Diverse Opinions – 2
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a VentureBeat interview:
The metaverse, as you know, for all of you who are learning about it and hearing about it, it’s a virtual world that connects to the world that we live in. It’s a virtual world that is shared by a lot of people. It has real design. It has a real economy. You have a real avatar. That avatar belongs to you and is you. It could be a photoreal avatar of you, or a character.
In these metaverses, you’ll spend time with your friends. You’ll communicate, for example. We could be, in the future, in a metaverse right now. It will be a communications metaverse. It won’t be flat. It’ll be 3D. We’ll be able to almost feel like we’re there with each other. It’s how we do time travel. It’s how we travel to far places at the speed of light. It could simulate the future. There will be many types of metaverses, and video games are one of them, for example. Fortnite will eventually evolve into a form of metaverse, or some derivative of it. World of Warcraft, you can imagine, will someday evolve into a form of metaverse. There will be video game versions.
…In the world of industry, [the] building exists fully in virtual reality…We designed it completely digitally. We’re going to build it out so that there will be a digital twin of this very physical building in VR. We’ll be able to simulate everything, train our robots in it. We can simulate how best to distribute the air conditioning to reduce the energy consumption. Design certain shapeshifting mechanisms that block sunlight while letting in as much light as possible. We can simulate all of that in our digital twin, our building metaverse, before we deploy anything here in the physical world. We’ll be able to go in and out of it using VR and AR.
Jason Moore wrote this in the early days of the pandemic: “The basic concept of a metaverse has not changed much since the 1990s. Imagine a 3D world that you would enter through your web browser. You would be able to socialize, shop, and work from your desk or couch over the internet. A key feature of the metaverse is that it’s persistent. When you are logged out, the virtual world continues without you just as the real world does. The goal is for the user interface to the metaverse to be intuitive and easy so you could spend many hours a day immersed in stimulating activities. For some, the metaverse could occupy most of their waking hours with the real world sometimes being more of a distraction. Could a modern metaverse replace some of the interpersonal interactions we are craving? The key is to create a virtual world that stimulates many of the same senses we experience out in the real world. For example, touch and smell are just as important as the auditory and visual cues we get when talking face-to-face. It’s the combination of all these senses that create feelings and memories. Can we experience that using a computer or mobile device?”
Mark Sullivan wrote in Fast Company in the context of Facebook’s metaverse plans: “In a metaverse, lots of AR experiences would share a common reality, and users could navigate between them…You might social network in one place, then move to some other digital place for gaming, then move somewhere else for concerts or movies. One of the toughest problems…is mapping a common 3D graphical world to the real world so that users can see the same digital content when they’re in the same real-world places. Google relies on this kind of mapping when it places augmented reality wayfinder graphics to provide walking directions for users within its Maps app (the graphics are viewable on a smartphone, but may be seen through glasses in the future). Niantic built a map under its 2016 Pokémon Go AR game to let all the players see the same Pokémon in the same physical places. The quality of mixed-reality content, and how well it’s integrated around and within the real world in front of our eyes, may determine whether people eventually adopt it.”
