A title with which I profoundly disagree, but useful to see what claims being made. And no, there is no reference to the environment.
p. 10 For all the success of Second Life, it was the rise of virtual world platforms Minecraft and Roblox that brought its ideas to a mainstream audience in the 2010s. In addition to offering significant technical enhancements compared to their predecessors, Minecraft and Roblox also focused on children and teenage users, and were therefor far easier to use…By the end of 2021, more than 150 million people were using Minecraft every month – more than six times as many as in 2014, when Microsoft bought the platform. Despite this, Minecraft was far from the size of the new market leader, Roblox, which had grown from fewer than 5 million to 225 monthly users over that same period. According to Roblox Corporation, 75% of children ages 9 to 12 in the United States regularly used the platform in Q2 2020. Combined, the two titles amassed more than 6 billion hours of monthly usage each, which spanned more than 100 million different in-game worlds and had been designed by over 15 million users. The Roblox game with the most lifetime plays – Adopt Me! – was created by two hobbyist platers in 2017 and enabled users to hatch, raise and trade various pets. By the end of 2021, Adopt Me’s virtual world had been visited more than 30 billion times – more than 15 times the average numbers of global tourism visits in 2019.
P 17 The very idea of the Metaverse means an ever-growing share of our lives, labor, leisure, time, wealth, happiness and relationships will be spent inside virtual worlds, rather than just extendedor aided through digital devices and software. It will be a parallel plane of existence for millions, if not billions, of people, that sits atop out digital and physical economies, and unites both. As a result, the companies that control these virtual worlds and their virtual atoms will likely be more dominant than those who lead in today’s digital economy.”
p. 39 Almost all the most popular virtual worlds today use their own different rendering engines (many publishers operate several across their titles), save their objects, textures and player data in entirely different file formats and with only the information that they expect to need, and have no systems through which to even try to share data to other virtual worlds. As a result, existing virtual worlds have no clear way to find and recognise one another, nor do they have a common language in which they can communicate, let alone coherently, securely and comprehensively.”
p. 48 We don’t want virtual worlds in the Metaverse to merely persist or respond to us in real time. We also want them to be shared experiences. For this to work, every participant in a virtual world must have an internet connection capable of transmitting large volumes of data in a given time (high bandwidth), as well as low latency (fast) and continuous (sustained and uninterrupted) connection toa a virtual world’s server (both to and from)… perhaps the greatest constraint facing the Metaverse today – and the one that is hardest to solve. Simply put, the internet was not designed for synchronous shared experiences. It was designed, instead, to allow for the sharing of static copies of messages and files from one party to another.”
p. 53 “there are no simple, inexpensive or quick solutions. We will need new cabling infrastructure, wireless standards, hardware equipment, and potentially even overhauls to foundational elements of the Internet Protocol Suite, such as the Border Gateway Protocol.”
p. 55 Even nonpersistent virtual worlds that are less than 10 square kilometres in surface area, severely constrained functionally, operated by the most successful video game companies in history, and running on even more powerful computing devices still struggle to sustain more than 50 to 150 users in a shared stimulation.. Fortnite’s famous 2020 concert with Travis Scott. “players” converged on a much smaller portion of the map, meaning the average device had to render and compute far more information. Accrdoingly, the title’s standard cap of 100 players per instance was halved, while many items and actions, such as building, are disabled, thereby reducing the workload. While Epic Games can rightly say more than 12.5 million people attended this live concert, those attendees were split across 250,000 separate copies (meaning they watched 250,000 versions of Scott) of the event that didn’t even start at the same time.”
p. 75 Most online games try to send as much information as possible to the users in advance, and as little as possible when they are playing… files are so large because they contain nearly the entire game, namely its code, game logic and all the assets and textures required for the ingame environment (every type of tree, every avatar, every boss battle, ever weapon)”
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