(2021-06-29) Ball Interchange Tools Standards And The Metaverse

Matthew Ball: Interchange Tools + Standards and the Metaverse. Without them, there will be no Metaverse — only a more virtual and immersive version of today’s mobile internet and app stores. What’s more, this pale imitation will be far less lucrative, dynamic, and healthy.

One of the reasons the internet has been so lucrative and transformative is because of how it was created

establishing open standards that would help them share information from one server to another (i.e. messages or files), and in doing so make it easier to collaborate on future technologies, projects, and ideas.

None of the above prevented businesses from making a profit on the internet

It’s not hard to imagine how the internet might differ if it had been created by multinational media conglomerates in order to sell things, serve ads, harvest user data for profits, or control your end-to-end experience

The Metaverse will not develop as the internet did. But we still want the Metaverse to flourish as the internet did

we will need an ecosystem of ‘interchange’ solutions that interconnect, translate, and exchange information/users/assets across and between myriad different and competing platforms

To understand the importance of interchange, let’s consider one of the key needs for the Metaverse: rendering on local devices.

Fortnite needs to use Microsoft’s DirectX for Xbox, and Sony’s GNMX for PlayStation, Nvidia’s NVM for Nintendo Switch, and Apple’s Metal for iOS. Only Google’s Android has built its solution around OpenGL

almost always results in successful platforms (dominant or not) using anything they can, from APIs to consumer accounts and software approvals, to lock in developers and users, and ensure they’re the standard, not a standard.

We have a few key examples in recent history.

For more than a decade, Sony refused to support cross-play, cross-purchasing or cross-progression between games played on PlayStation and other platforms. This meant two friends playing the same game but on different consoles (such as PlayStation and Xbox) could never play together.

Similarly, Valve Software — the owner of Steam, the dominant PC gaming platform — has made it so that all games purchased through the Steam store will forever require the store to be played (which means receiving a cut of all revenues in perpetuity). It also prevents players from taking their achievements, play data, and friends lists elsewhere, while fragmenting in-game chat.

While Apple doubtlessly supercharged the mobile internet era, it now uses its well-deserved success to prevent disruption, constrain the ‘open web’, and maximize the “total return on our IP”, to quote CEO Tim Cook.

On iOS, WebGL, which allows developers to produce rich 2D and 3D rendered environments in a web browser, is so severely constrained that it’s not viable for most rich applications.

To offset the difficulty and cost of multiplatform development, and moderate the power of dominant platforms, a number of interchange solutions have emerged over the past decade.

The best examples are cross-platform gaming engines such as Unreal Engine and Unity.

None of the PC or console platforms have been able to successfully make their own engines into standards (e.g. Valve/Steam’s Source Engine).

Another example of key interchange solutions includes live gaming services providers such as Microsoft’s PlayFab and Amazon’s GameLift.

Furthermore, Microsoft and Amazon use PlayFab and GameLift to entice developers to Azure and AWS, which are otherwise commodity-priced services.

PlayStation’s decision to enable cross-play, cross-purchasing and cross-progression in 2018, for example, wasn’t based on internal preferences. Instead, it was a response to the success of Fortnite, which launched a year earlier (and not coincidentally from a company focused on cross-platform gaming, Epic Games).

Fortnite become the most popular AAA game globally

Supporting this success was the fact that Sony’s gaming competitors had all embraced cross-platform services for Fortnite.

Epic ‘accidentally’ activated cross-play on PlayStation, allegedly without Sony’s permission, on at least three occasions — thereby rallying even more upset users to petition Sony for change, and proving the impediments were purely policy, not technology

Today, a number of hit games can be accessed by nearly all computing devices globally (and thus could be played by anyone, anywhere, anytime), without users needing to re-pay, or fragmenting their identity, achievements, or player networks

PlayStation continues to drive over 45% of total Fortnite revenues

All of the challenges listed above are at risk of becoming harder, or worse, in the Metaverse era. This, in turn, will make it harder for new platforms to emerge — and, frankly, for the Metaverse to be built.

For example, we want as much of the world to integrate into the Metaverse as possible. This means interconnecting the many devices and platforms around us today

We also want many of the virtual experiences that already exist to interconnect in brand new ways

we’ll want to move assets, items, achievements, play history, currency, avatars and more

It’s critical that developers can easily export their work from one virtual platform, rendering solution, or engine to another

For the Metaverse to thrive, we need developers to thrive. And this means making it as easy to take a virtual immersive educational environment or AR playground from one platform to another as it is to move a blog or newsletter. (interop)

The limited range of identity and player data, too, is an impediment to the Metaverse economy. Consider the issue of toxicity in gaming. Activision might ban Player B from Call of Duty for abusive or racist language, but Player B can then go on to troll on Epic Games’s Fortnite (or on Twitter, or Facebook).

Banks and other financial institutions didn’t used to share credit data, either — but, eventually, they realized credit scores benefited all. (Except they then outsourced that to an oligopoly with no check on its errors.)

Competitors Airbnb and Vrbo, too, are now partnering with a third party to prevent guests with a history of poor behavior from making future bookings.

More broadly, it’s likely that the leading virtual platforms of the Metaverse will be even more lucrative and powerful than today’s mobile leaders

Given these expanded powers, additional checks and interchange solutions will be crucial.

As the need for interchange solutions grows, economics tends to generate a solution. For example, Disney’s Pixar open sourced its Universal Scene Description (USD) file format to help developers create interchangeable 3D data. Nvidia’s Omniverse platform then uses USD to coherently bring together assets from Maya, Houdini, Unreal Engine, AutoCAD, and more, into a shared virtual environment. Epic’s Twinmotion platform can also be used to import models from nearly any BIM and CAD program, such as Archicad, Revit, SketchUp Pro, RIKCAD, and Rhino, and will then use machine learning and AI to upgrade and integrate them wherever possible and in a matter of minutes.

Cesium is an open platform dedicated to streaming, analyzing, and visualizing 3D geospatial data using the 3D Tiles open standard.

instantly create real-time visualizations using Unreal, JavaScript, or other proprietary engines.

In 2020, Epic Games also unveiled Epic Online Services (EOS), a new product line that essentially acts as ‘Fortnite live services in a box’. EOS offers everything that Microsoft PlayFab and Amazon GameLoft do, but for free, and without requiring a specific cloud-server solution, or obligating a developer to use any other Epic products

Discord is another key interchange solution in the live services category.

While Discord’s offering still lacks many core features, such as entitlements management, game analytics, and skill-based matchmaking, it’s easy to imagine the company expanding into many of these functions over time.

The strength of the Discord ecosystem has already led to native integration into Xbox Live, and in 2021, Sony announced plans to do the same with PlayStation Network, thereby reducing both platforms’ control over player networks and socializing

In 2020, Unity launched the Unity Distribution Portal, which enables developers to create a single build of their app, then distribute and manage it across all mobile app stores, including Apple’s App Store and Google Play.

there’s OpenXR and WebXR for rendering, WASM for portable binary-code format for executable programs

XRE is an end-to-end solution for hosting humans and AI in a virtual space, while VRM is a popular file format for “3D humanoid avatars”. The not-yet-released WebGPU is intended for accelerated graphics and compute, while Dat is a peer-to-peer data protocol, and IPFS is a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol.

But for these open standards to “win”, they need to offer developers greater profits than those provided and controlled by the closed platforms.

And this is hard. The major platforms make enormous, loss-making investments in tools and technology

But there is one major interchange technology that, while not open in the traditional sense, retains most of the values and benefits of an open standard, and also looks likely to thrive in the Metaverse: blockchain.