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The Metaverse Primer

Jun 29, 2021 | Written By Matthew Ball

June 2022 Update: This essay was released in January 2020, expanding on a piece I wrote in
2018. In June 2021, I released a nine-part update, 'The Metaverse Primer', the foreword to which
is below. In July of 2022, W. W. Norton publishes my book “The Metaverse and How It Will
Revolutionize Everything”. In the spirit of openness, I’ve kept all my old essays up. But I would
love for anyone interested in the topic to check out the book. It provides a deeper, broader,
better, and more up-to-date thinking on the topic, and more accurately reflects my positions,
as well as everything I’ve learned and the feedback I’ve received since I began writing about
the Metaverse. The title has also been endorsed by the Founders and CEOs of companies such
as Epic Games, Unity, Netflix, and more, and Apple Books has listed it as one of the most
anticipated books of Summer 2022. You can read more here, or purchase at the following
retailers: Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Bookshop, Hudson
Booksellers, Target, Walmart, more.

When did the mobile internet era begin? Some would start this history with the very first
mobile phones. Others might wait until the commercial deployment of 2G, which was the first
digital wireless network. Or the introduction of the Wireless Application Protocol standard,
which gave us WAP browsers and thus the ability to access a (rather primitive) version of most
websites from nearly any ‘dumbphone’. Or maybe it started with the BlackBerry 6000, or 7000
or 8000 series? At least one of them was the first mainstream mobile device designed for on-
the-go data. Most would say it’s the iPhone, which came more than a decade after the first
BlackBerry and eight years after WAP, nearly two decades after 2G, 34 years after the first
mobile phone call, and has since defined many of the mobile internet era’s visual design
principles, economics, and business practices.

In truth, there’s never a flip. We can identify when a specific technology was created, tested, or
deployed, but not when an era precisely occurred. This is because technological change
requires a lot of technological changes, plural, to all come together. The electricity revolution,
for example, was not a single period of steady growth. Instead, it was two separate waves of
technological, industrial, and process-related transformations. 

The first wave began around 1881, when Thomas Edison stood up electric power stations in
Manhattan and London. Although this was a quick start to the era of electrical power —
Edison had created the first working incandescent light bulb only two years earlier, and was
only one year into its commercialization — industrial adoption was slow. Some 30 years after
Edison’s first stations, less than 10% of mechanical drive power in the United States came from
electricity (two thirds of which was generated locally, rather than from a grid). But then
suddenly, the second wave began. Between 1910 and 1920, electricity’s share of mechanical
drive power quintupled to over 50% (nearly two thirds of which came from independent
electric utilities). By 1929 it stood at 78%. 

The difference between the first and second waves is not how much of American industry used
electricity, but the extent to which it did — and designed around it.
When plants first adopted electrical power, it was typically used for lighting and/or to replace
a plant’s on-premises source of power (usually steam). These plants did not, however, rethink or
replace the legacy infrastructure which would carry this power throughout the factory and put
it to work. Instead, they continued to use a lumbering network of cogs and gears that were
messy and loud and dangerous, difficult to upgrade or change, were either ‘all on’ or ‘all off’
(and therefore required the same amount of power to support a single operating station or the
entire plant, and suffered from countless ‘single points of failure’), and struggled to support
specialized work.
But eventually, new technologies and understandings gave factories both the reason and
ability to be redesigned end-to-end for electricity, from replacing cogs with electric wires, to
installing individual stations with bespoke and dedicated electrically-powered motors for
functions such as sewing, cutting, pressing, and welding. 

The benefits were wide-ranging. The same plant now had considerably more space, more light,
better air, and less life-threatening equipment. What’s more, individual stations could be
powered individually (which increased safety, while reducing costs and downtime), and use
more specialized equipment (e.g. electric socket wrenches). 
In addition, factories could configure their production areas around the logic of the production
process, rather than hulking equipment, and even reconfigure these areas on a regular basis.
These two changes meant that far more industries could deploy assembly lines in their plants
(which had actually first emerged in the late 1700s), while those that already had such lines
could extend them further and more efficiently. In 1913, for example, Henry Ford created the
first moving assembly line, which used electricity and conveyor belts to reduce the production
time per car from 12.5 hours to 93 minutes, while also using less power. According to historian
David Nye, Ford’s famous Highland Park plant was “built on the assumption that electrical light
and power should be available everywhere.”

Once a few plants began this transformation, the entire market was forced to catch up,
thereby spurring more investment and innovation in electricity-based infrastructure, equipment,
and processes. Within a year of its first moving assembly line, Ford was producing more cars
than the rest of the industry combined. By its 10 millionth car, it had built more than half of all
cars on the road.

