Métavers: the fantasy of a parallel virtual world – Sciences et Avenir

This article is taken from Sciences et Avenir – La Recherche n ° 898, December 2021.

The term caught on in the space of one summer, during an interview with Mark Zuckerberg on tech news site The Verge. On July 22, the CEO and founder of Facebook (now Meta) explained that for the social network, the next step was to build a “metaverse”, a digital space of a new kind: in the form of avatars, users will not be alone. Spectators of a dive, but active participants. They could dance there or attend concerts, like doing their fitness exercises … Second shocking statement in mid-October: Facebook announced the creation of 10,000 jobs in Europe to develop this environment. At the same time, the company promised to create a $ 50 million fund over two years to help other players build a “responsible” metaverse and fund research organizations.

Mark Zuckerberg thinks big: “We can imagine the metaverse as an embodied version of the Internet, where you don’t just consult the content: you are in it,” he sums up. The essential characteristic of the metaverse is that it is a space called persistent. That is, an environment that continues to evolve even when you disconnect. Every time the user returns, they take things along the way, discover new items, new virtual activities, etc. The deepest dive involves wearing a head-mounted display (in this case, the Facebook-owned Oculus Rift VR headset), but Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t make that a prerequisite. According to him, the metaverse can be accessed using a smartphone, a tablet, or a computer screen.

An aggregation of several universes

However, the social network would only be part of the metaverse. In reality, this would be an aggregation of several virtual universes (hence the “meta” prefix) that exist and become interoperable. And he is not the only one who shares this vision. Other companies have announced similar initiatives. Starting with video game studio Epic Games, whose CEO, Tim Sweeney, advocates an “open meta-verse” that is not controlled by any particular company. We could play Fortnite (published by Epic Games) in multiplayer mode before watching a series on Netflix. An even more ambitious vision, the development of which has already made it possible to raise funds of… one billion dollars (840 million euros).

A parallel economy under construction

The world’s largest operating system publisher, Microsoft, won’t miss the boat, either. This year, he also described his project of “metaverse applications”: “digital replicas” of real environments (buildings, factories, works) for simulation and control. An ambition to attack the professional market that is also shared by the manufacturer of graphics processors Nvidia. And the first projects see the light of day. The American beer producer Anheuser-Busch has thus modeled the logistics chain of its breweries with Microsoft tools, and BMW an assembly line with those of Nvidia. For its part, Facebook has opened Horizon Workrooms: meeting rooms accessible on an Oculus Rift through an application on the Oculus site.

First the digital twin of a factory, then the world

CEO Jensen Huang of graphics processor maker Nvidia doesn’t go round the clock. It promises neither more nor less to transform the entire world into a metaverse, turning it into a digital double. It is actually an outrageous way to evoke photorealistic digital twins of industrial, architectural, etc. sites. Nvidia unveiled the platform that will be used to build them, Omniverse, in April.

Before opening a powertrain assembly line for electric cars in Regensburg, Germany, BMW created a digital version of the factory, which was based on real-world data and physical constraints. It is accessible from anywhere in the world, at any time, by any authorized BMW employee. The challenge ? Try new manufacturing processes, new software, get employees to collaborate and see the consequences, especially in delivery times. The “misfires” only affect the simulated world and all adjustments are possible. BMW has also used it to study the movement of employees on the site, with characters animated by artificial intelligence, or to evaluate with avatars how many people are needed to perform a certain task.

Even a parallel economy is being established in these virtual modes. As proof: in Decentraland, a 3D virtual world created in 2015, accessible on screen or through a virtual reality viewer, it is possible to buy land with virtual currencies or transactions that go through blockchain. In France, the Laval Virtual festival team (Mayenne) founded the company Komodal, which provides advice on the creation and management of virtual worlds.

This enthusiasm reflects real technological advances (headsets, cloud, artificial intelligence, brain-machine interfaces) without which the development of the metaverse would not be possible. And that is just the beginning. “The next step, which will take place quickly, will be to use artificial intelligence to populate these worlds”, considers the founder of the Virtual Laval festival, Laurent Chrétien. The avatars will remain alive when the user disconnects, others will have specific functions affected. “For example, simple digital” extras “(such as non-player characters in video games) or conversational agents.

All these initiatives are reminiscent of Second Life, created by the American company Linden Lab in 2003. This virtual world had made headlines at the time before falling into oblivion (without disappearing). Will the metaverse suffer the same fate? Too early to tell; the future of the metaverse is hard to imagine. Especially since its own definition differs from one speaker to another. The term, which dates back to a sci-fi novel from the 1990s (see box below), therefore allows various interpretations of recent advertisements. However, the honorary researcher in information sciences François-Gabriel Roussel, author of several essays on the subject, insists on the notion of “persistence”, which does not yet exist today: “Encounters in a virtual environment, such as videoconferences Zoom or Skype, they are just tools. Once the meeting is over, their environment no longer exists. ” For his part, Laurent Chrétien believes that the notions of immersion, real-time 3D, avatars and interaction are not enough to summarize the concept. “Second Life was just a slight immersion, but it is not a metaverse: In the latter, we walk from one world to another while navigating from one place to another on the Web.” Also, in its final acceptance, the metaverse could become another way to experience not just social media but the internet in general.

The origins of the metaverse

The term comes from the science fiction novel “The Virtual Samurai”, by American Neal Stephenson, published in 1992 (Snow crash in English). It designates the virtual and urban world of books, organized around a single street of 65,536 km, “Broadway, the Champs Elysees of Metavers”. More recently, Nameless City from the film The Matrix (1999) and Oasis from Ernest Cline’s novel “Ready Player One” (2011), and its Steven Spielberg film adaptation, are metavers.

Current interfaces awaiting significant improvements

“I tend to see the metaverse as a computer desk that allows you to work in Excel, surf the Internet, shop online, make word processors, etc., etc.”, estimates Anatole Lecuyer, director of the Hybrid team at the National Institute of Research in Digital Sciences and Technologies (Inria), dedicated to virtual reality. Several things and no longer a single activity at any given time. But for the moment, this notion mainly raises questions. Or, rather, exacerbate those already awakened by virtual reality.

In fact, frequenting a metaverse involves spending much more time there than in immersive experiences as we know them today. All issues of interaction, navigation, movement, perception will require clear improvements. “The locomotion interfaces are still extremely vague, notes Anatole Lecuyer. The solution we have found so far is to teleport, but it will not be ideal to teleport all the time.” The same goes for activities as simple as grasping an object and moving it. The control of virtual reality suffers from a lack of generic interfaces, equivalent to the keyboard and mouse of the computer. The current somewhat clumsy manipulations can turn into real frustrations in a metaverse. Perception also raises the question: how to handle cyber kinetosis (the feeling of discomfort from disorientation in virtual reality) or the real puzzle of touch simulation? Some solutions may be sufficient for a few minutes of immersion, not necessarily for one or more hours.

Finally, “this type of project raises questions of long-term appropriation (of its avatar, editor’s note)”, estimates Ludovic Hoyet, an Inria researcher specialized in the perception of the virtual human. In general, the feeling of incarnation in virtual reality is very fast but very few studies have been able to measure the effects of a long and regular immersion. “What will be interesting from the point of view of the investigation will be to see the cases in which it does not work. In the long term, the feeling of incarnation will change, it will deteriorate, it will create with our virtual character. That is the kind of thing there is. than being able to quantify, measure. Maybe there will be no effect. ” More than a virtual world, the metaverse promises to be a vast unknown universe.