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The power Revolution, the mobile Internet, and Metaverse

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The Theoretical Framework of Metaverse

Author:Matthew Ball

The original translation:Jorge Canalejas Cano (MetaApp)

Max Zhou (MetaApp)

Matt Ball first wrote about virtual worlds in 2018, and completely changed his mind about virtual worlds in a January 2020 update:

"The Metaverse: What It Is and Where to Find It, Who Will Build It, and Fortnite | Metaverse - & have spent in The virtual world: What, Where, Who Is going to develop It?"

Since then, a lot has happened. The pandemic forced hundreds of millions of people to take classes and work remotely, making Roblox one of the most popular entertainment experiences in history.

In March 2021, Google's search index for The phrase "The Metaverse" reached 100. From January 2005 to December 2020, the index never exceeded 7.

As of today, I thought it was time for an update -- this article reflects how my thinking has changed over the past 18 months, and responds once and for all to the questions people keep asking me, such as "Has Metaverse arrived yet?" ", "When will it come? "And" How does it grow?"

Welcome to "THE METAVERSE PRIMER."

When did the era of mobile Internet begin?

Some people think that the history of the mobile Internet began with the first generation of phones; Others argue that its history begins with the commercial deployment of 2G, the first digital wireless network; Others argue that it began with the introduction of the Wireless Application Protocol Standard (WAP) and the WAP browser that came with it, allowing us to access (fairly primitive) most websites from almost any "non-smartphone"; Perhaps the history of mobile phones began with the blackberry 85X series, the first major mobile device designed for real-time data.

Most people would say the iPhone is the beginning of mobile phone history, more than a decade after the first blackberry and eight years after WAP; Nearly two decades after 2G, and 34 years after the first cellphone call. The iPhone has defined many of the visual design principles, economic principles, and business practices of the mobile Internet age.

In fact, it's an open question. We can determine when a particular technology was created, tested, or deployed, but not when an era began. This is because every technological change requires a large number of technological changes to be assembled and occur. The electricity revolution, for example, did not grow steadily in one wave. Instead, the electricity revolution experienced two separate waves of technological, industrial, and process-related change.

The first wave of the electric revolution began in 1881, when Thomas Edison set up power stations in Manhattan and London. Although the age of electricity got off to a fast start -- Edison had invented the first working incandescent light bulb just two years earlier, and had only been commercialized a year earlier -- the spread of electricity to industry was slow.

Thirty years after Edison invented the first power stations, less than 10% of America's mechanical driving power came from electricity (two-thirds of which was generated locally, not from the grid). But all of a sudden, the second wave began. Between 1910 and 1920, the share of electricity in mechanical transmission power increased fivefold, to more than 50% (nearly two-thirds of which came from independent electric utilities). By 1929, electricity penetration had increased to 78%).

The difference between wave one and wave two is not how much electricity American industry uses, but the degree to which it uses it -- and the degree to which it is designed around it.

When electricity is first used in a factory, it is usually used for lighting and as an alternative to replacing the power plant's internal energy (previously steam). However, the plants did not consider replacing the old steam infrastructure to deliver power to the entire plant.

At the time, factory managers continued to use these confusing, noisy, dangerous, difficult to replace, large, heavy gears and gear sets. The gear sets are either "all on" or "all off" (thus requiring the same amount of power to support an operation station or the entire plant and continuously encountering numerous "single points of failure") and do not support specialized workflows.

But eventually, new technology and knowledge gave factory managers the will and ability to switch to electricity: from replacing gears with wires, to installing custom motors to do jobs like sewing, cutting, stamping and welding.

The benefits of the electrical revolution to the industry are large and broad. The same factories now have more space, better light, better air and less dangerous equipment. What's more, independent workstations can be powered separately (which increases safety while reducing costs and downtime) and use more specialized equipment (such as electrical socket wrenches).

In addition, factories can configure their production areas around the logic of the production process, eliminating the need for heavy equipment and even reconfiguring workspaces on a regular basis. These two changes meant that more industries could deploy assembly lines in their factories (in fact, assembly lines first appeared in the late 1700s), and those that already had such lines could expand them further, increasing productivity.

