My guesses about the Metaverse

Facebook is committed to the Metaverse. They are so committed that they changed the name of the company from "Facebook" to "Meta".

But what, exactly, is the metaverse? Facebook -- excuse me, Meta -- has provided only vague descriptions.

I have a few ideas. I start with some assumptions:

First, the metaverse, for Meta, will be a source of income. Meta will make money -- somehow -- with the metaverse offering.

Second, that income will probably come from advertising. Advertising is what Meta knows. I expect them to use that expertise.

Third, the metaverse will run on Meta devices, and not Apple phones (or Android phones). Meta will do this to avoid the Apple tax that it collects on transactions, and to collect data on its users. Apple's recent moves to increase privacy on its phones will provide an incentive for Meta to build its own platform.

Fourth, the platform will be an "immersive" (we're going to see that word a lot, I fear) one that uses an over-the-eyes display, headphones, and a microphone. There may be a few other pieces, but the display, headphones, and microphone are the important parts.

Given those assumptions, what will we see in the metaverse?

To sell advertising, Meta needs users. It needs users who spend a lot of time on the platform. The more time a user spends on metaverse, the more opportunities Meta has to show them advertisements. Therefore, the content on metaverse will be designed to attract and retain attention.

I expect that the metaverse will be closer to a video game than a web page. Instead of text and photographs, the metaverse will rely on animation and sound.

But the metaverse won't look and feel like a typical video game. Video games require too much attention, and if one is concentrating on the game then one is not paying attention to advertisements. (Also, not everyone wants to play action-packed video games.)

I think metaverse will have a mix of fast-paced and slow-paced attractions. It may have video games (especially multi-player video games), and it may have pastoral activities such as a walk in a virtual park. (A walk which you can take with friends, and in which you can meet people.) It can have real locations and fictional locations. One could visit the Eiffel Tower in Paris, for example, or the Grand Canyon. Or maybe one could visit a completely imaginary place such as Middle Earth and Hobbiton.

Metaverse may even have group sessions for things like virtual yoga classes or virtual bird watching.

How will Meta build all of these virtual locations? My guess is that they will build some, and rely on others to build more. They may ask game companies, who have experience with virtual locations, to build games for the metaverse or to assist others to build virtual-world counterparts to real-world locations such as museums, tourist destinations, or fantasy worlds.

Advertisements will be video, too. Instead of static text that pops up, and instead of simple photographs, advertisements will be video, and interactive, and fit into the current virtual world. They may be delivered by avatars. When walking through a virtual park, one may encounter a talking squirrel that mentions a movie, or a book, or a restaurant.

That's my vision of the metaverse. Meta has some challenges for this effort.

One challenge is getting other content providers on board. The creation of a virtual world is a significant effort, much higher than building a web page.

Another is interaction. The equipment needed to access metaverse (over-the-eyes display, headphones, and microphone in my guess) allows for limited input. Voice recognition seems the least clumsy approach, although I'm not sure that the technology is quite ready. (Also, a room full of people all on the metaverse and speaking into their microphones will be ... noisy.) Another approach is gestures, but over-the-eyes displays are limited to turning and perhaps nodding and shaking. For complex input, something more is needed. I'm not sure what that will be.

The biggest challenge may be non-technical. Facebook was successful because of the network effect. Once a person joined, they sent e-mails to their friends, asking them to join. Facebook got big from this effect. So big that it surpassed its predecessor, MySpace (which surpassed its predecessor, Friendster).

Facebook, at the moment has a lot of users but little in the way of goodwill. It will take a lot of convincing to get people to join this new metaverse. Meta will handle this with... advertising.

So those are my guesses. The metaverse will be a platform for delivering advertisements, attracting users with interactive video content. Meta will use their own platform, bypassing Apple and Google and their taxes, restrictions, and rules.

Let's see what Meta delivers!

Microsoft Office becomes hip because Facebook did

The new Microsoft Office 2010 edition has a number of improvements, ranging from animations on the opening splash screen to collaborative capabilities. Microsoft Outlook has a special feature, one that I have not seen in the other products of the suite.

Microsoft Outlook has a social networking feel to it, with incoming e-mails showing avatars of the sender and their immediate network. That's a neat trick, since few people in our office have the latest version of MS Office, and therefore have had no opportunity to set up a social network. (And to be honest, the avatars are all generic "shadow" avatars.)

But this is a change to look like a social network without actually being one.

It turns out that you as the user don't define your social network in MS Outlook -- the software uses the organization's network defined in the Active Directory server. People are members of departments (or groups, or branches, or whatever) and MS Outlook relies on this structure. Which means that the social network image of MS Outlook is just that: an image. It's not my social network (where I can friend and unfriend people), it is the company's definition of a social network: the people in my assigned organizational unit.

It looks cool, until you realize what's happening. Is this an attempt at making a staid (dare one say "quaint") interface more hip? is it a way to make MS Outlook more acceptable to the generation that was raised on Fascebook? Perhaps.

Hipness aside, this change demonstrates that Microsoft felt compelled to change Outlook. Perhaps the change was driven by the collaboration capabilities, but I feel that Microsoft is attempting to compete with Facebook. Which means that Facebook is driving the design of software, not Microsoft.