It's a Virtual Revolution

Howdy from Durham,

Welcome to the 2 new subscribers from this past week.

Today, we’re testing out a new format.

I’m sharing my Kindle highlights as quick-hit takeaways from the book I recently finished: Matthew Ball’s The Metaverse: How It Will Revolutionize Everything.

What is the metaverse?

tl;dr virtual worlds like those seen in the movie Ready Player One

• “A massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”

Who will build the metaverse?

tl;dr video game developers

• “Daniel Ek, the co-founder and CEO of Spotify, has argued that the dominant business model of the internet era has been breaking down anything made of atoms into bits—what was once a physical alarm clock on a nightstand is now an application inside the smartphone on a nightstand, or just data stored on a smart speaker nearby. 
  
  In a simplified sense, the Metaverse era can be thought of as involving the use of bits to produce 3D alarm clocks made of virtual atoms. Those with the most experience in virtual atoms—decades of it—are game developers. They know how to make not just a clock, but a room, a building, and a village populated by happy players. If humanity is ever to move to a ‘massively scaled interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds,’ that skill is going to take us there.”

What’s holding the metaverse back right now?

tl;dr the headsets aren’t advanced enough yet

• “With AR [augmented reality] and VR [virtual reality], one key constraint is the device display. The first consumer Oculus, released in 2016, had a resolution of 1080 × 1200 pixels per eye, while the Oculus Quest 2, released four years later, had a resolution of 1832 × 1920 per eye (roughly equivalent to 4K).
  
  Palmer Luckey, one of Oculus’s founders, believes that more than twice the latter resolution is required for VR to overcome pixilation issues and become a mainstream device.“

Which industries might be ripe for disruption by virtual worlds?

tl;dr education and healthcare, due to their rising costs

• “The US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the cost of the average good in January 1980 has increased over 260% through January 2020, whereas the cost of college tuition and fees has grown 1,200%. The second-closest sector, medical care and services, is up 600%.”

• “More hopeful is medicine and healthcare. Just as students might use 3D simulation to explore the human body, so too will physicians. In 2021, neurosurgeons at Johns Hopkins performed the hospital’s first-ever AR-surgery on a live patient. According to Dr. Timothy Witham, who led the surgery and is the director of the hospital’s Spinal Fusion Laboratory, ‘It’s like having a GPS navigator in front of your eyes in a natural way so you don’t have to look at a separate screen to see your patient’s CT scan.”

How will virtual worlds transform entertainment?

tl;dr there will be active fan participation in the worlds that people love the most (i.e. Marvel, Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc.)

• “At 9 p.m. on a Wednesday night, for example, Marvel might tweet that the Avengers “need our help,” with Tony Stark, as live-performed by Robert Downey Jr. (or perhaps someone who bears little resemblance to him but steers an avatar that does), leading the way. Alternatively, fans will have the opportunity to live out what they watched in a movie or show. The end of The Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015 involved the titular heroes fighting a legion of evil robots on a chunk of land floating above the earth. In 2030, players will have the chance to do the same.”

What is the difference between the metaverse and web3?

tl;dr web 3 = decentralized governance, metaverse = virtual world technology (some overlap but not the same thing)

• “Both the Metaverse and Web3 are ‘successor states’ to the internet as we know it today, but their definitions are quite different. Web3 does not directly require any 3D, real-time rendered, or synchronous experiences, while the Metaverse does not require decentralization, distributed databases, blockchains, or a relative shift of online power or value from platforms to users. To mix the two together is a bit like conflating the rise of democratic republics with industrialization or electrification—one is about societal formation and governance (web3), the other is about technology and its proliferation (metaverse).”

What I’m paying attention to:

The importance of books

Thanks for reading

How did you like this “Kindle highlights/quick hit” format?

I’d love your feedback - reply and let me know!

Josh

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