In 1913, Henry Ford created the first assembly line, a moving assembly line that used electricity and a conveyor belt to reduce production time per car from 12.5 hours to 93 minutes (an order of magnitude!). It also uses less electricity. According to historian David Nye, Ford's famous Highland Park factory was built "on the assumption that lights and electricity should be everywhere" (a non-consensus at the time).

Once a few plants begin this transformation, the entire market is forced to catch up, thereby promoting more investment and innovation in electrical-based infrastructure, equipment and processes. Within a year of opening ford's first moving assembly line, the company had produced more cars than the rest of the industry combined. By the time the 10 millionth car rolls off the assembly line, it will have made more than half the cars on the road.

This "second wave" (the spread of industrial electricity) did not depend on a single dreamer stepping on Edison's work in evolutionary leaps. Nor is it just driven by the growing number of industrial power stations. Instead, it reflects a number of interconnected innovations, including power management, manufacturing hardware, production theory, and more. Some of these innovations can fit in the palm of a factory manager's hand, some require a room, a few require a city, and they all rely on talent and process.

Historian David Nye says: "Not ford oneself want to out line the idea, and then give him the idea of managers to implement. The success of the highland park plant is to understand the United States most of the manufacturing process of managers and engineers together, their ideas, draw their own work experience, created a new production method that together." The process, which led America into the roaring twenties, marked the biggest annual increase in the productivity of Labour and capital in a century.

What made the shiftdynamicThe Internet

This is the way to look at the mobile Internet era. The iPhone seems to be the beginning of the mobile Internet, as it integrates and/or distills everything we now think of as "mobile Internet" into one minimal viable product that we can touch, hold and love. But the mobile Internet was created -- and driven -- by so many things.

In fact, we may not be talking about the first iPhone, but the second iPhone 3G (the iPhone 3G has seen the biggest growth from model to model of all iphones, with more than four times sales). The second-generation iPhone was the first to include 3G, which makes mobile networks available and runs the iOS app store, making wireless networks and smartphones more useful.

But neither 3G nor the App Store is an apple innovation or invention. The iPhone is connected to 3G networks via chips made by Infineon, which connect via standards set by THE ITU and GSMA, AT& Wireless providers such as T + 0.42% deploy the chips in wireless towers built by Tower companies such as Crown Castle and American Tower. There's an App for everything you want on the iPhone, and that's because millions of developers make them, just as thousands of different companies made specialized electric motor equipment for factories in the 1920s. On top of that, these apps are built on a variety of standards -- from KDE to Java, HTML and Unity -- built and/or maintained by external organizations (some of which compete with Apple in key areas).

App Store payments run on digital payment systems and channels set up by major banks. The iPhone also relies on myriad other technologies, including Samsung cpus (licensed by ARM), ST Microelectronics gyroscopes, Corning's Gorilla glass, And other components from companies like Broadcom, Wolfson and National Semiconductor.

All of these inventions and contributions, taken together, made the iPhone and ushered in the mobile Internet era

In the 2020 & have spent Take the iPhone 12, released in 2003. In 2008, no amount of money would have made it possible for Apple to release the iPhone 12. Even if Apple had been able to design a 5G network chip, there would have been no 5G networks for it to use, or 5G wireless standards to communicate with, let alone applications to take advantage of its low latency or bandwidth. And even if Apple had made its own Arm-like Gpus as early as 2008 -- more than a decade before ARM itself -- game developers (who derive more than two-thirds of App Store revenue from ARM) would have lacked the game engine technology they needed to take advantage of its prowess.

Implementing the iPhone 12 will require an entire ecosystem of innovation and investment, much of which is outside Apple's jurisdiction (though Apple's lucrative iOS platform is a central driver of those advances). The business case for Verizon's 4G network and American Tower's wireless tower construction hinges on consumer and corporate demand for faster and better wireless service from apps like Spotify, Netflix and Snapchat. Without them, the 4G "killer app" would be just marginally faster email.