This ‘second wave’ of industrial electricity adoption didn’t depend on a single visionary making
an evolutionary leap from Thomas Edison’s core work. Nor was it driven just by an increasing
number of industrial power stations. Instead, it reflected a critical mass of interconnected
innovations, spanning power management, manufacturing hardware, production theory, and
more. Some of these innovations fit in the palm of a plant manager’s hand, others needed a
room, a few required a city, and they all depended on people and processes. 

To return to Nye, “Henry Ford didn’t first conceive of the assembly line and then delegate its
development to his managers. … [The] Highland Park facility brought together managers and
engineers who collectively knew most of the manufacturing processes used in the United
States … they pooled their ideas and drew on their varied work experiences to create a new
method of production.” This process, which happened at national scale, led to the ‘roaring
twenties’, which saw the greatest average annual increases in labor and capital productivity in
a hundred years.

Powering the Mobile Internet

This is how to think about the mobile internet era. The iPhone feels like the start of the mobile
internet because it united and/or distilled all of the things we now think of as ‘the mobile
internet’ into a single minimum viable product that we could touch and hold and love. But the
mobile internet was created — and driven — by so much more.

In fact, we probably don’t even mean the first iPhone but the second, the iPhone 3G (which
saw the largest model-over-model growth of any iPhone, with over 4× the sales). This second
iPhone was the first to include 3G, which made the mobile web usable, and operated the iOS
App Store, which made wireless networks and smartphones useful. 

But neither 3G nor the App Store were Apple-only innovations or creations. The iPhone
accessed 3G networks via chips made by Infineon that connected via standards set by the ITU
and GSMA, and which were deployed by wireless providers such as AT&T on top of wireless
towers built by tower companies such as Crown Castle and American Tower. The iPhone had
“an app for that” because millions of developers built them, just as thousands of different
companies built specialized electric motor devices for factories in the 1920s. In addition, these
apps were built on a wide variety of standards — from KDE to Java, HTML and Unity — which
were established and/or maintained by outside parties (some of whom competed with Apple
in key areas). The App Store’s payments worked because of digital payments systems and rails
established by the major banks. The iPhone also depended on countless other technologies,
from a Samsung CPU (licensed in turn from ARM), to an accelerometer from STMicroelectronics,
Gorilla Glass from Corning, and other components from companies like Broadcom, Wolfson, and
National Semiconductor. 
All of the above creations and contributions, collectively, enabled the iPhone and started the
mobile internet era. They also defined its improvement path. 

Consider the iPhone 12, which was released in 2020. There was no amount of money Apple
could have spent to release the iPhone 12 as its second model in 2008. Even if Apple could
have devised a 5G network chip back then, there would have been no 5G networks for it to
use, nor 5G wireless standards through which to communicate to these networks, and no apps
that took advantage of its low latency or bandwidth. And even if Apple had made its own
ARM-like GPU back in 2008 (more than a decade before ARM itself), game developers (which
generate more than two thirds of App Store revenues) would have lacked the game-engine
technologies required to take advantage of its superpowered capabilities. 

Getting to the iPhone 12 required ecosystem-wide innovation and investments, most of which
sat outside Apple’s purview (even though Apple’s lucrative iOS platform was the core driver of
these advancements). The business case for Verizon’s 4G networks and American Tower
Corporation’s wireless tower buildouts depended on the consumer and business demand for
faster and better wireless for apps such as Spotify, Netflix and Snapchat. Without them, 4G’s
‘killer app’ would have been… slightly faster email. Better GPUs, meanwhile, were utilized by
better games, and better cameras were made relevant by photo-sharing services such as
Instagram. And this better hardware powered greater engagement, which drove greater growth
and profits for these companies, thereby driving better products, apps, and services.
Accordingly, we should think of the overall market as driving itself, just as the adoption of
electrical grids led to innovation in small electric-powered industrial motors that in turn drove
demand for the grid itself.

We must also consider the role of changing user capability. The first iPhone could have skipped
the home button altogether, rather than waiting until the tenth. This would have opened up
more room inside the device itself for higher-quality hardware or bigger batteries. But the
home button was an important training exercise for what was a vastly more complex and
capable mobile phone than consumers were used to. Like closing a clamshell phone, it was a
safe, easy, and tactile way to ‘restart’ the iPhone if a user was confused or tapped the wrong
app. It took a decade for consumers to be able to have no dedicated home button. This idea is
critical. As time passes, consumers become increasingly familiar with advanced technology, and
therefore better able to adopt further advances - some of which might have long been
possible!

And just as consumers shift to new mindsets, so too does industry. Over the past 20 years,
nearly every industry has hired, restructured, and re-oriented itself around mobile workflows,
products, or business lines. This transformation is as significant as any hardware or software
innovation — and, in turn, creates the business case for subsequent innovations.

Defining the Metaverse

This essay is the foreword to my nine-part and 33,000-word primer on the Metaverse, a term
I’ve not yet mentioned, let alone described.

