MetaTraversal: Exploring How We Move Between Worlds & Experiences in an Open Metaverse
Connecting the open and immersive web with OS tools can open doors and portals between worlds - but when can everyone step through these portals to collaborate?
(Note to readers: this is the first in a series of journeys exploring the open metaverse and use cases for interoperability across fields and sectors. The open metaverse is broadly referenced here as the connected space between worlds, ecosystems, interfaces and realities that includes AR, VR, digital twins with streaming and volumetric media content inside digital environments that blur these lines. Next week we’re exploring media networks, followed by mapping the field, governance and economic outcomes. For detail on Open Metaverse Interoperability as an open source community visit omigroup.org)
MetaTraversal 1: The start of a journey across worlds and ways of working (9/2021)
Early last fall Ben Erwin of the Polys and WebXR Summit series reached out to me as a colleague, recognizing common gaps in interactive & interoperability strategy that many were echoing across sectors. Ben, the resourceful producer and fieldbuilder, also reached out to Neil Trevitt at Khronos Group and Terry Schlusser at T-Mobile to help advise and convene a series of gatherings to address these gaps. Daniel Dyboski-Bryant from the Virtual World Society, Dr. Karen Alexander from XRConnectED, Julie Smithson and Sophia Moshasha, leaders at XRCollaboration & XRWomen rounded out the convening & production committee as I began creating lists of people whose work was inspiring or informative toward platform metatraversal, building in the capacities to move between worlds or immersive experiences and potentially see what is on the other side of the portal before walking through.
We started from a place of inquiry, listening to see what was needed most to support easier collaboration and movement between ecosystem and worlds.
At first we could see the gaps but had not yet centered on a solution set. Early on in our interoperability community strategy work between associations and organizations in OS spaces (2021, mid-pandemic) we saw that there was little way to connect for open-ended conversations — we were missing convenings behind the scenes at industry conferences where agreements had been previously forged. To meet that need, in the fall we invited colleagues to be a part of a broader conversation space and spent months listening to other leaders working on aspects of interoperability, collaboration, data and movement.
This latest iteration of the metaverse with web3 integrations across the immersive web stack has been evolving and forking quickly, branching out into divergent R&D paths during the pandemic as experiments proliferate around the world. Efforts were not always aligned toward cross-sector interoperability or shared agreements in ways that benefit everyday creators and users of these technologies. Many of the R&D lessons of early metaverse research across universities and virtual worlds were not well referenced or shared, resulting in knowledge gaps between early web and 3D pioneers and modern web3 creator movements. There was little public conversation about open source, the open commons or free capacities and tools for collaboration beyond what was already working — Blender as a toolkit and OpenXR at Khronos are given as shining examples of progress made and improved on in community but few in web3 engage in onboarding or extending how we use work Blender or participate in organizations like Khronos. We spent the fall reaching out to colleagues, asking some to share 5-10 minutes of their progress in open metaverse traversal and specifically how we move across worlds and share content effectively: portability of art, identity, assets like collaborative works and our social graph, the friends network we truly have that exists beyond a single platform or database.
Backing up a bit, if you’re looking for a quick history journey through the last 30 years of R&D in the open metaverse, file formats and the early 3D web, check out this great new video from PhD candidate Rolando Masís at Princeton with a look at the ethical and biometric data concerns inherent in these conversation about digital selves. Most of the concerns Rolando brings up here are echoed by community members who have worked in platform development or have built tools and tech in the first few generations of VR, virtual worlds, AR and digital twins.
Rolando speaks to 3 elements in 12 minutes we engage in at MetaTraversal over 5 hours of talks, so take a few minutes to enjoy his summary of this field and considerations for research ahead.
Privacy: consent and default status of sharing data and identity-related information, from assets held to personal information that could compromise the individual behind the interaction were addressed in a number of MetaTraversal talks at MT1 and MT2. Biometric data related to health and equity is especially troublesome as the pace of innovation will be ahead of policy or regulation in these spaces for the coming decade.
Agency: how we manage our *selves* and what we consider to be a digital self may include not only avatars and interoperable representations in artistic forms but also volumetric livestreaming scans and other models or assets that may be less embodied or personalized. How we manage many identities safely while maintaining control of what data will be shared or passed between carriers or parties remains a hot topic of debate across platform holders, communications giants and independent researchers alike as the use cases for health and wellness or mass collaboration could easily be compromised if agency is not protected for participants.
Ethical Design: To create a place of shared understanding I’ll point you to the work of fantastic colleagues from around the world: Monika Bielskyte on Protopian Futures, Kavya Pearlman at XRSI.org and the community at Cyber XR Coalition along with the Ethical Futures OS written while I was a creator in residence at Mozilla by colleagues at the Omidyar Network and Institute for the Future. Kent Bye has a fantastic framework published and our team went into some of these topics in our podcast for Voices of VR. The risks identified here also apply risk to personal data shared across layers of the metaverse stack, whether open or closed systems. In some cases dozens of companies may touch every interaction in a web3 ecosystem as decentralization leads to greater fractional ownership and agency.