At the same time, better games use better GPU performance, and photo social apps like Instagram make better cameras useful. This improved hardware drives greater user activity and higher growth and profitability for participating companies, which drives better products, apps and services. So we should think of the whole market as driving itself, just as the landing of the grid drives innovation in small electric industrial motors, which in turn drives demand for the grid itself.

We must also consider changes and improvements in the capabilities of the average user (understanding/mastery of technology). The original iPhone could have gone without a Home button, just as the iPhone 10 did. This leaves more room inside the device for higher-quality hardware or a bigger battery. But the Home button is an important training feature for consumers who aren't used to the complexity of an iPhone. Just like closing a flip phone, this is a safe, easy, touch-friendly way to "reboot" the iPhone if users get confused or click on the wrong app. It took a decade for consumers to have enough power to operate their phones without the Home button.

This idea is crucial. Over time, consumers become more familiar with advanced technology and are therefore able to make better use of more advanced products. - & have spent Some of these are already technically possible! Just as consumers are shifting to new ways of thinking, so is the industry. In the past 20& NBSP; In mid-year, almost every industry hired, restructured, and repositioned their workflows, products, and lines of business around the mobile Internet. This shift is as important as any hardware or software innovation, and in turn creates the business case for subsequent innovations.

What should we think of Metaverse, and when will it appear?

With that in mind, let's turn to the Metaverse. It is often misread as virtual reality VR. It's like saying the mobile Internet is the iPhone. The iPhone is not the mobile Internet, it is the most commonly used hardware and application platform for consumers. Metaverse is sometimes described as a virtual user generated content (UGC) platform. It's like saying the Internet is a Yahoo! , Facebook, or World of Warcraft. Yahoo! Is an Internet portal/index, Facebook is a social network for UGC, and World of Warcraft is an MMO.

Other times, we receive more complex interpretations, such as "Metaverse is a persistent virtual space that enables continuity of identity and assets." That's closer to the truth, but still not close enough. It's a bit like saying the Internet is Verizon or Safari or HTML. These are broadband providers that allow you to connect to the entire network and access or render all of the Internet's web pages through web browsers and IP identifiers and markup languages that create and display the network. Similarly, Metaverse is not meant to be a game or virtual space that can be used for communication.

Instead, we need to think of Metaverse as a successor to the mobile Internet. While consumers will own the core devices and platforms to interact with Metaverse, Metaverse relies on much more. There's a reason we don't call Facebook or Google the Internet. They are destinations and ecosystems on the Internet, each of which can be accessed via a browser or smartphone for almost the entire Internet. Similarly, Fortnite and Roblox seem a bit like Metaverse in that they incorporate so many technologies and trends into a single experience that, like the iPhone, is physical and feels different from anything that came before. But they don't make the Metaverse.

MeTaverse framework & NBSP;

The purpose of this 9 readings is to provide a way of thinking about Metaverse. I've written before that the idealized vision of Metaverse (defined by features like infinite persistence, ubiquitous synchronization, infinite concurrency, widespread interoperability, etc.) was conceived decades ago. But we will do so through continuous, interconnected and interactive improvements across a wide range of areas.

Today, this is all in full swing -- not just because the Internet and mobile Internet are associated with it, but because of the unique technologies, experiences and behaviors of the emerging Metaverse.

Tim Sweeney, Epic CEO: "When Unreal 1 was released in 1998, the user could go to the Portal and move between the servers that the user was running. I remember a moment when the community created a cave map without combat, Standing in a circle and talking. But it didn't last long."

"Our desire for virtual worlds has been around for a long time. It started with real-time 3D text chats with 300 polygons of strangers. But it's only in the last few years that the large number of necessary components of the field have started to fit together quickly."