Before doing so, it was important for me to provide the context and evolutionary path of
technologies such as ‘electricity’ and the ‘mobile internet’. Hopefully it provided a few lessons.
First, the proliferation of these technologies fundamentally changed human culture, from where
we lived to how we worked, what we made, what we bought, how, and from who. Second,
these ‘revolutions’ or ‘transformations’ really depended on a bundle of many different,
secondary innovations and inventions that built upon and drove one another. Third, even the
most detailed understanding of these newly-emergent technologies didn’t make clear which
specific, secondary innovations and inventions they required in order to achieve mass adoption
and change the world. And how they would change the world was almost entirely unknowable.
In other words, we should not expect a single, all-illuminating definition of the ‘Metaverse’.
Especially not at a time in which the Metaverse has only just begun to emerge. Technologically
driven transformation is too organic and unpredictable of a process. Furthermore, it’s this very
messiness that enables and results in such large-scale disruption. 

My goal therefore is to explain what makes the Metaverse so significant – i.e. deserving of the
comparisons I offered above – and offer ways to understand how it might work and develop.

The Metaverse is best understood as ‘a quasi-successor state to the mobile internet’. This is
because the Metaverse will not fundamentally replace the internet, but instead build upon and
iteratively transform it. The best analogy here is the mobile internet, a ‘quasi-successor state’
to the internet established from the 1960s through the 1990s. Even though the mobile internet
did not change the underlying architecture of the internet – and in fact, the vast majority of
internet traffic today, including data sent to mobile devices, is still transmitted through and
managed by fixed infrastructure – we still recognize it as iteratively different. This is because
the mobile internet has led to changes in how we access the internet, where, when and why, as
well as the devices we use, the companies we patron, the products and services we buy, the
technologies we use, our culture, our business model, and our politics. 

The Metaverse will be similarly transformative as it too advances and alters the role of
computers and the internet in our lives.

The fixed-line internet of the 1990s and early 2000s inspired many of us to purchase our own
personal computer. However, this device was largely isolated to our office, living room or
bedroom. As a result, we had only occasional access to and usage of computing resources and
an internet connection. The mobile internet led most humans globally to purchase their own
personal computer and internet service, which meant almost everyone had continuous access
to both compute and connectivity.

Metaverse iterates further by placing everyone inside an ‘embodied’, or ‘virtual’ or ‘3D’ version of
the internet and on a nearly unending basis. In other words, we will constantly be ‘within’ the
internet, rather than have access to it, and within the billions of interconnected computers
around us, rather than occasionally reach for them, and alongside all other users and real-time.

The progression listed above is a helpful way to understand what the Metaverse changes. But
it doesn’t explain what it is or what it’s like to experience. To that end, I’ll offer my best swing
at a definition:

“The Metaverse is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time

rendered 3D virtual worlds and environments which can be experienced
synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users
with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as
identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”

Most commonly, the Metaverse is mis-described as virtual reality. In truth, virtual reality is
merely a way to experience the Metaverse. To say VR is the Metaverse is like saying the mobile
internet is an app. Note, too, that hundreds of millions are already participating in virtual
worlds on a daily basis (and spending tens of billions of hours a month inside them) without
VR/AR/MR/XR devices. As a corollary to the above, VR headsets aren’t the Metaverse any more
than smartphones are the mobile internet.

Sometimes the Metaverse is described as a user-generated virtual world or virtual world

platform. This is like saying the internet is Facebook or Geocities. Facebook is a UGC-focused
social network on the internet, while Geocities made it easy to create webpages that lived on
the internet. UGC experiences are just one of many experiences on the internet.

Furthermore, the Metaverse doesn’t mean a video game. Video games are purpose-specific
(even when the purpose is broad, like ‘fun’), unintegrated (i.e. Call of Duty is isolated from
fellow portfolio title Overwatch), temporary (i.e. each game world ‘resets’ after a match) and
capped in participants (e.g. 1MM concurrent Fortnite users are in over 100,000 separated
simulations. Yes, we will play games in the Metaverse, and those games may have user caps
and resets, but those are games in the Metaverse, not the Metaverse itself. Overall, The
Metaverse will significantly broaden the number of virtual experiences used in everyday life
(i.e. well beyond video games, which have existed for decades) and in turn, expand the number
of people who participate in them. 

Lastly, the Metaverse isn’t tools like Unreal or Unity or WebXR or WebGPU. This is like saying
the internet is TCP/IP, HTTP, or web browser. These are protocols upon which the internet
depends, and the software used to render it.

The Metaverse, like the internet, mobile internet, and process of electrification, is a network of
interconnected experiences and applications, devices and products, tools and infrastructure.
This is why we don’t even say that horizontally and vertically integrated giants such as
Facebook, Google or Apple are an internet. Instead, they are destinations and ecosystems on
or in the internet, or which provide access to and services for the internet. And of course,
nearly all of the internet would exist without them.

