natural energy consumption on Earth. Upgrading from 2D to 3D provides more ways for us to gather together. For example, we used to write letters for communication, then with the mobile network, we now use phones and the internet to connect.

As we enter the metaverse, the 3D interactive experience will definitely bring differences to our daily lives. Not to mention the possibility of conceptual changes in social and legal perspectives, including moral issues concerning the co-existence of humans and AIs, or troubles in incorporating new forms of organization to the existing legal systems, etc.

🥔 That’s all for today’s episode.

To sum up, we combed a timeline of events that are relevant to the concept of metaverse; summarized the definitions of metaverse from mainstream players; and tried to build our own definition: metaverse is a social system built in the virtual dimension exceeding the tangible world, and it consists of four elements: technology, content, participants and interaction. We also borrow Matthew Ball’s theory to indicate the key characteristics of the metaverse. In the end, we discussed the future value and significance of metaverse to the general public.

Moving on to the next episode, we will analyze more concepts relating to the metaverse. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please comment or leave us a message:)

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Part of the ideas credit to communications with Arnaud

All the pictures are from the Internet, and the copyright belongs to the original author

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