TARS - Focus on Microservice Ecosystem

With the increasing usage of the Internet, it's becoming harder and harder to distinguish between "real" life and "digital" life. Our routines are mostly reproduced in online environments, such as picking outfits for our avatars in games, fostering virtual relationships, constructing virtual homes, meeting friends at a virtual mall, and hosting holographic meetings. With this, a new era of digital transformation is coming, the metaverse era.

What is metaverse?

The metaverse is composed of virtual spaces in which you can create and explore it with other people who are not in the same physical space as you [1]. The metaverse is the future of the internet and it is made of persistent and shared 3D virtual spaces in which you are able to hangout with friends, work, play, learn, shop, and create. The metaverse requires new technologies, protocols, and companies to work on it and the expectation is that it emerges over time as different products, services and capabilities.

How to achieve the metaverse?

This is still a question to be answered. According to Panchenko, the CEO and Founder of Dmarket, today’s metaverses are simplified virtual items or virtual services accessible with or without virtual reality (VR) headsets. According to him, the metaverse will first include the fields of ubiquitous computing, blockchain with non-fungible tokens (NFTs), extended reality (XR) with virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), and will further be extended to other fields [4].

Which companies and products are already in the metaverse era?
Some of the pioneer industries to be the first in building metaverses are gaming, crypto, fashion, and Hollywood. The online video game Fortnite is building the foundations of the Internet's future, due to their 3D environments, social features, character personalization, and the ability to create new environments. Fortnite is even hosting in-game live concerts in order to engage people to spend more time immersed in these virtual worlds. Watch the full event video here, where Fortnite features Ariana Grande's concert.

Figure 1. Fortnite featuring Ariana Grande in-game concert. Image extracted from the youtube video.

In December of 2020, Gucci and Roblox collaborated to build a metaverse environment. Roblox announced that Gucci brought some rare items to Roblox and that Roblox players can now use the Gucci collection (see tweet below). In the Gucci Garden Archetypes, a Gucci's immersive multimedia experience that explores and celebrates Gucci's creative vision, a virtual Gucci garden was available to everyone on Roblox for two weeks. Gucci dropped a limited edition of virtual bags in the game that was sold for $4,115 (350.000 Robux, the game’s currency), which is more than the $3,400 retail value.

Figure 2. Roblox players can now use Gucci collection

Besides Gucci and Roblox, other companies are already using the metaverse concept. Roblox is also in China through a joint venture with Tencent, which has registered a big quantity of metaverse-related trademarks for its own social app QQ [5]. Facebook has also purchased Oculus VR and developed the horizon/virtual world meeting space with the concept of metaverse in mind. Additionally, Facebook is investing $50 million to build technologies on metaverse. Finally, the computer-graphics chipmaker Nvidia Corp. wants its Omniverse platform to power some of the underlying framework.

Open source in metaverse

Despite companies investing in metaverse, open source is also there. The Open Source Metaverse Projectwas one of the first open source metaverse projects, in which a metaverse engine and a client component are the main features of the project.
Akraino, which is a product of the Linux Foundation’s LF Edge program, aims at creating open frameworks for edge computing deployments. Akraino has a collection of configuration blueprints, and some of them focus on AR/VR infrastructure that could be integrated with metaverse, such as the Integrated Edge Cloud (IEC) blueprint.

Challenges to build metaverse

To create a metaverse, it is necessary to have robust interoperability across services, human and civil rights communities should ensure that these technologies are built in a way that is inclusive and empowering. For that, experts in the government, industry and academia should work together. Metaverse is still in the beginning and many questions are still remaining to be answered, such as:

How can we give people more choice, encourage competition, and maintain a thriving digital economy?
How can we minimize the amount of data that's used to enable privacy-protective data uses and give people transparency and control over their data?
How can we make sure that these technologies are designed inclusively and accessible to everyone?

What to expect from the metaverse?

When the metaverse is well established, people will be able to experience blended virtual and physical experiences. Also, gamevertising will become more popular, since gaming is becoming a playground for brands and marketers to connect with their target audience. Furthermore, augmented shopping experiences will pave the road to more intuitive, immersive, and engaging experiences. Finally, meta societies might be created with a digital reality that reflects the values and standards of physical societies [6].

Interested to learn more about the metaverse? Check the links below for more information:

About the author:

Isabella Ferreira is an Ambassador at TARS Foundation, a cloud-native open-source microservice foundation under the Linux Foundation.

References

[1] https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/building-the-metaverse-responsibly/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140608135859/http://www.metaversestandards.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
[3] http://metaverse.sourceforge.net
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/cathyhackl/2021/06/24/more-than-a-trend-entering-the-metaverse-will-become-a-necessity-for-brands/?sh=b1c42ca55ab2
[5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-29/what-the-metaverse-is-who-s-in-it-and-why-it-matters-quicktake
[6] https://www.wundermanthompson.com/insight/new-trend-report-into-the-metaverse