Facebook is all in on the metaverse.

Their intention is to pivot from being a media to metaverse company:

“And my hope, if we do this well, I think over the next five years or so, in this next chapter of our company, I think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with the Verge.

Today, Andrew Bosworth (Boz) who leads Facebook Reality Labs, announced the formation of a metaverse product group that will pull in heavyweights from Instagram (Vishal Shah, head of product) and Facebook Gaming (Vivek Sharma will lead the Horizon teams, and Oculus OG while Jason Rubin will lead the Content team).

Continents on the Metaverse

Facebook joins Epic Games (makers of Fortnite), Niantic (makers of Pokémon Go, which is creating a metaverse at physical world-scale), Roblox and Apple (who will never call it the metaverse) in trying to build the next evolution in computing.

I recently wrote that the metaverse is a sort of cultural proxy term for a major shift in computing:

• From one that is (mostly) flat and two-dimensional to one which is spatial
• From a time when reality itself is separate from the digital, to a time when real-time digital content is mapped directly onto our own world (truly a "meta" layer on physical reality)
• From a time when 3D environments are mostly for games, to one when we consume the majority of our entertainment and spend increasing amounts of our social and work time in 3D digital spaces.

The evidence of this shift can be found in everything from user hours 'in-worlds' to how much money is being spent, from virtual concerts that pull in millions of concurrent attendees to the increased capacity for our phones to take 3D snapshots or to scan the room with LiDAR in order to enhance augmented reality.

These provable trendlines, however, don't make a "metaverse". The Metaverse implies travel. It implies that we can move easily between 3D experiences as easily as we click a link in a browser.

(Although, there are a lot of bottlenecks with this too, as you experience everytime you hit a sign-up form, paywall or need to enter your credit card number YET AGAIN).

Imagine needing a browsers for social media, and then another for shopping, and another to read the news.

That's the experience of the metaverse today: you need one client for Roblox, you need an app to play Pokemon Go, you need a different app for Fortnite and you even need special equipment to jump into VR.

And just like the web, you also need different 'identities' (sign-ups) and wallets to fully participate in these spaces.

The continents are getting bigger but there's no way to move between them and we can't easily take our identity, possessions and money with us.

As Facebook describes it: "But to achieve our full vision of the Metaverse, we also need to build the connective tissue between these spaces -- so you can remove the limitations of physics and move between them with the same ease as moving from one room in your home to the next."

Oh: I bolded the word "our". We'll come back to that.

The Cultural Layer of the Metaverse and the Tech Stack

Right now, culturally, the metaverse is a big amorphous blob against which a lot of ideas are being attached.

Most people have never heard of it. Most people don't care whether Hololens will ever become a consumer device and they aren't sitting at home wondering about the FOV on a pair of Nreal glasses. They only care whether it sounds cool and what they'll be able to do once they get there - even if "there" is some generalized future.

Javier interpreted my observation of this fact as a disservice:

And Javier is right: because beneath all of this top level noise is the hard work of creating the actual technology that will make it work, and the even tougher job of creating the standards that will help make all of this seamless interconnectivity possible.

We can talk for days in generalities about 'the metaverse'.

But that talk MATTERS, because culture eventually translates into requests for development, for projects.

"Give me one of those NFT things," is what they're yelling right now in some headquarters somewhere. And next up (believe me, I've been asked): "get me onto the Metaverse!"

Meanwhile, programmers and developers sit in a room and actually make stuff.

And what they develop will have embedded values. Code is not agnostic. Code makes a statement about what we believe, whether it's through insisting that you use your real name and birth gender or that transactions be distributed (or centralized).

Code becomes culture and culture becomes code. Usually the former, as anonymized email, lack of micropayments and other design choices in how the Internet was built makes clear.

Which brings us back to that "our" word that Boz used: "But to achieve our full vision of the Metaverse, we also need to build the connective tissue between these spaces."

