The metaverse: fragmented fiefdoms or a boundless space of creativity and massive crowds, where people freely move from world to world? Our co-founder Rob Whitehead isn’t waiting for an answer. He’s diving into the big questions in How To Metaverse.
This immersive educational format equips everyone – from curious newcomer to seasoned developer – with insights into the biggest challenges in building the metaverse. Demos and workshops unfold live, within the metaverse itself, so you can learn about and experience it firsthand, as a virtual world transforms around you in real time.
Here’s a recap of the series so far – and more sessions are coming very shortly.
The building blocks of the metaverse
How To Metaverse debuted with a bang. An online session with content creators was swiftly followed by an in-person event at NFT Paris 2024. “We don’t do demos with videos – we’re going to do it live,” said Rob, before launching a world with 10,000 simulated players. And the audience weren’t passive observers either – using their phones, they got to join the fray, becoming active participants in this living, breathing metaverse.
The message was clear: the metaverse is all about live crowds and community – something Rob extended to its creation. He explored the tech challenges in dealing with thousands of unique avatars, and outlined our vision of a metaverse built not in silos, but by a community, with countless people collaborating and building upon each other’s work.
Rob dove deep into how interoperability and composability can help us achieve this goal, enabling a metaverse where “different parts of the world made by different people connect seamlessly together like jigsaw puzzle pieces”. Essential to this: Metaverse Markup Language (MML), a user-friendly, platform-agnostic way to build metaverse environments and objects that can be manipulated in real time. Watch out for more on this – via our MML guided tour – in the coming weeks.
Making metaverse crowds feel real
The next online How To Metaverse broadcast tackled density – how the metaverse handles massive crowds. Rob unleashed a bot army to give everyone present a taste of how we stress-test a system and the complexities of thousands of people interacting in a dense virtual space.
He then went deep into how we tackle key challenges. Cutting-edge compression and AI/ML techniques deal with colossal networking pressures as crowds grow. Streaming character details on the fly lets us render potentially thousands of unique avatars and silhouettes. And “making everyone feel like they’re in a massive crowd at a gig” is made possible through a bespoke audio mix per user that factors in distance and environmental factors. All of which makes for a truly immersive personalised experience.
The future of the metaverse is open
According to Rob, this is just the opening act: “We love doing development out in the open and are going to keep doing more events like this.” So if you’re interested in co-creating the future or just curious about our tech, stay tuned to our LinkedIn and X feeds for details on upcoming How To Metaverse sessions.
We’re building the metaverse in the open – and everyone’s invited.