The Metaverse Emerges

As I’ve written before, the full vision of the Metaverse is decades away. It requires
extraordinary technical advancements (we are far from being able to produce shared,
persistent simulations that millions of users synchronized in real-time), and perhaps regulatory
involvement too. In addition, it will require overhauls in business policies, and changes to
consumer behavior.

But the term has become so recently popular because we can feel it beginning. This is one of
the reasons why Fortnite and Roblox are so commonly conflated with the Metaverse. Just as
the iPhone feels like the mobile internet because the device embodied the many innovations
which enabled the mobile internet to go mainstream, these ‘games’ bring together many
different technologies and trends to produce an experience which is simultaneously tangible
and feels different from everything that came before. But they do not constitute the
Metaverse.
Personally, I’m tracking the emergence of the Metaverse around eight core categories, which
can be thought of as a stack (click each header for a dedicated essay).

1. Hardware: The sale and support of physical technologies and devices used to access,
interact with, or develop the Metaverse. This includes, but is not limited to, consumer-
facing hardware (such as VR headsets, mobile phones, and haptic gloves) as well as
enterprise hardware (such as those used to operate or create virtual or AR-based
environments, e.g. industrial cameras, projection and tracking systems, and scanning
sensors). This category does not include compute-specific hardware, such as GPU chips
and servers, as well as networking-specific hardware, such as fiber optic cabling or
wireless chipsets.

2. Networking: The provisioning of persistent, real-time connections, high bandwidth, and

decentralized data transmission by backbone providers, the networks, exchange centers,
and services that route amongst them, as well as those managing ‘last mile’ data to
consumers. 

3. Compute: The enablement and supply of computing power to support the Metaverse,
supporting such diverse and demanding functions as physics calculation, rendering, data
reconciliation and synchronization, artificial intelligence, projection, motion capture and
translation.
4. Virtual Platforms: The development and operation of immersive digital and often three-
dimensional simulations, environments, and worlds wherein users and businesses can
explore, create, socialize, and participate in a wide variety of experiences (e.g. race a car,
paint a painting, attend a class, listen to music), and engage in economic activity. These
businesses are differentiated from traditional online experiences and multiplayer video
games by the existence of a large ecosystem of developers and content creators which
generate the majority of content on and/or collect the majority of revenues built on top
of the underlying platform.

5. Interchange Tools and Standards: The tools, protocols, formats, services, and engines
which serve as actual or de facto standards for interoperability, and enable the creation,
operation and ongoing improvements to the Metaverse. These standards support
activities such as rendering, physics, and AI, as well as asset formats and their
import/export from experience to experience, forward compatibility management and
updating, tooling, and authoring activities, and information management.
 6. Payments: The support of digital payment processes, platforms, and operations, which
includes fiat on-ramps (a form of digital currency exchange) to pure-play digital
currencies and financial services, including cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin and ether,
and other blockchain technologies.

7. Metaverse Content, Services, and Assets: The design/creation, sale, re-sale, storage,
secure protection and financial management of digital assets, such as virtual goods and
currencies, as connected to user data and identity. This contains all business and services
“built on top of” and/or which “service” the Metaverse, and which are not vertically
integrated into a virtual platform by the platform owner, including content which is built
specifically for the Metaverse, independent of virtual platforms.

8. User Behaviors: Observable changes in consumer and business behaviors (including

spend and investment, time and attention, decision-making and capability) which are
either directly associated with the Metaverse, or otherwise enable it or reflect its
principles and philosophy. These behaviors almost always seem like ‘trends’ (or, more
pejoratively, ‘fads’) when they initially appear, but later show enduring global social
significance. 

(You’ll note ‘crypto’ or ‘blockchain technologies’ are not a category. Rather, they span and/or
drive several categories, most notably compute, interchange tools and standards, and
payments — potentially others as well.)
Each of these buckets is critical to the development of the Metaverse. In many cases, we have
a good sense of how each one needs to develop, or at least where there’s a critical threshold
(say, VR resolution and frame rates, or network latency). 

But ultimately, how these many pieces come together and what they produce is the hard,
important, and society-altering part of any Metaverse analysis. Just as the electricity revolution
was about more than the kilowatt hours produced per square mile in 1900s New York, and the
internet about more than HTTP and broadband cabling.

Based on precedent, however, we can guess that the Metaverse will revolutionize nearly every
industry and function. From healthcare to payments, consumer products, entertainment, hourly
labor, and even sex work. In addition, altogether new industries, marketplaces and resources
will be created to enable this future, as will novel types of skills, professions, and certifications.
The collective value of these changes will be in the trillions.

This is the Foreword to the nine-part ‘METAVERSE PRIMER’.

Matthew Ball (@ballmatthew)

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