The metaverse is going to be an open-sourced version.
Amy E. Price was photographed at the South By Southwest festival.
Snow Crash was a science-fiction novel that predicted cryptocurrencies and virtual worlds. He is combining the two ideas by launching a metaverse powered by a blockchain. He is against big tech firms with their own metaverse plans so why is he doing it?
There have been many versions of the metaverse pushed by developers. Last year Facebook changed its name to Meta and Microsoft invested billions in its own version of the idea.
Instead of being owned by someone, the metaverse would be linked to aBlockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrencies. The purpose of Lamina1 is to act as a core for the open metaverse. Interoperability, identity of users, and financial transactions are handled by a bookkeeper.
In a white paper announcing the launch, Lamina1 said the first virtual world would be called "THEEEVERSE" and was designed by Neal Stephenson. A virtual world with an unforgettable origin story is promised.
There are two main possibilities when it comes to an open metaverse. One is a metaverse created at least partially using open-source software, just as the open-source operating system Linux underpins many of the world's biggest commercial technology platforms. Each world could be its own.
The open metaverse is a system of virtual worlds underpinned by open standards that allow characters to move from one world to another, just like you click from website to website in your browser.
There are signs that open standards can work. The OpenXR standard that describes virtual environments and how people can interact with them is supported by three companies. The Metaverse Standards Forum has been set up to help settle on common standards for things like how 3D models should be representation.
Technology companies seem to be moving away from a fully open metaverse in order to keep control of their own virtual worlds and monetize them.
A seamless metaverse that can be built and controlled by the communities that use it is still being worked on. The Open Metaverse Alliance is supporting the effort.
The founder of that alliance is Kalila Lang. She says open-source architecture is important to the future of the metaverse, but the idea of seamless interoperability between worlds is not feasible.
She says that one does not fit the other when it comes to interoperability. It wouldn't make sense to take my character's guns from Call of Duty and put them into Assassin's Creed. The entire game would be broken by it. It wouldn't make sense.
Lang believes that open standards allow the creation of open worlds without the control of technology giants. She said that the use of the product name " Metaverse" caused "ill will" in some quarters, but that it had a silver lining in that more attention was being paid to virtual worlds.
She wants people to build worlds on top of their constructs. We want to do something similar to theWordPress of virtual reality. People hack it into shapes they want.
We don't know if the metaverse will become a part of our daily lives. Even if the likes of Meta have the advantage of scale, there could be a place for all of them in some form.
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