Five metaverses to understand what the metaverse is

In 2003, there were no Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Social networks were still far from being what we know today. Yet even then, people were trying to answer a simple question: how do people want to socialise online? Beyond the classic chat rooms, one of the most futuristic answers was Second Life, the virtual world founded 18 years ago in San Francisco. By means of an avatar, people can explore all environments, build their own houses, go to clubs and shops, meet each other in the most popular squares and thus experience a “second life” of our choice.

Second Life’s greatest success came around 2007, when it exceeded one million users worldwide and became the internet sensation, so much so that – just in Italy – Antonio Di Pietro opened a branch of his Italia dei Valori party and Irene Grandi held a concert there. After reaching the peak of success, decline inevitably followed. It is no coincidence that Second Life started to go out of fashion as soon as the first social networks appeared, which showed how online sociality could have much simpler and more immediate forms, capable of complementing our offline lives rather than replacing them.

Nevertheless, Second Life is still alive and well today and can count on a few hundred thousand fans. Above all, it will be forever remembered in the history of the Internet as the first incarnation of the metaverse, which today – thanks to more advanced technologies and especially to virtual reality – aims at overcoming the limits that impeded its adoption.

It is no coincidence that many of the entities planning their own metaverse are video game companies, which have always been used to creating interactive and immersive worlds, environments and narratives. From Nintendo’s Animal Crossing to World of Warcraft; from Minecraft to Roblox. However, the most ambitious of these projects is probably Fortnite: a multiplayer shooter platform created by Epic Games (350 million users) that has become much more than an online video game over time.

Today, Fortnite is the setting in which Travis Scott held a “space” concert in April 2020 that was attended by 12 million users using their digital avatars and who were able to dance to the music (weapons were disabled for the occasion). And that is not all: Fortnite has recently partnered with luxury streetwear brand Balenciaga, who has produced accessories, clothes and even designer weapons to buy in the metaverse to customise their characters. It may not be in virtual reality (yet), but as time goes by Fortnite is emerging with its vision of a spectacular and entertaining metaverse, for which CEO Tim Sweeney has raised $1 billion in funding.

At the opposite end of Fortnite there is the metaverse imagined by Mark Zuckerberg and presented during the Connect conference. A metaverse whose main purpose is to replicate our daily lives: playing sports, spending evenings at home with friends, holding business meetings. All this, however, within a virtual reality world that we can experience through Oculus visors (owned by Facebook/Meta).

Zuckerberg’s metaverse is still a long way from becoming reality. In fact, he has spoken of at least five to ten years before his vision can be fully realised. However, there is already software such as Horizon Workrooms, which represents a first incarnation of what Facebook’s digital world of the future will look like. Still in beta, Workrooms is a virtual reality workspace in which you can hold meetings with your colleagues.

According to Zuckerberg, this mode is capable of recreating an experience very similar to that of in-person meetings, thus overcoming the limitations of Zoom or Teams meetings. Workrooms also allows us to transfer our physical computer, share the screen with everyone, use a shared digital whiteboard and more. However, the question remains: is it not easier to go to the office and have a regular face-to-face meeting?

The AltSpaceVR platform, owned by Microsoft, is perhaps the most resembling virtual reality version of Second Life: a social space in which users can create settings to meet up with friends and spend an evening around the (digital) fire, organise conferences, participate in games, karaoke or other live events. The graphical interface is very simple and interactions are all in all elementary, but this makes it easy to understand how to move around and communicate in the various environments.

It is likely that AltSpaceVR was an inspiration for Mark Zuckerberg: here too, the aim is not to create Fortnite-like crazy adventures, but to reproduce in virtual reality some of the experiences of everyday life. AltSpaceVR has also been useful to Microsoft (that bought it in 2017) in developing its professional platform Mesh, which is the first reply to Facebook/Meta’s Horizon Workrooms and is setting the stage for Microsoft’s metaverse. In his vision of a metaverse for workaholics, Mark Zuckerberg already has a rival.

If you want to get an idea of what the fulfilled metaverse might look like tomorrow, your best bet is probably to see Ready Player One, Steven Spielberg’s 2018 film (based on Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel). In an unlivable world because of extreme social inequalities, climate catastrophe, overpopulation and resource depletion, the only way out left to the poorest part of the population is to take refuge in the virtual world known as Oasis.

This is where – after putting on a visor and a pair of haptic gloves – you can experience extraordinary adventures in virtual reality: drag racing, flying discos, incredible role-playing games and much more. The vision that science fiction has bequeathed us of the metaverse seems much more as Fortnite than Horizon Workrooms: designed more to make us escape from the real world than to create a virtual simulation of it. Hoping, of course, that this escape is dictated only by the desire to live some extraordinary experience and not, as happens in the novel and the film, by the need to escape from a collapsing planet.