Now, maybe when he said "OUR" and "WE" he meant all of us: but unless we're all reporting in to this new product team that he mentioned in the next paragraph, I think he's really talking about Facebook.

And so let's be concrete: we'd better be concerned about who's making the decisions about how all of these worlds will interconnect; how anonymity, pseudoanonymity and identity will be handled (signed in with your Facebook account into VR lately?); who will have access to our bank records once we arrive;  whether users will value sex or shopping, creativity or socializing; and how the whole damn thing will be paid for in the first place.

You Build the World

We're at an inflection point. The buzz will die down. Or, more accurately, it will come in waves. Everyone will talk about the metaverse for a few weeks and then people will get back to work.

But Facebook's announcement is another proof point that the largest players around are making huge and very public bets on the 'metaverse'.

But we all have agency here. Facebook doesn't have an ordained right to determine what the metaverse should be, or how the connective tissue should be designed.

Thankfully, I actually have some faith in the Reality Labs team and their willingness to publish, share, and participate in open source initiatives. (Their bosses on the other hand are a different story).

The storylines are being drawn: some of them highly tangible and specific (passthrough VR!) and some of them vague and aspirational.

At the one end of the spectrum are the big players like Facebook. And they'll either become....well, Facebook, but making even more money from the ever-greater amounts of time we spend with them.

Or, they might become AOL. Trying to build a giant closed garden and then discovering it all blown away by the tsunami of a more open metaverse.

Because at the other end of the spectrum is a grass-roots led version of the metaverse. One in which NFTs aren't just over-inflated fan clubs, but a proof of concept that value can be decentralized and ripped from the control of centralized corporations and governments.

In this more open metaverse, maybe the values of creativity, beautiful code and co-creation can help to get these new worlds right.

In truth, both will exist: huge continents and smaller islands, open seas and walled kingdoms.

But perhaps the interplay between the two will allow for a convergence of culture and code which values the user first, and the very human experience of entering whole new worlds.

Epic Games has bought Sketchfab. A further definitive sign that Epic intends to be the primary driver of the Metaverse.

If you're reading this, there's probably no need for me to outline the players. But jump over to Techcrunch or Engadget if you want a primer.

The short version: Sketchfab hosts a lot of 3D models and makes it easy to view, buy and use them; Epic is a game engine (and Fortnite). Or maybe Epic is Fortnite (and a game engine).

But this is about more than developers or marketplaces for 3D models. Because putting aside Epic's grand designs for the Metaverse, Sketchfab itself has created an important trajectory for our spatial computing future.

The Metaverse is Bigger Than You Think

There's a concept for the Metaverse. It's based primarily on two books. And it circles around the idea that at some point, we'll throw on a pair of VR goggles and we'll enter a universe which has a fidelity that matches our own.

Being a universe, it will have its own culture and economy. We'll be able to hang out in seedy bars or play...well, play some future version of Fortnite with our friends. We'll be able to earn a living, whether through some super-charged version of Axie Infinity or by sitting around in our virtual homes answering questions posed by the Mechanical Turk (while Bezos smiles down at us from space).

But I think this vision is too narrow. I'll take the most obvious reasons:

• Building out the "worldscape" of the Metaverse will take time. Fortnite island is small. And even if you bolt on No Man's Sky-type generative content, we're still a long way from moving beyond islands towards something truly expansive. And so this vision of a universe we log into is the biggest lift there is.
• This is fine. We don't NEED a universe-sized Metaverse. And yet it will still compete against a world which is already pretty darn huge: our own. You can layer a lot of really cool content on top of the physical world that we've already built. Therefore, a big chunk of how we experience the Metaverse can happen as we walk around downtown.
• The most successful franchises today are multi-platform. Which means that there is already a pipeline and movement towards experiences that bridge phones, VR headsets, television sets and future optical devices. VR is not how most of us will experience the Metaverse.
• The convergence of AI with spatial computing will facilitate worlds that look nothing like how we imagined them. It's feasibile that entire universes will exist that have their own cultures, economies, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), autonomous avatars and reason for being ....that don't even particularly require any users.

