Augmented Reality, the Bridge to the Metaverse
Created
Mar 17, 2022
Date Published
Mar 16, 2022
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“Right now, we have over 14,000 ARKit apps in the App Store, which provide incredible AR experiences for millions of people today. And so we see a lot of potential in this space and are investing accordingly.”
This reads like a seemingly unremarkable quote about augmented reality from Tim Cook on Apple’s last earnings call. You’d assume he was answering a question about… well, AR.
But he wasn’t. Cook was sharing what is still the only official word from Apple on how they think about their “role in the metaverse.”
Asked about the metaverse, Apple’s CEO replies by touting their augmented reality efforts. The world’s largest tech giant, the company that popularized personal computers, smartphones, and smartwatches, talks about the metaverse solely in the context of AR.
And Apple’s actions follow their words. Rolling out new AR frameworks. Incorporating avatars into iMessage. Improving hardware sensors. Developing proprietary chips. Drastically improving their geonavigation. Highlighting advances prominently at WWDC. Quietly buying my friends’ AR companies…
Apple has never been shy about their love for augmented reality, but their approach should be raising more eyebrows as the metaverse emerges as the next major computing platform. As someone who is building an AR metaverse company, I don’t understand why more people aren’t seeing the signs. They’re not hiding, with Cook frequently evangelizing that AR will be bigger and more profound than VR or mobile itself.
It’s becoming clear that Apple’s strategy is based on a specific vision — that augmented reality will be the first and defining platform of the metaverse.
The Metaverse
Let’s do a very quick summary of where we’re at today.
Simplifying the definition by metaverse authority Matthew Ball, the metaverse is a persistent, synchronous, massive, and interoperable network of virtual worlds. Not a tool like email, but a counterpart to reality itself. Not The Matrix, but a bunch of interconnected matrices.
Phones, computers, headsets, headjacks — these are physical devices to access the metaverse.
And augmented reality, like virtual reality, is a way to experience it.
Decentralized worlds like The Sandbox, soulless platforms like Facebook’s Horizon, and creative game ecosystems like Roblox offer glimpses into the metaverse, but they are either missing a part of the definition, failing to hit scale, or acting as only one piece of a greater metaverse puzzle.
Critically, the metaverse is not a specific technology but an era where we have a changed perception of technology’s role in our lives. One where digital realities represent a larger piece of our shared reality — and where purely using technology is replaced by owning and experiencing it. The more tactile those digital realities become — the more real the metaverse is.
While the metaverse won’t announce its own arrival, we know it’s not here yet. As Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney recently said, “only in recent years have a critical mass of working pieces started coming together rapidly.”
Rapidly being a key word here.
Enter Web3
This past year, the metaverse and web3 became inextricably linked. The metaverse, as Ball defined it, extends across worlds. And web3 offers not only a foundation for decentralized data across platforms, but also a way to confirm decentralized ownership.
All we have left is to quickly spin up blockchain-based, persistent, interconnected Animal Crossings and Fortnites and boom! — we’re living in the metaverse.
Daisy Mae, launch partner for Coinbase NFT
Well, people are trying. But it’s not all working.
The metaverse builders of web3 are more often than not:
- focusing on the wrong hardware
- building singular apps, not platforms
- delivering experiences that fail to connect emotionally.
Browser-based Decentraland plays like a clunky Second Life reboot. Take me back to my walled off Fortnite.
Mobile-First
I’m not the first to point out that web3 has been designed for the wrong hardware, but it’s shocking how little attention that’s gotten.
Consumer investor Gaby Goldberg recently wrote about the lack of mobile-native applications and how only building for mobile will get us closer to full adoption of web3. It’s incredible how much we’ve grown in crypto while neglecting mobile, boosted by wealthy remote white collar workers sitting on desktops in a pandemic.
