Field Trip Through The Metaverse

The Metaverse has been hyped up a lot recently, but in reality, it’s still a long way from fulfilling its potential. Originally ideated as the next step in the evolution of the internet, the Metaverse, in theory, is where people hold the creative ability to construct new worlds while staying connected to existing ones. Concurrently, it represents a cautionary tale, warning society of the perils that the monopolization of the internet, or reality in general, may bring.

Today, many organizations are trying to build their own walled gardens, disconnected from everything else; meanwhile, others are trying to connect and decentralize virtual worlds, allowing everyone to create new worlds and jump between them. During our game studio’s first ‘Metaverse Fieldtrip,’ we explored several open and accessible worlds.

There are hundreds of virtual worlds (most of them made in the past two years), but for this trip, we focused on ones that allowed new users to enter without creating an account.

Our trip began in Gather.Town, a 2D world that gives users the ability to recreate physical spaces from a top-down, game-like perspective. It was a fun time bringing our studio into the Metaverse.

We took some creative liberties and added a few extra things like a pool table, piano, and board games. Plus a park in the back!

While everyone enjoyed visiting our virtual office, we experienced a few challenges communicating since it was not initially clear that you can’t talk to people from farther than a few feet away. If we end up using Gather.Town regularly, we will probably use the spotlight tool liberally, so visitors can also see and hear each other regardless of where they stand in the room.

Our virtual office’s front door is actually a portal leading to a space we like to call the ‘Metaverse Corridor,’ filled with links to several different virtual worlds.

My goal was to make traveling between virtual worlds as simple as walking through a gateway, but this is where we find the current limitations of the Metaverse in its current state: there is no seamless way to traverse it.

Just as hypertext evolved from disconnected directories, portals could be the next evolution of hypertext links. However, as for now, we had to make do with sharing links to other sites that people could then open in new tabs.

Next, we dived into Mozilla Hubs, one of the first browser-based virtual worlds ever created! It was (and still is) developed by the same folks who make the Firefox Browser.

In Mozilla Hubs, people can become unique avatars, including gifs!

Our next stop was the Webaverse, which has been in development for a few years now. This platform is still a work in progress and not nearly as performative as Mozilla Hubs—its multiplayer features are turned off at the time of writing. Still, it has a unique aesthetic that you can feel even from the undeveloped street.

The Webaverse’s creators believe in building an open, interoperable metaverse that allows people to share avatars and various other assets across different worlds.

Spatial.io was originally going to be our next stop, but we belatedly realized that you need to create an account to try it out. That was unfortunate because Spatial.io is still one of the best-designed virtual worlds I’ve experienced thus far.

Spatial.io is simpler than other platforms, but everything it does do (e.g., collaboration and showcasing) is quite polished.

The third virtual world we visited during our trip was CryptoVoxels. This platform was likely the first and is still the most fully-featured, blockchain-based virtual world. There are hundreds of buildings or ‘blocks’ of varying sizes throughout this world.

We traveled to the Center, where you can access every other major block available in CryptoVoxels. It can sometimes take some time to load everything up, but it’s quite a fun place to explore.

Finally, we hopped into Jel.App, a tool built by one of the developers who worked on Mozilla Hubs. We have been following Greg Fodor’s development of what he calls the ‘unzoom,’ or virtual communication focused on voice and a shared setting, distinct from video calls.

It has been exciting to see Jel. App add more and more customization features. It uses HTML-friendly voxels that allow you to build structures, add ‘voxmojis,’ and effortlessly paste things like links and pictures.

We finished the trip with a cute dance party back in Gather.Town! Amebous Labs’ first field trip through the Metaverse was a fun and insightful adventure, so we look forward to doing more in the future. Next time, let’s explore some VR-centric worlds!