Guide to Get Started and Build the Metaverse

Photo by Richard Horvath on Unsplash

The metaverse will be one of the most exciting things to work on in the next few decades. The most successful people work on the most important thing they can be working on. As Richard Hamming said, “If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work.”

The metaverse fits this category and I believe it will be more and more “important” in the next decades.

This essay will give you a direction of what, how, and where to work on.

Defining the Metaverse

Defining the metaverse is a bit difficult as we don’t really know how it will be like. We have to build it first.

The metaverse seems to be the successor of our current internet. Zuckerberg suggests that “You can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content, you are in it.”

That is to say, the metaverse will be synchronous, 3D, persistent, and open to unlimited participants in an interconnected network of experiences and devices. The internet won’t just be something you reach with your arm. You will be in it and it will be around our lives in a fully immersive experience.

For an extended definition of the metaverse, read this essay by Matthew Ball.

Not “Googleable” Yet

Once we have an idea of what the metaverse is, we need to build it.

It’s not like, we can just look up a YouTube tutorial and customize it to our preference. At least not yet.

Here are the industries we can help build. From The Ball Metaverse Index:

1. Compute: companies enabling and supply of computing power to support the Metaverse
2. Networking: companies providing real-time connections, high bandwidth, and data services to consumers
3. Virtual Platforms: companies developing and operating immersive digital and often three-dimensional simulations, environments, and worlds wherein users and businesses can explore, create, socialize and participate in a wide variety of experiences.
4. Interchange Standards: companies building tools, protocols, formats, services, and engines that serve as actual or de facto standards for interoperability, and enable the creation, operation, and ongoing improvements to the Metaverse.
5. Payments: The support of digital payment processes and operations, which includes fiat on-ramps to pure-play digital currencies and financial services.
6. Content, Assets, and Identity Services: The design/creation, sale, resale, storage, secure protection, and financial management of digital assets, such as virtual goods and currencies, as connected to user data and identity.
7. Hardware: The sale and support of physical technologies and devices used to access, interact with or develop the Metaverse.

The reason why it’s not “googleable it” yet is because the infrastructure simply isn’t there. We need to work hard to build it.

Now, you know the industries. What happens now?

You have two options: 1) You join a company, or 2) You create your own.

For example, PayPal or Stripe. The founders could have joined big banks to develop online payment infrastructure but often the leaders of today’s big companies don’t have the vision or bureaucracy does not allow them. That’s why some of you will have to create some sort of enterprise to create the necessary innovation.

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