Categorising the metaverse

Or, more accurately, categorising projects that contribute to the metaverse.

We’re building a metaverse thing called Peduncle, and I had to come to terms what it is we’re building, and why. Much of this was by looking at what others were doing and feeling that this is not what we’re building, and/or, I don’t want this, and then figuring out why I felt this way. From my experience, the media excitement mainly focuses on three aspects: digital twins, crypto and ‘the new internet’, and these often gets conflated. This led me to think of the metaverse as having three layers:

1. A payments layer that enables ecommerce, and the excitement here often focuses on blockchain, or distributed layer technology;
2. The virtual platform, which can be a fictional platform, but in our project is a geospatial layer. This can be reported on as “digital twins”, and AI and IoT can make an appearance here as interpreting or sourcing the data required to create this model; and
3. The foundational layer, which can be the infrastructure, the data ownership, the protocols that can make the metaverse real. Here there also seems to be the impression that blockchain can enable or realise this, which I think is misguided.

This means there are different groups of people excited about the metaverse and for different reasons, with different ideological approaches, and different frustrations that they believe this metaverse thing could address, and while not the focus of this post, it is important to keep this in mind.

Matthew Ball has seven subcategories for the metaverse which he explains in a great, short overview video (14 minutes), and he’s also written a whole book on it.

1. Hardware: wearables, sensors
2. Networking: bandwidth and latency
3. Computing power
4. Virtual platforms,the 3D virtual worlds
5. Interoperability standards: domain registries
6. Payment rails
7. CAIS: Contents, Assets, Identity Services

This post was also inspired by The Virtual Worlds Type Indicator, or Metaverse MBTI , and these all fit into the virtual platform component:

a. World or Family
b. Open or Controlled
c. General or Specific purpose and
d. Persistent or Resetting

Considering these then, I would like to propose a template for describing metaverse projects:

Start with 0. The Overview, What is your pitch, the TL;DR. Then, some check boxes and places for comment for each category. As I went through these, more questions popped up:

1. Hardware: wearables, sensors
   Are you developing wearables?
   Are you developing IoT hardware?
   Are you involved in hardware development in any other way?
   How do you plan to manage your storage? Are you developing servers (hard or software)?
2. Networking: bandwidth and latency
3. Computing power
4. Virtual platforms,the 3D virtual worlds
   Real or fantasy?
   Photorealistic, or stylised?
   Static or interactive/modifyable?
   a. World or Family
   b. Open or Controlled
   c. General or Specific purpose and
   d. Persistent or Resetting
5. Interoperability standards: domain registries
6. Payment rails
   Is your product mainly or fundamentally built on blockchain?
   Which payment methods are integrated? Fiat, crypto, promises, cash-facilitated, other? Combination?
7. CAIS: Contents, Assets, Identity Services
   How are your namespaces managed?
   Do you have avatars? How do they work? Can people upload their own?

Then there are perhaps more ideological questions:

1. Do you consider your project to contribute to decentralisation in any way?
   What flavour of decentralisation?
   A lot of the talk around decentralization in crypto and web3 often conflates decentralization of computing with decentralization of power – Molly White
   (I am trying really hard not to go down a tangent here, I may write about this in a separate post… if you can’t wait, look at Brett Simon’s book Cloudmoney, page 240-ish (my notes for a cheat sheet)
2. How do you plan to manage namespaces, and serverspace?
3. Is your project open-source or proprietary?

and then some Business 101 type questions:

1. Who is your target market?
Professional users or general? Commerce? Gamers? Scientists? A Combination?
Men/woman, young/old, traditional gamer (and which genre), or not gaming? …

Moving forward, my hope is that people are more explicit with what exactly they are busy with, to help people find their relevant focus more quickly, and thereby allow better collaboration. Ideally these projects should have entries in a searchable, sortable database. My suggestion is to give an overview of how your metaverse project tackles each category, and I’ll have a stab at ours soon.

Please get in touch if you know of similar ways to categorise what is being done in the area, and please comment to improve the template.