What is the metaverse?

How can we define the metaverse?

Guillaume Moreau: The metaverse offers an immersive and interactive experience in a virtual and connected world. Immersion is achieved through the use of technical devices, mainly Virtual Reality headsets, which allow you to feel present in an artificial world. This world can be imaginary, or a more or less faithful copy of reality, depending on whether we’re talking about an adventure video game or the reproduction of a museum, for example. The other key aspect is interaction. The user is a participant, so when they do something, the world around them immediately reacts.

The metaverse is not a revolution, but a democratization of Virtual Reality. Its novelty lies in the commitment of stakeholders like Meta, aka Facebook – a major investor in the concept – to turn experiences that were previously solitary or for small groups only into, massive, multi-user experiences – in other words, to simultaneously interconnect a large number of people in three-dimensional virtual worlds, and to monetize the whole concept. This raises questions of IT infrastructure, uses, ethics, and health.

What are its intended uses?

GM: Meta wants to move all internet services into the metaverse. This is not realistic, because there will be, for example, no point in buying a train ticket in a virtual world. On the other hand, I think there will be not one, but many metaverses, depending on different uses.

One potential use is video games, which are already massively multi-user, but also virtual tourism, concerts, sports events, and e-commerce. A professional use allowing face-to-face meetings is also being considered. What the metaverse will bring to these experiences remains an open question, and there are sure to be many failures out of thousands of attempts. I am sure that we will see the emergence of meaningful uses that we have not yet thought of.

In any case, the metaverse will raise challenges of interoperability, i.e. the possibility of moving seamlessly from one universe to another. This will require the establishment of standards that do not yet exist and that should, as is often the case, be enforced by the largest players on the market.

What technological advances have made the development of these metaverses possible today?

GM: There have been notable material advances in graphics cards that offer significant display capabilities, and Virtual Reality headsets have reached a resolution equivalent to the limits of human eyesight. Combining these two technologies results in a wonderful contradiction.

On the one hand, the headsets work on a compromise; they must offer the largest possible field of view whilst still remaining light, small and energy self-sufficient. On the other hand, graphics cards are heat sinks. Therefore, in order to ensure the battery life of the headsets, the calculations behind the metaverse display have to be done on remote server farms before the images can be transferred. That’s where the 5G networks come in, whose potential for new applications, like the metaverse, is yet to be explored.

Could the metaverse support the development of new technologies that would increase immersion and interactivity?

GM: One way to increase the action of the user is to set them in motion. There is an interesting research topic on the development of multidirectional treadmills. This is a much more complicated problem than it seems, and it only takes the horizontal plane into account – so no slopes, steps, etc.

Otherwise, immersion is mainly achieved through sensory integration, i.e. our ability to feel all our senses at the same time and to detect inconsistencies. Currently, immersion systems only stimulate sight and hearing, but another sense that would be of interest in the metaverse is touch.

However, there are a number of challenges associated with so-called ‘haptic’ devices. Firstly, complex computer calculations must be performed to detect a user’s actions to the nearest millisecond, so that they can be felt without the feedback seeming strange and delayed. Secondly, there are technological challenges. The fantasy of an exoskeleton that responds strongly, quickly, and safely in a virtual world will never work. Beyond a certain level of power, robots must be kept in cages for safety reasons. Furthermore, we currently only know how to do force feedback on one point of the body – not yet on the whole thing.