What's the Metaverse? Where's the Money?
Victoria and I will be chatting about "Money in the Metaverse". Join us.
On Thursday 23rd May at 8.30pm London (3.30pm New York and 5.30am Sydney), my co-author Victoria Richardson and I will be on Zoom discussing our new book “Money in the Metaverse”. All subscribers to this substack will receive a Zoom invite to come and join us! After a few introductory remarks it will be an open discussion and we look forward to your questions, observations, criticism and suggestions. If you are not a subscriber, subscribe today and you can take part in the discussion!
By way of an introduction to the book and the topics it covers, here is the preface to the book that was written by my good friend and online pioneer Eva Pascoe.
“Imagination is the air of mind” – Philip James Bailey.
If you, like me, are a frustrated Metaverse explorer, then you will find it hard to put this book down. I read it on a flight from London to San Francisco and I was so engrossed in it that on touchdown I thought that the flight had been unusually short!
David and Victoria deliver a dazzling glimpse of what could be possible in the Metaverse. They paint an image of secure digital identities that can not only be attached to individuals like you and me, but also to companies or groups. They explore the feasibility of person-to-person transactions and the swapping of tokens, as well as looking at the role that banks and financial institutions might play in providing customer-centric guardrails for security and trust.
Virtual worlds conjured in electronic spaces have always been something of a secret passion for me. Hidden in the matrix, filling the cracks between escapism and play – those mystical worlds opened-up via online games, concert watch parties and virtual gallery shows. Back in the mid-1990s, when I co-founded the Cyberia Internet Café in London, we often organised virtual parties using CuSeeMe (early video conferencing software), connecting clubs in London, New York and San Francisco. We co-created environments that were low on bandwidth but high on imagination, enabling us to mingle in an electronic space with David Bowie, to beam up Gary Barlow or to organise a fan meet-up with Kylie Minogue – all early pioneers of music in virtual worlds.
The spirit of those early, pioneering virtual reality efforts was captured beautifully by a project called Virtual Nightclub (VNC), developed by Phillips in 1994. The glamorous digital music world created by Team Phillips mirrored those emerging spaces, conjured out of existing clubs, but creating something virtual and entirely new. But what it did not do was commerce. There was no possibility of buying a signed digital poster or e-swag from the music events that we were hosting. Imagine if we had had a digital t-shirt with David Bowie’s signature on it from the online Bowie.net and Cyberia event, or an electronic poster with Kylie’s digital dedication. The current value of those items would be enormous!
Online commerce became my life. A few years later I cofounded Topshop Online, the first online fashion store, where young fashionistas could buy physical fashion designed by Kate Moss and Maharishi. Most of our investors were dubious about whether people would change their behaviour and buy fashion online, but we proved them wrong: our Topshop e-store was a huge success, and in time it overtook Topshop’s biggest physical store in Oxford Street, London, in terms of sales. Last year I put some ideas about the future of online commerce to the test in a virtual Cyberia cybercafe, built in 3D and available via a headset or an app from a mobile phone. Along with colleagues I also organised a live VR event: a launch for a sci-fi book anthology. As many of the stories in the book explored metaverses, it made sense to launch it in one: not in an off-the-shelf commercial space but in our own, gritty-but-vibrant, London-by-night kind of place.
I invited 3D artists to recreate the actual Cyberia cybercafe from mid-1990s London (see figure 4 in chapter 2), right down to the computers running Windows 3.2 that were used for internet surfing, the wobbly bar stools and our famous clocks showing all of the times zones in which we had our cybercafes: from the Philippines to Tokyo and Bangkok, from Paris to London. Kylie Minogue digital posters were added to the wall because she was our most revered guest and fan.
To allow people to buy the book, we built a huge 3D version of it in the courtyard, to take advantage of the fact that the Metaverse has no ceiling, and we showed a large QR code on it. Once out of the VR space, people could grab the QR code using their mobile phones and then follow the link to Amazon to buy the book. This all worked, but as David and Victoria write here, it was cumbersome. We need better ways to transact in an era of spatial computing.
The Metaverse is essentially a secure internet: a connected network of e-worlds that provide secure trading environments. Big Tech is racing to provide secure payments guardrails, but at the cost of locking visitors into their proprietary identity walled gardens. Our Cyberia VR visitors are not going to be happy with a repeat of locked-down app stores extrapolated into the Metaverse, so imagine my delight when I first read David’s and Victoria’s new ideas about bringing web3 and digital identity together in a framework for safe and open ways of trading in the Metaverse (i.e., not within a walled garden).
The book tackles the challenges and limitations of current shopping and trading in the Metaverse head-on, and it does so with imagination, innovation and a pragmatic mindset. David and Victoria discuss the reasons why virtual objects, weapons, prizes and so on can only be bought and sold within the constraints of a single VR world. They explain why these limitations hold back economic growth. You cannot take your earned digital sword or a skin from Fortnite to Call of Duty – just as you cannot take a digitally signed book from the Cyberia cybercafe VR book launch to your home library in Roblox. They take us through a spectrum of options that are available to world-builders, with financial organisations doing their bit.
Rarely does a business-oriented book bring as much imagination to underpin its arguments as this one does. It gives us a peek into a future where the Metaverse will not be a place, but a process: a structure with building blocks but also a chance to join others, to share music, stories and art experiences with friends and family, and – in fact – with anyone anywhere. It will be a place to trade ideas and concepts as well as goods and services, such as learning courses and skills training.
It will be a world in which the only limit will be our imagination. My favourite poet, Philip James Bailey, would be pleased.
You don’t need to do anything more: all subscribers will receive a Zoom invite to join us at 8.30pm London time on Thursday 23rd May. See you all there!
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