Personally, I've tracked the emergence of Metaverse around eight core categories, each of which can be considered a technology stack (click on each link to a detailed article).

hardware: Sells and supports physical technologies and devices for accessing, interacting with, or developing Metaverse. This includes, but is not limited to, consumer-facing hardware, such as VR headsets, mobile phones, and tactile gloves, as well as enterprise hardware, such as hardware for operating or creating virtual or AR based environments, such as industrial cameras, projection and tracking systems, and scanning sensors. This category does not include computation-specific hardware, such as GPU chips and servers, and networks-specific hardware, such as fiber optic cables or wireless chipsets.

The network layerBackbone providers that provide persistent, real-time connectivity, high-bandwidth, decentralized data transmission, routing between networks, switching centers and services, as well as those that manage the "last mile" of data to consumers.

Computing power: Support the enablement and provisioning of Metaverse computing power, supporting diverse and demanding functions such as physical computing, rendering, data coordination and synchronization, ARTIFICIAL intelligence, projection, motion capture and translation.

Virtual platforms (which is what MetaApp is doing): Immersive digital simulation (usually 3d simulation), the development and operation of environments and worlds in which users and businesses can explore, create, socialize, and participate in a wide variety of experiences (e.g., racing cars, painting, taking classes, listening to music), and engage in economic activities. These businesses differ from traditional online experiences and multiplayer video games because there is a large ecosystem of developers and content creators that generate most of the content and/or collect most of the revenue on the underlying platform.

Protocols and Standards: Tools, protocols, formats, services, and engines that act as de facto or de facto standards for interoperability and support the creation, operation, and continuous improvement of Metaverse. These standards support activities such as rendering, physics, and AI, as well as asset formats and their import/export from experience to experience, forward compatibility management and updates, tools and authuring activities, and information management.

Payment method:Digital payment processes, platforms and operations are supported, including Fiat On-Ramps (a form of digital currency exchange), for pure digital currencies and financial services, including cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethernet, as well as other blockchain technologies

Metaverse content, services, and assets: Design or create, sell, resell, store, secure, and financially manage digital assets, such as virtual goods and currency, connected to user data and identity. This includes all businesses and services that are "built on" and/or "serve" Metaverse and are not vertically integrated into the virtual platform by the platform owner, including content built specifically for Metaverse independently of the virtual platform.

Consumer behavior: Observable changes in consumer and business behavior (including spending and investments, time and attention, decisions and capabilities) that are either directly related to, make possible or reflect Metaverse's principles and philosophies. These behaviors almost always seem like "trends" (or, more pejoratively: "fashions") when they first appear, but later take on enduring global social significance.

(You'll notice that "encryption" or "blockchain technology" is not a category. Instead, they span and/or drive several categories, most notably computing, exchange tools and standards, and payments -- and possibly others.)

Every technology stack/product stack is important to the development of Metaverse. In many cases, we have a good forecast of the path of each technology stack, or at least a key threshold (such as VR resolution and frame rate, or network latency).

But recent history cautions against being dogmatic about any specific path or idealized vision to a fully functioning Metaverse.

The Internet was conceived as the "information superhighway" and the "World Wide Web". None of these descriptions is particularly helpful in planning for 2010 or 2020, especially in understanding how the world and almost every industry will be transformed by the Internet. Even if the more specific propositions are true, they rarely map to the final result. For decades, it was clear that the Internet would have pure digital transactions, lots of user-generated content, and online online games -- but that didn't lead to predictions about Bitcoin, TikTok, or Twitch. Even if one can predict the technology or operational principles of these products and services, the behavior of their users, their monetization patterns, and their broader impact on society cannot be predicted in advance.

That said, we have a good understanding of each of the individual technology stacks and paths needed to implement Metaverse, but how they fit together and what sparks they will spark together are difficult, important, and socially changing issues.

Like the electric revolution in New York at the turn of the 20th century, the impact was far greater than the kilowatt-hour.

However, based on precedent, we can guess that Metaverse will revolutionize almost every industry and function, from health care to payments, consumer goods, entertainment, hourly workers, and even special services. In addition, entirely new industries, markets and resources will be created to enable this future, and new types of skills, occupations and certificates will be created. The collective value of these changes will be in the trillions of dollars.

This is the introduction to the nine Metaverse readings.