The Metaverse poses a huge challenge to the interoperability of digital assets

In his monthly crypto column, Israeli serial entrepreneur Ariel Shapira discusses emerging technologies in the fields of cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance, and blockchain, and their role in shaping the 21st century economy.

In 2022, we no longer need to think about how many stars there are in the sky—Yale University astronomer Dorrit Hoffleit has confirmed that humans can see about 9,096 stars from Earth with the naked eye. Now that we're past this stage, let's start thinking about how many metaverses there are on the Internet—oh, there are a lot of metaverses.

When it rebranded as Meta, the formerly Facebook company thrust the concept of the Metaverse — shared virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) digital experiences — into the spotlight. Where Meta goes, others follow. According to Sentieo, the term "metaverse" only appeared seven times in investor presentations in 2020. In the watershed year of 2021, entrepreneurs mentioned it about 128 times in their publicity.

One might argue that, from a consumer perspective, metaverse proliferation can only be a good thing. As more and more metaverses demand the investment of time and attention from users, they naturally have to compete with each other. Ideally, they'll try to stand out by offering a better user experience, more features, and other consumer-friendly practices.

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In reality, however, a metaverse spread that flips upside down would likely go against its own core principles. Shared experiences mean everyone can join in (if they want to), but that's the first hurdle we hit. In order to meet up with your friends in Horizon Worlds, Meta's main metaverse builder, you'll need an Oculus Quest VR headset. However, to experience an AR-driven metaverse similar to OVER, and NFT-based land ownership, all you need is a smartphone. This in itself is an accessibility issue, which in Meta's case comes with the temptation for users to be locked out of dedicated hardware. Falling into this temptation means shutting down your entire metaverse.

Transferring a user's assets from one metaverse to another is also not an easy task. We’ve heard advocates of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) rave about how NFTs will usher in a revolutionary new era of interoperability in video games. So far, though, that hasn't happened, and not just because of technical limitations.

Commercial considerations also come into play, as NFT game developers are more interested in selling their own NFTs than adding value to products created by others.

Hypothetically a group of VR or AR based metaverses could work with similar logic. If users wanted their Metaverse 1 characters to wear the Gucci shirts they bought in Metaverse 2, it meant a financial loss for Metaverse 1. Also, if Metaverse 1 ends up supporting wearables from Metaverse 2, it means it adds a utility to an asset sold by another vendor, doing you no good, if not detriment, to your own product.

At the business level, projects can find a way around this problem. It could be a fee for the sale of interoperable items, which would allow each supporting metaverse to receive a commensurate amount of profit on the transaction. Alternatively, Metaverse could enter into a cross-promotion deal to explore other ways to create shared value.

Even a bilateral interoperability agreement between Metaverse projects would keep this situation from what appears to be a zero-sum game. Metaverse 1 may add value to assets provided by another ecosystem, but also gain additional utility for its own assets. If their respective ecosystems bring about comparable sized user bases with roughly the same transaction volume, then the arrangement also looks fairly fair.

However, this is where we have to grapple with technical challenges. Even if two hypothetical metaverses are built on the same engine, you still can't easily import objects from one to the other. Metaverse 1 will likely have a realistic look and support for cloth simulation, so that in this world the shirt behaves like it would in the real world. Metaverse 2 may be aiming for a pixelated retro style, with simpler physics and blocky humanoid 3D bodies. Combining these two designs is actually quite a difficult job.

In this particular case, Gucci would be better off making two shirts from scratch, one for each metaverse, rather than trying to make one interoperable shirt. From an ownership standpoint, both shirts could be associated with their respective NFTs, for which they would be nested within a top-level NFT representing ownership of the entire stack of shirts.

A program like this is still likely to use a lot of supporting frameworks. Pre-made libraries and SDKs will make it easier for Metaverse developers to deal with interoperability in a large cross-platform ecosystem. They’re already doing it, with projects like Univers building a backbone for Metaverse creators to move their creations on-chain and into a larger network of connected services and decentralized applications.

It is not difficult to imagine that similar initiatives will make the interaction between different engines, as well as the interaction between SDKs and frameworks based on a specific metaverse, smoother. We could even see machine learning-based algorithms turning realistic-style wearables into pixelated counterparts and vice versa.

Going a step further, interoperability could become a major selling point for the Metaverse project in order to attract more users. Metaverse developers should strive to overcome the business and technical challenges involved. They should look to the future and build a metaverse of metaverses rather than isolated technology and hardware stacks. Without a holistic, seamless online world that brings everyone together, we’ll end up scattered among many fragments—pretty much the same as we are now, just with bulkier headsets.

Cointelegraph Chinese is a blockchain news information platform, and the information provided only represents the author's personal opinion, has nothing to do with the position of the Cointelegraph Chinese platform, and does not constitute any investment and financial advice. Readers are requested to establish correct currency concepts and investment concepts, and earnestly raise risk awareness.