Web3's Mobile MomentIn 2013, media & technology analyst Benedict Evans presented "Mobile is eating the world," looking at how the…
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In case it isn’t obvious, if you’re not mobile-first, you’re also not attracting zoomers. In his writings on the (not quite catchy enough) “Compounding Power of Young Users,” Packy McCormick expelled wisdom on the importance of not being boomer-centric:
“The idea here is to focus on building the best experience possible for the youngest part of your market, acquiring and retaining them as they get older, and continuing to focus on serving the youngest people who age into your market. The hard part is that in the short-term, they don’t have the most money to spend and they’re not the most profitable segment, but if you retain them over the long-term, you own the future.”
While mobile is an answer to scaling web3 broadly and cross-generationally, it’s not enough to take desktop behaviors and move them to the phone.
The way we communicate and share on mobile is entirely different…
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On mobile, the camera becomes our voice — how we share our real life into our digital one. Snapchat, Instagram, Tiktok. We’re taking 2 trillion photos per year.
And augmented reality is the digital layer on top of the camera. It’s also how we’ll share our digital life back into our real one.
Tied to reality, AR doesn’t need to create a new world to build on. We have Earth (at least for now). And with it, limitless variables of context: location, weather, history, time.
When experiencing AR, you’re already past the prologue. The where, who, and when are answered.
In Central Park, with my family, on Christmas. On the sofa, with my bulldog, at 2am. At the beach, alone, at sunset.
You can begin to see why existing platforms and games have a comparatively uphill battle when providing meaning to their users — at least outside of financial incentives. They’re lacking context — and connections to our lives.
Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee argued the importance of connections more clearly than I could:
“In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it’s related to, and how it’s related. There really is little else to meaning.”
Berners-Lee was speaking not about AR, but in the context of hypermedia, like the web. Augmented reality is hypermedia connected to reality.
If a piece of information, or a word, only has meaning because of what it’s related to, do we really expect fully digital worlds to have a comparable level of meaning or emotional connection out of the gate?
More Than a Platform
Because of its connection to our real lives, augmented reality is both a way to experience the metaverse like VR and a platform within the metaverse with locations and context.
The metaverse has been described as something we’ll live within. Augmented reality makes it something we live with.
“It will happen, it will happen in a big way, and we will wonder when it does, how we ever lived without it. Like we wonder how we lived without our phone today.
The same concept was brought up last week at SXSW by gaming icon and former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils’Aimé. Between shots at Facebook’s lack of innovation and skepticism at VR, he lauded augmented reality as the “more compelling” vision of the metaverse, when describing where he saw it going – as a “a digital space where you interact with your friends in a social and, I believe, gaming type of environment.”
Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aimé perfectly diagnosed the worst thing about VRFormer Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé has been mostly out of the gaming spotlight since parting ways…
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AR will usher in the metaverse as a complement to reality, not a diversion. With a tangible and tactile connection between the two.
The Emotional Connection
In another essay, Gaby Goldberg highlighted the increasing loneliness of our digital-only lives, because, as she explained, “we haven’t yet found a way to meaningfully share our digital experiences.” Unlike the social movement of web2 that brought our real lives online, we now face digital-only existences that lack external shareability or expression.
For fully contained worlds like Fortnite, sharing within the game works. Your friends see your skins as long as you’re staying in that same third place.
This breaks down when we step out of these self-contained worlds and want to bring our digital selves into other digital worlds or back into reality. During my years working with Epic, we recognized and worked on concepts to solve this, but they’re not here yet, with financial barriers as large as the technical ones. Your Peely Fortnite skin is locked in Fortnite. Your Domino Crown is only in Roblox.
Augmented reality objects and experiences aren’t trapped. They’re seen in your house. Or at your friend’s party. They’re shared on Snapchat. They’re aware of what’s around them.
Augmented reality brings things full circle — merging our new digital lives into our real ones. Taking URL to IRL.
The Gray Space
That merge creates something entirely new.
The representation of digital creations in the real world changes based on the context of the viewer. In turn, AR creations are not completed solely by the original creator, but exist as dynamic, organic, and unpredictable, living in what David Bowie, always ahead of his time, referred to as “the gray space.”
