People are talking about this thing called the “Metaverse.” We explore what’s around the corner, why you should care, and the role of 3D volumetric content.
By Evercoast
What is It?
Metaverse is a broad term generally referring to a digital reality that combines aspects of social media, online gaming, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and cryptocurrencies. It is often regarded as the successor to the internet.
In The Metaverse Primer, Matthew Ball describes the metaverse as:
“The Metaverse is an expansive network of persistent, real-time rendered 3D worlds and simulations that support continuity of identity, objects, history, payments, and entitlements, and can be experienced synchronously by an effectively unlimited number of users, each with an individual sense of presence.”
Facebook, arguably the tech company who’s made the biggest investment in the metaverse, describes it more simply:
“The ‘metaverse’ is a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren’t in the same physical space as you.”
Tony Parisi, Unity’s Head of AR/VR Ads and E-Commerce Technology, describes the metaverse succinctly as:
“…the power of real-time 3D graphics to connect people. Period; full stop. To me, this is what The Metaverse means, and any other attempt to otherwise describe or define it is unnecessarily reductive, and ultimately unproductive.”
However you choose to define the metaverse, 3D is going to be a key part of its interface.
Today, on the cusp of Facebook reorganizing from a social media company into a metaverse company, nearly 8 years after the acquisition of Oculus, it’s important to consider what the metaverse is. Not just Facebook’s view of it, but also what it means to every other individual and company in the world, and ultimately why it matters to you.
The Spatial Web and Web 3.0
Web 2.0 moved the world from static desktop web pages designed for information consumption to interactive experiences and user-specific content that brought us Uber, AirBnB, YouTube, Facebook, and a slew of other rich and highly functional applications. As a user you generally read, watch, and consume the internet as it is today. The metaverse fundamentally changes that paradigm to one of presence “in” it.
We are now seeing the “spatial web” unfold, a key component of Web 3.0, which will blur the lines between our online and physical realities. This will be realized through the convergence of enabling technologies including AR and VR, advanced networks such as 5G, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision. Early use cases for this spatial web have been expansive and span application domains from virtual concerts to remote robotic surgery.
But this is all just the beginning. The book Snow Crash cemented the concept of the metaverse in popular culture, and more recently the book and big-budget movie Ready.Player.One carried that torch, depicting a vision of the metaverse that could one day come to exist in some similar form. Ignoring dystopian narrative tropes, if we instead focus on the fundamental “features” depicted in Ready.Player.One — the things that enable a completely new form of communication and experience, that blend between actual, virtual, and augmented reality — they’re highly compelling features for our future lives. Virtual worlds, haptics, avatars, gaming, decentralization, cryptocurrency, fully autonomous vehicles and robots…the building blocks of the metaverse have been underway for a long time, and are now converging fast. As the connective tissue between all these technologies comes to fruition, it’s gonna get wild!
The Promise of Volumetric
One of the biggest challenges to realizing the metaverse will be how 3D content is created. Quite simply, the creation of good, photorealistic 3D content is hard. Synthetic, “cartoon-like” 3D content is relatively easy to create at this point, as are avatars that resemble the “moji” versions of our human selves.
Volumetric technologies solve a huge problem in leveling up from this cartoon aesthetic to fully photorealistic 3D avatars. It’s the most effective way to capture a 3D version of a human, object, or environment in its exact form. And for the Metaverse to take off, volumetric technologies will need to become more accessible and pervasive.
Despite the vast diversity in how the metaverse may be utilized, in all scenarios a key technology will be an efficient and accessible means to create personalized avatars for people and digital twins for places.
Cryptocurrency & NFTs
Many believe the metaverse shouldn’t be owned by one or even a handful of companies and that it should be as open and democratized as the whole of the internet. New technologies like cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) will facilitate less centralized virtual worlds.
NFTs are a way of recording who owns a specific virtual asset, enabling the possibility for creators to receive payments for their content based on its use or exchange rather than based on, say, a volume of views. Creating and transferring virtual goods is a big part of the infrastructure that needs to be built for a proper metaverse to emerge, and thus NFTs are a useful financial architecture for the metaverse. Your digital, volumetric self in the Facebook Metaverse can be secured as a unique NFT and transported to the Roblox Metaverse, the Fortnight Metaverse, or between any other walled gardens that will undoubtedly compete.
Evercoast’s platform for creating and representing one’s digital self as a volumetric entity, both in real-time or as recorded reality, provides a pipeline of content creation for the broader metaverse. When a creator can push record on reality, and publish to the NFT blockchain, easily and cheaply, it will change the paradigm for identity, communication, audience, and monetization.
Volumetric For Everyone
It’s challenging to understand the metaverse and all of the potential ways it may change our lives. This is in large part because it doesn’t exist yet, at least in any unified way. We are at a point today where the technologies being discussed are just mature enough to integrate and deploy, and do so at scale.
When we started this company, our first tagline was “Volumetric for Everyone.” We still live with that belief, and as we collectively work toward this future, Evercoast moves the needle by delivering a capture solution that’s capable of operating in a practical space such as a conference room or at your desk, that runs on a single PC using low-cost commercially available depth cameras, and greatly reduces the cost and overhead typically associated with volumetric capture systems.
We’ve also created 4-camera face capture systems that are capable of real-time volumetric video chat and captures, and they’re suitable (i.e., small, light) and affordable for home use.
From mobile phones to stadium-scale capture, from humans and animals to objects and places, volumetric is advancing rapidly and enabling an incredible new way to create, communicate, and consume real 3D content.
Hi, we’re Evercoast! Our mission is “Volumetric For Everyone.” Learn more about what we do and how we enable high quality, cost-effective 3D content.
