Meta, the parent company of Facebook, recently announced its latest innovation, Orion — its first “True Augmented Reality Glasses” — in a splashy product event hosted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The Orion demonstration was impressive, not only for the technical capability of the glasses, but also because they actually looked kind of cool — or at least one can plausibly imagine wearing them and not feeling embarrassed.
Augmented Reality (AR) wearables may finally be crossing into the mainstream. And there are many reasons to be hopeful about the technology.
Two decades ago, desktop computers and web browsers opened the door to Web1 and the dot-com era.
Then smartphones and mobile applications led to Web2 and the social web.
Now AR/VR — along with digital wallets that make it easy to control your own digital data and digital goods — could be our portal into the next era of the web, known as Web3.
Wearables are also our gateway to the Metaverse, commonly understood as an immersive and new shared online reality.
Plus, wearables make it easier for people with limited abilities to use technology and can monitor and improve our health and well-being.
Zuckerberg thinks wearable glasses could even replace smartphones by the end of this decade.
He also thinks Facebook’s wearables will introduce users to its own Metaverse, and he is spending big to find out.
Facebook’s Reality Labs division responsible for researching and developing the software/hardware of its VR/AR technologies, is all-in on the Metaverse vision still.
In the last quarter, the division lost $4.5 billion, a staggering amount.
As Zuckerberg has said before, “the Metaverse isn’t a thing a company builds. It’s the next chapter of the internet overall.”
The stock market seems to finally be rewarding Zuckerberg’s long-term vision, after penalizing him in prior years for profligate spending on wearable technology and his metaverse ambitions. Today, Facebook stock is at an all time high and Zuckerberg’s fortune has swelled to more than $200 billion.
This should give us pause. Do we really want Facebook and other tech giants creating the standards and the technology interface for how we access the next era of the web?
Facebook’s business is a walled garden, engineered to harvest and resell our data to advertisers, while locking us into an ecosystem that prioritizes the profits of the platform over the rights and freedoms of individuals. That’s web2 all over again.
There are two issues here. First, we want hardware platforms to be open, so we don’t replicate the same control Apple and Google have over the smartphones, charging rents and stifling innovation.
Second, we want the virtual environments we access using AR and VR to be hardcoded with basic rights — like privacy, property rights and the freedom to transact — so that our data is protected and we have more control this time around.
Call it the “Open Metaverse,” driven by the principles of Web3, where decentralized ownership and digital rights take center stage.
Yat Siu, founder of Web3 metaverse pioneer Animoca Brands, says that the corporate metaverse imagined by Facebook and other Web2 giants is more akin to a theme park than a true online economy or new shared reality for humanity. “Disneyland is fun… but you don’t have ownership in this. There’s no stake in it. Therefore, it’s meaningless, except for those who own it.”
In countries like Canada and the US, we are guaranteed certain rights by law.
For example: the right to own property, the right to privacy and the freedom to transact and engage in commerce in a lawful manner.
Why shouldn’t those rights extend online, and into virtual spaces?
In an “Open Metaverse,” a decentralized network of virtual worlds and environments, users would be able to freely buy, sell, and transfer digital goods across platforms without the risk of losing them if a company shuts down or changes its terms of service, another hidden risk.
Arianna Simpson of Andreessen Horowitz argues that in today’s digital economy, digital property rights are conspicuously absent. “You don’t have ownership; there are no property rights. They exist inside someone else’s universe at their privilege.”
OMA3 is one group trying to get this right.
They’re a coalition of nearly 100 Web3 companies (including Siu’s Animoca Brands) committed to building a decentralized, interoperable metaverse.
OMA3’s mission is to ensure that the metaverse is not controlled by a few large corporations but is instead an open ecosystem where users have full control over their data, identities, and digital assets.
The alliance is focused on creating shared protocols and standards that will enable different metaverse environments to connect seamlessly.
This interoperability is crucial for the future of the metaverse.
In an open metaverse, said Alfred Tom, Executive Director of OM3, a user could move their digital goods — whether it’s a virtual plot of land, an avatar, or a piece of art—between different virtual worlds, maintaining the value and the functionality throughout.
VR and AR may allow us to experience the metaverse, but they alone are not sufficient to bring it into being.
Alex Tapscott is the author of “Web3: Charting the Internet’s Next Economic and Cultural Frontier” and managing director of the Digital Asset Group, a division of Ninepoint Partners LP