He brought up this concept in 1999 after an interviewer labeled the internet as merely “another delivery system.” Bowie described a future where “the piece of work is not finished until the audience comes to it and adds their own interpretation, and what the piece of art is about is the gray space in the middle.”
This is both exhilarating and terrifying for creators — as they lose control of how, where, and with what their work is viewed.
The Case for AR
Taken together, we have a path to the metaverse in augmented reality that is:
- natively mobile, built for how we communicate and share
- not only a way to experience the metaverse, but also a platform with context
- emotionally, physically, and unpredictably connected to our real lives.
Behaviorally more comfortable, inherently more personal, technically more achievable.
And it doesn’t require us to disconnect from reality.
So, how close are we?
The Framework
Coming back to Matthew Ball, his often-cited Metaverse Primer details eight components of the emergence of the metaverse.
Analyzing augmented reality through his framework helps evaluate its current status, especially compared to the other ways we expect to experience the metaverse, like VR and 3D worlds as a whole.
Hardware (1) for augmented reality is here: smartphones with built-in AR capabilities and the relentless focus of the largest tech company in the world, highlighting their AR phone/tablet tech at every chance they get and likely releasing the first mass market smart glasses in the near future.
Networking (2) and Computing (3) barriers are lower than fully virtual worlds, especially high-definition ones, as AR is building off the non-technical foundation around us. No need to fully render a new world, we have this very-HD one already.
Interchange Tools & Standards (5) remain a challenge across any 3D platform, and heavily-fragmented and gated AR is no exception. However, Apple has embraced Pixar’s open-source USD format for AR, creating a standard building block that doesn’t exist in many 3D worlds.
Current User Behavior (8) is likely the most overlooked aspect of augmented reality. A fundamental and comfortable medium for dog-faced selfies, Pikachu-catching, and memojis, AR is regularly used by 76% of consumers across social, gaming, and messaging. Despite the lack of a killer or universal app, it’s here at scale in web2.
Lastly, Virtual Platform (4), Payments (6) and Content (7) are three interconnected topics that will evolve together in AR. Users send Payments to buy Content, and depending on your viewpoint (Sweeney or Gates), a product becomes a Platform either when its participants’ content — or economic value — exceeds that of its creator’s. Augmented reality fails to meet either metric. Walled off, lacking a payment standard, fragmented, with creators largely relegated to making things for brands on social platforms. I previously wrote in more detail about this creator-dilemma in AR and spoke about the limitations operating system’s put on payment solutions.
Those remaining pieces are what we’re trying to drive forward at Anima. So are Snap and Niantic, each from different perspectives. Snap is a social ads-based platform, fully web2 in the most successful and frustrating ways. Niantic an IP-centric one, linked to Pokémon Go and beginning to push out their own toolset. At Anima, we’re natively web3, built for creation, ownership, and collection from the onset.
What’s Next
Augmented reality will be the first platform of the metaverse, but we’re not there yet. Tackling the challenges around content and payments is what’s next — with content, particularly, being king.
Creating quality AR is difficult, and the fragmentation of tools and platforms makes creators’ decisions trickier. Many poorly-made examples of AR, often as branded lenses selling IRL products, drive people away. People know when they’re being marketed to.
Web3, in technology and community, is key to all of this. There is now both a market and an accepted mechanism for digital ownership.
We just need to connect it together, creating an ownership layer within augmented reality, and let the creators go to work.
Tim Sweeney, perhaps the most quoted metaverse visionary, summarizes his thoughts on augmented reality:
“I do believe in this future of the world in which billions of people are wearing AR hardware, AR glasses are their everyday life, and I believe that’s the entertainment platform of the future. And we’re gonna be there.”
Thanks to Gaby Goldberg, Matthew Ball, and Packy McCormick for the concepts and quotes from their writings and the discussions we’ve had about these topics. Pre-order Matthew’s book about the metaverse if you haven’t. Thanks to David Yang, Neil Voss, and Matt Parrilla for editing help.