Author | Jamie Burke

Science fiction works like "Ready Player One" will"Metaverse "Described both as an end point and as an abnormal process of capture and control.

In Ready Player One: IOI, a giant corporation, wants to own and control the servers and databases of OASIS, where they can delete accounts, access any information, change the rules of the world, and print unlimited currency for themselves.

free"free"Access has become the norm.

As we invest more time, data, and wealth in our platforms ($10 billion and 4 billion hours a month in virtual worlds and gaming environments since the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020), we think it’s important to look at their design principles, The business model and terms of service are critical so we can decide if we want to continue opting in or spin off into other schemes.

we call it

we call it"Open Metaverse Operating System", which is a shared and open operating system built on the success of decentralized protocols, especially DeFi and NFT (Non Fungible Tokens) emerging from the Web 3 Stack based on blockchain and encrypted assets.

Define Metaverse

Technically speaking, the original vision and definition of the Metaverse was a point in time when the distinction between physical and virtual became blurred. This is often seen in the context of AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality), otherwise known as mixed reality becoming ubiquitous.

However, we think it's important that we don't see it as a destination, but rather a journey or process.

This is because we have to admit that the beginning of the Metaverse is already here, and if we see it as a distant destination, we are sleeping without addressing some fundamental design choices and potentially replicating or deepening the Network flaws.

It seems that one of the defining characteristics of metaspace is that it is, in a way, an old fiat-based economic system independent of nation-state control and enjoying a status above it.

If we look at Facebook's efforts to launch its own digital currency with Libra (which will extend to Oculus), because it's a highly centralized and fiat-based company, it's actively constrained, effectively emasculated, as a real disruptive and Sovereign cryptocurrency.

It can be argued that part of the truth is that some gaming platforms are very large, they are closed micro-economies, with their own currency, centrally controlled by them, valuable systems such as XP systems, in-game items (skins) and marketplaces, large amounts of wealth are held and traded.

But the reality is that only a few let you use fiat currency to transact on their closed platforms, but more importantly, wealth cannot be transferred between these micro-economies directly into a virtual meta-economy with its own sovereign currency.

What's more, you generally can't buy physical assets with virtual wealth, putting digital natives at a financial disadvantage, with 63% of players saying they'd actually spend more on skins if they had real-world value.

We ultimately propose that what we believe to be the defining feature of a true Metaverse is that it needs its own economy and native currency, where value can be earned, spent, lent, borrowed or invested in a physical or virtual sense, most importantly The thing is that there is no need for a government.

Competing multiple worlds

In this article, however, we first explore two versions of the Metaverse we observe: one dominated by closed platforms and big tech companies (eg Facebook/Oculus) and one built on open Protocols, such as Decentraland. Where possible, we can assess the relative openness of the two platforms.

How receptive a platform is to open source its code and data, how closed a virtual economy is (in its proprietary game), how much control they have over the monetary and fiscal policy of the underlying economy, how well it interacts with fiat-based systems, And whether they allow value transfer outside of their ecosystem. We also believe there is a spectrum of lo-fi versus hi-fi based on the hardware required to experience virtual worlds, and we recommend that this spectrum should continue to be inclusive and bring as many people out of the old economy as possible , into the open Metaverse.

Web3, an open metaverse carrier

We came up with the idea that there is a converging set of technologies that can provide an open Metaverse with a common operating system that sits between hardware, application software, and users. Due to its open-source nature and on-chain transfer of assets through NFTs, digital assets and their metadata are durable and permanent. In this sense, the Open Metaspace OS enables virtual worlds built on it to partially or wholly incorporate important Web3 principles around user-centricity, decentralization, and sovereignty, which create an unstoppable nature for its success.

Toolbox for Web3

We break down Web 3, its design principles, protocols, and standards into a toolbox for use by entrepreneurs and architects of the Metaverse, which we describe as The Web3 Toolbox for The Open Metaverse, and suggest that they will become interchangeable terms, are increasingly understood to mean the same thing.

Building in the Metaverse

We suggest that if you use this toolbox to build a completely new instance in the Metaverse (such as a virtual world), or seek to evolve an existing Web 2 platform, you will be faced with a series of design decisions at several levels of the stack and tradeoffs, choosing between open/shared or closed/gated and proprietary. And, you may rationally choose a solution that is open and closed permanently or temporarily at another level, based on the exigencies of your business and its stakeholders (such as shareholders), users, or philosophical principles. In the end, there is always a contradiction that needs to be resolved.

One approach we propose is to use a consistent framework (which we call"Anatomy of a virtual world") to observe any particular Metaverse instance as an anatomy of the various layers of the platform.

Open Metaverse Operating System

The question we discussed was: Is the Open Metaverse OS ready? Our view is that Web 3 technologies are primarily optimized for high levels of decentralization and transaction security, not at the expense of smooth real-time interactions. And its application on the desktop and mobile phone is more based on the experience of 2D network. So to date, Web 3 has had a poor user experience, but that is changing as the world of Web 3 and cryptocurrencies increasingly merges with new environments like gaming and VR, with a generation moving from Web 2 platform shift.

