Or at least it needs to be!

Let’s take a quick look at “The Internet” At the lowest levels, TCP/IP, is a way for machines to talk to each other globally. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it absolutely was game changing. Early computers required you to sit in front of them to access, and they couldn’t access anything not physically close by. TCP/IP came along to change that, allowing computers to share information across large distances. The early Internet had a couple protocols, FTP for file transfer, SMTP for email exchange, gopher for doc searching, but it didn’t have a “face” until http came along. That was truly a game changer allowing hypertext documents with links to other documents. This is what people today mostly think of as the Internet, it wouldn’t have happened without the great minds at CERN executing and MAKING IT AN OPEN PROTOCOL!

So what protocols will be required for Web 3.0, and in particular a three dimensional, immersive, peer to peer, open platform? It will required standard, open protocols. Right now in 2022 there is a fair amount of focus on blockchain, NFT, and crypto which art part of the solution, but definitely not the whole solution. Outlier Ventures has reintroduced their paper The Open Metaverse and a good summary of what is required. This is an excellent roadmap for the protocols of an open metaverse, with a glaring exception. The author admits he mostly glosses over what I call “the face” of the metaverse, ie what it will visually look like. I want the metaverse to look cool with high resolution graphics, full stereo VR, but I don’t want it to be millions of separate little game worlds and a few big monster censored, walled gardens game worlds. It needs to be dispersed like the world wide web where users can jump from one site to another.

This can’t be accomplished using a game engine, it needs to be open and distributed. WebGL forms an underlying compatibility layer, Babylon JS or Aframe can be leveraged on top of that. Perhaps Mozilla Hubs is an example of what an open metavese might look like. I’m not exactly sure, but want to encourage folks to think about open protocols to enable web 3.0 Using SMTP as an example, before email we had isolation, only AOL users could talk to AOL users, SMTP revolutionized communication and “forced” even the biggest companies to adopt it. The metaverse needs similar open protocols to use as the building blocks for the metaverse. Unfortunately some of those big companies have abused email and other protocols, we’ll need to be on the lookout to avoid those past mistakes as we build a real metaverse.