So far, people have analogized the transformation of the meta universe and society to a mobile centered digital life. This is because the meta universe is mainly a trend, not a specific field, project, or even a specific statement. At present, most people have not used the meta universe application, and have not spent time in AR, VR, and or browser based virtualization. There is only a part of the universe now, mainly in the game and web3 industries. This article will discuss the definition of meta universe application through Web3 and game footage.

Although there is no existing application that can meet all these conditions, it will change over time. A true meta universe application should be:

Real time: avatar mobile, voice chat and text chat respond to user input instantly. Users can interact with others, both to be seen and heard.

Always on (persistent): There is no concept of arranging a party. People can simply access the application, just like bars, coffee shops or open games.

High scalability: For a compelling experience, a metauniverse application should be able to handle many users at once. A rough benchmark is the ability to handle the same number of people as a crowded music festival. The key obstacle is to give users an irreplaceable feeling of being in a large crowd while retaining their sense of personal existence. The current cutting-edge technology is Improbable's M2 technology, which provides power for the application of the meta universe.

Compatible with cryptocurrency and web3 economy: Cryptocurrency and web3 provide power for the economic engine of the meta universe, and allow different applications and users to trade value with each other. Users can trade directly or through the open cryptocurrency and web3 protocol. The existing agreements, projects and communities of NFT and DeFi space will be the key primitives that the developers and users of the meta universe will use.

Unlicensed and open: Much like the use of the Internet, the use of the Metauniverse does not require the permission of the gatekeeper. Any user can enter the meta universe to read and create applications for others to use. Creators should be able to benefit from the economic value growth of their creations without being affected by the owners of the Metacosmic Infrastructure Company.

Mainstream accessibility: The hardware required to access the meta universe, whether it is AR glasses, VR headphones, or mobile and desktop computers, can be obtained at affordable prices for mainstream consumers. In view of the fact that the meta universe application is video card intensive, this means that the GPU cost needs to be reduced while the performance needs to be greatly improved.

Although no existing application meets all the above conditions, the game is closest to web3. The application of the universe in the game industry can be traced back to the beginning of the 21st century. These experiments began with games such as Second Life and Playstation Home, both of which provide real-time and persistent virtualization and have no other goal except to provide users with digital shared space. However, the popularity of these games has never reached impressive figures, and the experience is relatively simple.

At the beginning of the 21st century, large-scale multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), such as Warcraft and Runescape, became a very popular trend in games, driving the boundaries of concurrent users and cultivating their own internal digital economy. Although these in game items centered digital economies are impressive, they are still in a sandbox state in the game. At their peak, these games sometimes support thousands of simultaneous users, although these users are scattered among hundreds. MMORPGs were never accepted by the mainstream and were still a niche game category at that time.

The next major wave of the game starts with Fortress Night and its Royal Campaign mode. Fortress Night can be considered as the first real mainstream game. It naturally becomes a digital shared space where people can communicate and chat with each other outside the game. Fortress Night is also the first truly cross platform mainstream game. Users can play games and chat with others, regardless of their game console or operating system.

This ultimately prompted Sony and other major host manufacturers to break their online fence garden, support multiplayer games in a cross platform manner, and allow other games to follow suit. However, the key difference from Fortress Night is that the game is completely free. The only thing players can buy is character skin, and there is no profit in the game. In other words, these skins are purely decorative, representing the state of the game.

Based on the success of Fortress Night and its unique business model, it is easy to see how encryption and the web3 universe can develop more in-game projects supported by NFTs based on this success. NFTs provide similar distribution and revenue models, but have greatly enhanced the player experience.

Web3 meta universe applications, such as decentralized land and sandbox, aim to enhance the development of games in the past two decades through an open economy driven by encryption and web3. These lands can be bought and sold on the open market. The currency in these meta currencies, such as the $APE coin, can be used with the DeFi protocol completely outside of the meta universe application. The identity can be bound to the web3 wallet and reused elsewhere.

However, there are still application performance and scalability issues in all three early web3 meta universe examples. Although Otherside is currently in the leading position due to the M2 University of Technology of Improbable, it still has a way to go before it is considered to be mainstream ready. Although web3 has been committed to building a real meta universe experience for users, no web3 application can meet all the necessary prerequisites above to fully realize the vision of the meta universe.

epilogue

In terms of meta universe development, there are many lessons learned from the game and web3 industries. The meta universe is a gradually developing trend, and people have more and more screen time in the virtual world. In the end, this trend will lead to most of the collective screen time in society being spent in the meta universe applications, which echoes the fact that mobile Internet applications will eventually dominate our collective screen time today. However, this trend has only just begun today.