The other universe

The Metaverse, a brave new virtual world or just pointless sci-fi bollocks? James "Amiga4Eva" Matson dons a VR headset and goes off in search of answers.

The Metaverse, a brave new virtual world or just pointless sci-fi bollocks? James "Amiga4Eva" Matson dons a VR headset and goes off in search of answers.

Frank is a very lucky man. He lives in a four-story mansion with more bedrooms in his home than most people have light switches. He is an expert in various forms of hand-to-hand combat, drives a Porsche and has the dashing good looks to put any James Bond character to shame. He leads an exciting life with limitless possibilities.

Frank is confident, powerful and can be or do just about anything he wants to. He is a lucky man indeed. And if he doesn’t feel like being a lucky man he can – at will – change into a foxy lady or 400 foot mecha robot that flies effortlessly through the upper atmosphere.

Then he takes off his headset, slides off the gloves that for the past 8 hours sent pulses of positional and tactile data to his home PC.

Unplugged from the virtual world he’s back to being a balding overweight fast food outlet manager, devoid of ninja skills. His dashing good looks – a result of his online persona or ‘Avatar’, just a pleasant memory.

That’s ok – it’s just the real world. Whenever he feels the urge to get away again, it’s a simple matter of putting on the headset, the gloves, and tumbling back into the omnipresent Metaverse.

And on the seventh day they created VRML
People love escapism. That’s why we play games, watch movies and dress up as superheroes in the privacy of our own bedroom. Taking that escape to the ultimate level – a synthetic universe or ‘Metaverse’ – is perhaps the final expression of that human compulsion.

VRML sought to bring primitive 3D interaction to the internet

Author Neal Stephenson first coined the Metaverse term in his now classic cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. Written in 1992, it detailed a virtual world full of people interacting on a digital level, using technology to not only communicate with other people traversing the 3D landscape but to formulate their physical appearance and personality.

The concept however, has been the pet fascination of humanity both in fiction and fact since the first shadowy days of computers being networked together.

The Metaverse could be loosely interpreted as Virtual Reality’s big brother. It takes the concept of a virtual environment on a small scale and expands it to an all encompassing mirror of everything the real world caters for sans the limitations of space, time and physics that make our daily lives so rigid.

The internet – in its evolution from the American run ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency) into the homes of ordinary people – unwittingly made the first tentative steps towards this pervasive online world where people could detach from the physical and escape to a digital realm.

Already linking millions of people via home computers, the internet was seen by many as the perfect established framework to launch an immersive virtual world. Propelled into the public eye courtesy of films like The Lawnmower Man, virtual reality became one of the sizzling buzzwords of the 80s and 90s.

VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) was developed in the 1993 to provide a standard for introducing a 3D interface to the Net. Gone would be the static visage of html pages, replaced by virtual shopping malls and fully interactive 3D browsing.

Silicon Graphics supported the endeavour through allowing the use of its Open Inventor ASCII (a graphics toolkit allowing the creation of 3D shapes, materials textures and lighting) and the corresponding file format, even going so far as to contribute utilities and assist in coding VRML browsers.

Unfortunately VRML died a horrible death thanks to being too early to shine on PC hardware circa 1994 and having no products to really show it off. It was sadly left to rot amongst various other ‘too much too soon’ 90s PC concepts such as VoIP (Voice over IP).

To quote one of the original VRML developers ‘VRML was sideswiped by Java3D, kneecapped by ChromEffects and finally trepanned by Flash. All the while misused and abused’.

That’s not to say that VRML was single handedly to blame for the lack of evolution in the Metaverse ideology. It was just the tip of a very large iceberg.