The other universe

Deficiencies all round
Humans are a clever bunch when it comes to distinguishing the real from the illusionary. It all comes down to a matter of depth and immersion.

As we’re all aware, humans perceive the world visually in three dimensions; height, width and most importantly depth. Without all three running in sync, the human brain will never yield to the illusion of an environment, virtual or not. That’s why a life-size cardboard cut-out of Angelina Jolie will never, ever replace the real thing.

The 3D graphics capabilities of home PC’s during the early days of VR simply didn’t have the power to create convincing 3D Environments on a large or even small scale. Without good 3D, a virtual universe is dead before it draws its first breath.

Sure, you could create a fantastic 2D environment and have lots of interactivity but the end user will never be completely enveloped by it. M.U.D projects (Multi User Dungeons) and IRC were – and still are - good examples of 2D interaction built on the internet framework. Both worked to a limited degree, but neither completely sucked the user in.

The garish and jagged world of early VR environments

It wasn’t until the mid 90s that early 3D accelerators like the PowerVR and Voodoo were served up. Collective jaws came unhinged at the sight of texture mapping and bi-linear filtering, but with a fill rate of 45 million pixels offered by the original Voodoo and no fancy pixel shaders in sight, the 3D hardware of the day fell well short of creating a backdrop that could suspend belief for the end user.

Strike one.

Of course pretty pictures aren’t the only priority of a Metaverse in the making. Bandwidth shoulders much of the workload too.
Thanks to speed at which light, sound and other environmental data reaches our brain in the real world (ie stupendously fast) humans don’t perceive much in the way of lag or delay when receiving or processing data about our surroundings.

And we like it that way.

Walking from the loungeroom to the kitchen, we know that there's going to be no 30 second pause as a banner flashes above us reading 'Please Wait: Loading Kitchen'.

In order for a virtual environment to work well, it would have to emulate that speed of data delivery seamlessly. Add into the equation that for a Metaverse to be realistic it should be populated with digital representations of real people - all able to interact with each other - and the complex bandwidth requirements are increased exponentially for hundreds, thousands or millions of users all transferring and receiving data at the same time.

Today a large portion of us are happily bloated with Cable or ADSL connections whirring cheerfully away at speeds of at least 256Kb/s downstream. When the idea of Virtual Reality and the Metaverse first generated serious interest the best home connections available to most people were archaic dial-up modems.

A networked virtual environment that supports a large user and shunts complex positional data and 3D objects across large distances was never going to be realised on the limited networks to which most PC users had acclimatised themselves during the rise of the internet.

Strike two.

Heads up
Any article or news report that’s ever surfaced about VR or the Metaverse is almost always accompanied by an obligatory photo of some poor sucker wearing what looks like a cross between Borg fashion and a mutated bicycle helmet.

‘Direct manipulation devices’ like headsets which track a users head movements and adjusts the viewed environment accordingly or sensor gloves that read tactile motion from wrists or fingers gained immense popularity with VR software, because the user interaction is based on natural skills (pointing, pushing, picking things up).

One of the biggest constraints keeping the illusion of a digital universe at bay is the fact that no matter how real it may seem on a screen in front of the user, the whole thing falls apart at the seams like an imitation Gucci handbag if interaction takes place on a screen a few feet away from the user, with responses entered via the unnatural means of a keyboard and mouse.
Strike three for the Metaverse of former times came courtesy of VR peripherals of the day being crappy, cumbersome and overpriced.

In the mid nineties, console giants Atari, Nintendo and Sega – all riding the virtual reality craze – announced a form of VR headset to create an immersive gaming experience. Despite an infant Metaverse once again being almost within reach, only the maligned and altogether freaky ‘Virtual Boy’ of Nintendo fame made it to the market.

With a shoddy product range and sporting a comfort level akin to having ten bricks stapled to your head, the Virtual Boy made a poor showing.

Most VR headsets followed the same sad theme of tinny sound reproduction, unconvincing resolutions and motion sensors that would freeze or skip images when the user moved their head too quickly for the processor to ‘track’.