We therefore propose that the Open Metaverse OS is best understood as an evolving collection of highly composable technologies that will be increasingly, but selectively, used to make aspects of the Metaverse progressively more open.

open framework

We propose that the way of thinking about an open Metaverse operating system is also a framework through which to evaluate the openness, design choices and trade-offs of specific instances of Metaverse, including: whether the code is open source, whether assets are portable, whether the data platform is proprietary What is still user-controlled, who can create value, the extent of UGC vs platform, and how to monetize.

decentralized"decentralized"Similarly, openness cannot be absolute, and its choice is not binary, but in a multidimensional space. Even among those we can classify as most"open"openness"openness"。

So why build in the open Metaverse?

The question we want to solve is, why build or integrate a virtual world, or why use an open Metaverse operating system? Especially compared to the more convenient closed and centralized approach, with so many trade-offs and limitations, that it cannot be adopted at scale?

We explain why we believe the Metaverse has a general direction towards open standards, even for closed players that you might at first glance think of as open 3D object media standards: and the Metaverse web browser.

We explore the importance of the principles of self-sovereignty, identity sovereignty, and related digital wealth (including assets and increasingly data), based on the concept of user-centricity: users take precedence over any particular platform. Some might say that users are the platform in general. In this context, we believe that virtual worlds become interfaces for creating, trading, or experiencing virtual goods and services that are mobile and not limited to a single platform.

We suggest that this is a powerful economic driver and a fundamental paradigm shift rather than the closed metaverse and its business model that we see dominating the web today. When Creation, Wealth and Assets Can Have"off platform"life, and are freely and infinitely interchangeable in an open market, their liquidity and value grow, simply because more value can be exchanged between them without limit. We suggest that you can think of this as"value squared"a form of

moat"moat", that is, locking users and their data on their platforms and demanding ransom from them.

Thus, we explain that it is more likely that virtual worlds in an open metaverse are increasingly interoperable and interconnected, to the point that it is difficult to distinguish them as independent, but as distinct instances within a whole.

empty world problem

We also fixed the issue that when comparing Open City to its traditional competitors, it was basically full of spaces where there was nothing. Estimates of daily active users across all platforms are still in the thousands, almost meaningless compared to Fortnite, which has more than 350 million monthly users.

The question we ask is how can open virtual worlds catch up in the first place and equal the content and rich experiences of today's dominant virtual worlds and gaming platforms? And suggested that in 2017, by selling and exchanging ERC20s and ICOs, cryptocurrency exchanges (such as Coinbase and Binance) were generally brought to millions of retail investors, driving media attention and a virtuous cycle of hype, so will NFT platforms .

And LiDAR technology now allows anyone with the latest iPhone to render the physical world at scale, turn it into a machine-readable 3D model, and turn it into a tradable NFT that can be uploaded very quickly into the open virtual world, and Add avatars, wearables, furniture, and even entire buildings and streets.

Because they are machine-readable, they can leverage open source standards such as Pixar's USD, Nvidia's MDL, Khronos Group, and Nvidia's Omniverse to further input artificial intelligence and output infinite variations, which in turn can be distributed globally and in open markets Monetize better than any closed platform.

We discussed why we believe this will drastically reduce the time and cost of making games or entire virtual worlds and economies, while also leveraging the workforce of millions of creators around the world, allowing for seamless and decentralized collaboration far beyond The power of a single game studio, label or virtual platform.

Humanity's greatest economic experiment

Our proposed open Metaverse, including Web 3 principles, will allow innovators to conduct open and permissionless experimentation with their underlying economies, supported both at the protocol layer and by the rules of the game in each virtual world itself. Moreover, each experiment can be run synergistically or in competition with other experiments in parallel.

game to make money"game to make money"Nothing new, but it's becoming mainstream now,"play as work"And myriad variations, including: play by holding, earn by sharing or curating, make a living by gaming, which could become a primary income for hundreds of millions, a form of financial liberation rather than digital feudalism.

top-down regulatory power

Finally, we combine the government's increasing top-down mandates to limit the power of social platforms such as Facebook and various other Web 2 platform monopolies from an antitrust perspective, but also from the motivation of data trade and abuse, creating An extra and powerful force to untie the platform.

Once regulators understand the significance of cryptocurrencies and the implications for their fiat-based economies, eventually they will realize that their success is inevitable, but also beneficial, bringing about an open, permissionless hypermarket. Competition, both in technology and in financial services and inclusion, is certainly in the interest of consumers.

in conclusion

in conclusion

We invite you to read the full text and give us your thoughts, and consider this article as a first step in trying to understand the Metaverse. We look forward to discussing and iterating with you, and thank all the contributors who helped us arrive at this initial understanding.

Finally, we look forward to seeing you in an increasingly open Metaverse.

—Jamie Burke

Original link: https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmNmJcLc9Me7LERSh5shJmkgEeddFzcn4L1pTeMjT5fXqE/OV_Metaverse_OS_V5.pdf

Jamie Burke Author

Translated by Mike Jin

Edited by Vivian