MT2: Synthesizing the Constellation of Standards & Communities
Portals as a construct useful for education or industry, the overlap of standards and how data is shared across the spatial web was explored in the second MetaTraversal in December 2021. In this 90 minute session we start to define the research space as including a variety of approaches to creating windows, doors and portals that allow for collaboration or movement with some portability of self. The spatial web and real world metaverse are also discussed and there are overlapping conversations explored by the Immersive Web working group at W3C that continue to inform this process.
As we begin including live and recorded demos of traversal experiments a number of new collaborations and R&D efforts grew out of the chat in these first 2 zoom sessions from the fall of 2021. Some of those efforts including simple and more complex, threaded traversal experiments using WebXR and discrete web apps were effective at inspiring projects seen at MT3 and MT4.
MT3: Human Standards for Creating Mutual Value
As we opened the door to wider conversations about design, human engagement and the types of traversal portals or doors between web experiences and worlds we want to see happen in the future, explorations of equity and accessibility were essential to bring forward. Christopher Lafayette of Gatherverse presented 7 baseline standards for humanity first in the connected and shared spaces of the social, industrial and enterprise metaverse experiences now being crafted inside many companies.
While web3 was not explicitly discussed by most speakers, various on-chain approaches and decentralized strategies have formed a herd of very creative elephants on the metaverse field, inciting innovation and moving attention from other aspects or approaches to interoperability, especially open source efforts that touch on accessibility and the human experience. Fantastic experiments around web3 tools for avatar interoperability for example were explored by Jin at XRDEVLOG in the first MT event and both omigroup.org and M3 as communities support ongoing avatar interoperability experiments using both on-chain and OS approaches. How we root experiments in our humanness and the fundamentals of human connection is a key discussion point throughout all of these projects, as interoperability and agreement-building is an interpersonal practice that we are asking people to engage in openly.
There is common recognition from industry and independent leaders alike that data safety & safer transactional web layers are vitally important to future agreements along with work shared in ways that build trust and resiliency, not only trustless and touchless ecosystems but also the high-touch work of DAOs and collectives. Communities and collectives reset conversations of data ownership and rights management for commonly-held equity structures, expanding smart contract use into new fields and groups in ways that will benefit collaboration long term, a topic explored here in future posts. Returning equity, safer data sharing and value back to creators is a goal shared among many who have attended the MetaTraversal events, whether working for profit or nonprofit layers in this OS 3D puzzle.
Together this forming field & space is a jenga stack that is missing big pieces even as other parts are moving and collapsing digital space/time in the process. This is work in progress, it can be messy and much of the work is relational and behavioral.
Interoperability is interpersonal. We’re playing this out together to sort out what the future of our open, shared spaces will look like and what capacities we will share in those futures. How we collaborate and work together matters to the whole created, along with how we center a wide variety of voices from across these worlds of experience. Together we begin unpacking the tougher questions: how would you create a more equitable and open metaverse?
While this growing field is ripe for standardization, new extensions, collaborate OPEN R&D and integration across ecosystems, there’s excitement and momentum in this early stage process that will take time, accountability and scientific rigor to yield best outcomes. As we wait for research to catch up with rampant development, many great interoperability and community efforts in both OS and well-funded or tokenized circles will fail to gain traction beyond the froth of this bubbly moment, creating closed ecosystems for wealth held by a few thousand but potentially not an open metaverse that allows for all people to walk through doors from one world to the next. Open standards alone will not be enough to forge a fully open metaverse for all — an open commons approach to R&D combined with OS code and accountability still requires thousands of leaders to agree to do this work in the open, together.
There are sometimes gatekeepers — and there are frequently risk-exploiting dragons.
As with all engagement in the open metaverse, it helps to know who owns what space. Open is relative to 1) who you are in the world, 2) where you are and 3) what access you can realize. Engaging in anonymous or avatar-first work still requires the human being to be in a physical place with bandwidth and safety to survive, a challenge faced by our colleagues in war-torn areas today. There is no open space today that is truly safe for all people to engage in, so in at least one respect we are far away from a truly open metaverse accessible to all people. Currently human rights around engagement or anonymity are less well-defined than the rights of the state to pull crypto transaction histories or access assets, a challenge when centering marginalized community members who may be put at risk for their activities by some governing bodies.
The beneficial and risk-related issues of web3 transaction and identity management strategies for sharing assets or managing avatars or personas will also be explored in a future post here — there are many great experiments now underway to develop useful open identity protocols for an open, immersive 3D web that can be shared but not owned by any company.
How we move between worlds today includes proprietary and closed platforms, web3 multichain approaches and OS implementations using tools like Hyperledger or ecosystems like Holochain designed for resiliency over complex generative networks. While it is likely we will see different types of metaverse interfaces and experience zones for different types of work and play, there is still one connected space referred to as the shared metaverse. Tony Parisi’s talk in the 4th MetaTraversal speaks to this connected shared capacity for all, opening the door to identity and web3 infrastructure conversations as part of portability and the social experience.
