No metaverse in sight (1)
One of the things the media present these days as one of the most important technological advances for the near future is what has come to be called the metaverse.
The metaverse could be characterized by two fundamental properties. First, what is now offered to us through more or less large two-dimensional screens (ranging from a small smartphone to a smart TV that takes up almost an entire living room wall) will become a three-dimensional experience, or at least an “immersive” one, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish a “real” experience from a virtual one. In fact, in many cases, both experiences will be much more unified than they are now, through what is known as “augmented reality” or “hyperreality.”
Secondly, besides becoming increasingly difficult (or so it is assumed) to distinguish virtual reality from physical reality, the metaverse promises us the possibility of experiencing an endless variety of worlds, so that the “real world” will be just one of many realms among which we can divide our time, and not necessarily (as is said) the most interesting one. Unfortunately for the most optimistic, I believe that something like that dream is still far from being realized to the extent they hope.
Technological challenges for the metaverse
The two fundamental components of the metaverse face technological challenges that seem difficult to overcome. Regarding virtual reality, it likely won’t be too problematic to create visual and auditory perceptions that are increasingly similar to those we experience in real life, but when it comes to the other senses, the situation is infinitely more difficult. This is because these senses not only require the interaction of our sensory organs with the relevant “information” (in the form of sound or electromagnetic waves), but also genuine contact with the objects around us. Perhaps in the near future we might see something like an aroma synthesizer incorporated into a virtual reality headset that covers not only our eyes but also our nose. However, the range of odor molecules that such a device would need to create instantly to be sufficiently realistic would require us to compress an entire mega-chemical laboratory and its storage of reagents into a couple of cubic centimeters, and I’m afraid that’s still far beyond our current technical capabilities.
Perhaps, more and more sophisticated tactile gloves will also be developed, made from smart fabric that can not only monitor the movements of our hands but also reproduce on our skin the sensation of touching the objects we would “touch” in that virtual reality. And perhaps full-body devices with those characteristics may be built not too far from now. However, our “tactile” perception of the world does not only depend on the stimulation our epidermal nerve endings receive but also on each and every movement of our body as it interacts with objects and the resistance those objects offer. A “virtual reality suit”, therefore, would have to be connected to a kind of “general object simulator” that we could push, or by which we could be pushed continuously from all directions and in every possible shape.
Pretending and not actually doing
For example, I find it quite implausible that such a suit could convincingly replicate an experience like diving into a swimming pool from a diving board. Not to mention an experience like sitting in front of a piano keyboard and playing a Beethoven sonata. And it would be even more difficult to replicate all this if one hasn’t first learned to dive into water headfirst or play the piano in the real world. But there is one completely fundamental experience in our lives that, in my view, will obviously never be replicated in a remotely believable way in virtual reality, no matter how immersive the interfaces we may be able to build. I’m not referring to sex (which probably might be much easier to convincingly simulate) but to food. No matter how great the variety of activities Silicon Valley companies allow us to engage in within the metaverse over the coming decades, I am certain that one of the things we won’t be able to do there is eat a plate of spaghetti carbonara or drink a glass of Sherry wine—or at least have a virtual experience indistinguishable from truly doing such things. Therefore, I don’t foresee much success for the business of meta-restaurants. Now, I’m not saying that businesses reasonably called that won’t exist, but what they will allow us to do, at most, is either pretend to eat and drink there (just as in a war video game, we pretend to kill people without actually killing anyone) or “enhance” our experience of being in a “real” restaurant with additional perceptions beyond just eating and drinking—such as offering us a virtual show of Balinese dancers in an oriental restaurant—while we are served real, traditional food.
But if the difficulties of persuasively simulating a “real” experience are probably much greater than commonly thought, the second defining characteristic of the metaverse (let’s recall: offering us many alternative worlds) is perhaps a technological challenge too colossal to yield revolutionary results within a reasonably short time frame. The conceptual seed from which the idea of the metaverse grows is, of course, video games. Unlike a movie watched in a theater or on a TV, a video game offers a similar audiovisual experience, but with the added feature that what happens is not entirely pre-programmed; it depends on the player’s reactions and decisions. It’s not that movies or TV series lack “interactivity” altogether, since, after all, the experience of recalling the plot and playing with it in one’s imagination is a form of interaction (possibly even greater when reading a novel, where the reader’s imagination has to contribute much more than when watching a movie). However, we can say that this type of interactivity is extremely limited and primitive compared to what a video game allows. In this sense, a video game constitutes a “world” in a far more literal way than a novel or a movie, where the worlds that are constructed clearly exist only in our imagination, meaning they are worlds “within us.” In the case of video games, though their worlds are also “fictional” and not “real,” it is more the players who are “in the world” of the video game—and presumably will be even more so as interfaces advance (except, of course, when it comes to things like spaghetti, swimming pools, and other such issues).
I shall describe in the next entry the four main reasons why I think the idea of an unlimited number of operating ‘virtual worlds’ is very, very far from our technological possibilities.