Which speaks to a point I made on Twitter in response to a question about virtual world economies:

I've tried to write about this before. And I realizes it falls on deaf ears. But I still see no reason why we can't at least partly equate, for example, driving a Tesla (or Tesla driving us) as being an experience of the Metaverse. Your car, afterall, will soon become a physical, metal avatar moving through a digital space.

But there are two other reasons why the Metaverse won't be exactly how we imagine. And that's where Sketchfab comes in.

Because in buying it, Epic isn't just buying a marketplace for 3D content that can be used to populate the Metaverse. It's buying two other things which have a deeper value.

Sketchfab: Headless CMS for 3D Content

Epic has bought distribution. Sketchfab is a headless CMS for 3D content. Which means that better than any other platform in the world today, it is allowing content developers to distribute to the web or VR, to game engines or augmented reality.

Epic writes (bold added):

Sketchfab makes it easy to discover, edit, buy, and sell 3D content directly through their web-based service and is home to 4 million 3D assets. Their technology has integrations across every major 3D creation tool and publishing platform and is compatible across all major browsers and operating systems, on both desktop and mobile. By joining forces, Epic and Sketchfab will be able to make 3D, AR and VR content more accessible and grow the creator ecosystem, which are critical to an open and interconnected Metaverse.

Headless CMS has been around for a while. But it's really only gained significant traction in the last few years. And it's the idea that the content should be cleanly separated from its display.

You can write an article in Wordpress. And the article gets displayed within the Wordpress template. Sure, it looks OK on mobile. But it doesn't look so good as an Instagram story.

You can write a chunk of content in a headless CMS, however, and by semantically tagging that content it can be consumed by Instagram for a story, a blog site as a blog post, and as a snippet on a main page. The content doesn't care WHERE it will be displayed.

And that's what Sketchfab does.

And this is important, I think, because the Metaverse will be built in large part off of existing paradigms, technology stacks and frameworks.

As much as I'd like to just toss the whole Internet out and start over, there is a path- of-least-resistance to adapting what we've learned already to a world of spatial computing.

In buying Sketchfab, Epic has bought a distribution platform. It's like buying a company that can convert a theatre play into a movie, TV show and youTube clip with the touch of a button.

SketchFab Is A Memory Box

Epic recently purchased Capturing Reality which gave it a photogrammetry powerhouse. It was a natural extension of Quixel, which is a library of "megascans" used by developers.

But Sketchfab has become the place everyone else goes to post and share their scans.

We're not quite ready to assemble 3D photo albums of a wedding or our trip to Cancun. But it will come.

Because with photogrammetry now accessible to anyone with a decent phone camera (and at an even higher degree of fidelity if you also have LiDAR), we're about to achieve peak velocity for scanning.

Photogrammetry is to 2021 what the Polaroid was in the 50's: poised to become a cultural phenomenon.

In fact, if the only thing that Sketchfab did was distribute scans at the scale they do today, that alone would be worth the purchase price to Epic.

And this points to another shift in how we think about the Metaverse: that it will include both crafted and scanned content, that we will be able to create landscapes composed entirely of 3D images of our relatives or pets, or we will choose to live in accurate digital recreations of our own homes (and how meta is that?)

The lines between where and WHAT is digital and physical will soon cease to have meaning.

Everything will have a digital layer. Some of those layers will be private and walled off and used by enterprise, some of them will be accessible to everyone, and many of them will create new forms of inequality because you will need to be priviledged enough to afford the devices to see what might be critically important content.

Sketchfab captured something elusive: the first headless CMS for 3D content, which makes distributing a 3D asset as easy as hitting publish on a blog. And a place where amateur (and professional) communities, best practices and assets are being built around 3D scans.

Which means, by extension, that Sketchfab has created a toolkit for sharing stories about place.

Which, to me, is the primary definition of what the Metaverse will be.