MT4: Interoperability is (still) interpersonal as we align around our agreements
Our 4th gathering moved to multicast with AWE.LIVE on 3/3 as we began the work of connecting these conversations to a broader field map and panel conversations, moving the format toward deliberation and agreements. Aligning and choosing to work together has taken the last 6 months of groundwork laid by dozens of speakers across research, development, industry, education, creative arts and technology entrepreneurship. Julie Smithson provided a physical map to this collaboration and how it has developed over time through the shared MIRO board she’s crafted with us through these 4 sessions together.
From this space of mapping and shared alignment we began the conversation of interoperability strategy, aligning the constellation of standards and how we participate in these efforts as independent researchers, a standards contributor or a technology platform tool provider.
How we collaborate on open metaverse strategies matters to the collective future of anyone who may touch the 3D web a generation from now. Equity and accessibility. Open access for all. These hallmarks of the open web are essential baseline structures to carry over if we are to thrive and address the biggest breakdowns of our time. From pandemics to climate emergency, we will see it all at once now — how we choose to align our tools and work together is a key dialogue. This technical panel of standards creators and participants in this process gives an inside look at how extensions and collective decisions are made and crafted into agreements that become standards and building blocks for greater collaboration.
This minimum viable connected space is coming and in some aspects is already here, at least in the early stages. If we choose to build it, we will have a free, open and interoperable metaverse where communities can create and generate value together, spin off those works as new ideas and collaborate effectively to move ideas into action and production, watching through a shared process step by step together in a shared fabric. There are many loose ends to be woven together if we are to make that real.
To make metatraversal possible, our capacity to move from one immersive web space, platform, app or world needs to be as simple, consistent and straightforward as possible, overcoming barriers in language and how we see and connect with each other as human beings sharing space. Portals or doors need to be clearly delineated with a shared language and UX that can be adopted by a wider network of experience providers, work that overlaps with groups like Immersive Web working group at W3C (See Ada Rose Cannon’s talk at MT2 for more on this). To design collective, straightforward solutions that work for the widest potential use cases and applications, we start from choosing to align and agree on next steps. Some of those next steps are easy to see in conversation but adoption requires companies to choose to participate and collaborate in the open such as extensions to the work of Khronos around programmability and spatial capacity of glTF assets.
Communities like OMI are easy and open ways to start that journey at every level of career and project development, even if you are a student or non-technical support leader. The open metaverse is a participatory endeavor, not primarily one based on tokens, transactions or a single technology, and none of this should be considered only in the hands of major companies with billions to spend on marketing it. Technologies, like communities and spaces, are formed by people. People write the code, maintain it and communicate it with each other and every iteration of an open metaverse technology needs to work for humans as individuals and communities alike.
Beyond VR, today we have aspects of non-standardized traversal in clunky forms on the web & on your phone, both systems not originally designed for delivering 3D connected content. Notice what happens as you try to move from a 3D game or AR application into a livestreaming call or collaborative meeting on your mobile device. You can test this out at home by trying to move from one experience to the next easily while holding onto an asset or copy/pasting to your clipboard — the operating system and hardware makes a huge difference in your current experience or capacity to maintain one collaborative work if you need to check to work elsewhere for a few minutes.
As we expand what a URL can do for digital twins, webassembly scenes or elements of the physical world, we’re a long way from adoption and realization of metatraversal across browsers and systems. If you work in a proprietary platform or cloud-based metaverse space with others today you may or may not be able to make yourself or your work fully portable and actionable elsewhere, exporting any aspect of your art, work or experience to share it as you choose with others in other spaces. These barriers to collaboration persist in AR, VR, on the web and across ecosystems.
Human viability and long term healthy outcomes for all people will be determined by how we address these pain points, affecting our ability to respond in crisis, emergency or en masse to our greatest challenges.
Now we also have working test cases where we can study how to expand & improve.
Varied types of collaborative team-based traversals have well-tested industrial and first response use cases from disaster mitigation to climate action with more accurate simulations, models and digital twins integrated into our everyday decision-making processes in shared stakeholder agreements and communities. As smartglasses hit consumer markets, challenges related to AR systems integration, real world situational awareness and portability of collaborative work will continue to evolve how we move between the digital and physical worlds. How these tools will be applied is discussed in the first panel at MT4 with company leaders weighing in on every aspect of how these real world use cases will touch our everyday lives.
This evolution is happening all around us, faster than we can predict. Kent Bye of Voices of VR interviewed the MetaTraversal team as it has grown to include many creators from the XR Women and XR Collaboration side of this work for an inside look at how communities work together toward these common goals. For many of us, interoperability is still interpersonal and the web, in all forms, must still be human first in order to help us all thrive.
How overlapping agreements are formed and aligned from the bottom up, as well as from governance and economic structures will be explored in future posts here, stay subscribed here for those posts in the coming weeks and thanks for sending in your questions, quotes, comments and collaborative demos as we grow this body of work. MetaTraversal can be found on YouTube, Discord or metatraversal@gmail if you’re interested in exploring how this work may overlap with your efforts toward interoperability around the world.
