The open metaverse, year 0

Virtual reality has never worked with the general public: too expensive, too complicated, requiring too much space and especially no app killers. As much, when it was born in the early 1990s, it was normal, due to the low power of the computers of the time. Then there was another Sony-sponsored attempt, Facebook, which also failed in practice.
Metavers or virtual reality for everyone
Virtual reality, such as fantasized in films, animated films and novels are now tangible, as soon as we get out of the “demo effect”. The consoles, privileged terminals, manage raytracing, admittedly it is less good than on high-end graphics cards and professional GPUs, but it is a start.

The metaverse must not be a “3D internet” gadget, but impose itself with another language, other habits. This will not happen overnight, the general public can digest only one or two breakthrough technologies every ten years: see the time it took for the public to digest the world wide web, then the smartphone.

I am old enough to have known my teenage years on the Internet. I’m still traumatized by flashy websites and other javascript experiments. The metaverse is no exception, even if using a 3DSMax or a Maya is much more delicate than an Adobe Photoshop. This will limit, but not eliminate “lack of taste”.

COVID 19 and the crisis that accompanies it is in fact a game changer, which was essential on January 1, 2020 became superfluous in May of the same year.
The Unreal Engine license as an example
As much as we start from scratch at the purely technical level, as much we have accumulated experience concerning the return on investment and on what works. Certainly even if the metaverse will only address early adopters and businesses initially, eventually, it will become the “cool” corner for the high school student adept at making cookies at night.

Teams specializing in HTML 5 / PHP will have to put their teeth on Blender 3D and the way of thinking of video games so that users get to grips with the tools offered by startups as quickly as possible.

The Omniverse © environment of Nvidia will intervene, is concentrated in one place, all the tools necessary to work, I repeat, Omniverse © is not designed for amateurs, it is a pro environment, for pros.

Despite a few bad tongues (the Omniverse ©, it is not the “real” multiverse). This one is yet to be built.

Nvidia does not try to ape Oracle, for the pricing policy. In this sense, A company, born at the same time, Epic Games imposes the tempo, for the general public, these are only the inventors of Fortnite (the Unreal 1 & 2 the Unreal Tournament series, the gears of war … do not exist for the general public press) creator of the Unreal Engine. Its closest competitor is Unity, which is equally proprietary, but it installs under Linux. Both tools are free to start with, no one pays for these SDKs anymore, it’s the best way to kill a tech. Nvidia has the Omniverse © SDKs paid for at a fair rate for groups (from two). The Epic Games / Unity are asking for their money from a million dollars.

My heart can beat for free software, which is a great school for programming, system administration. But in some very specific areas, proprietary software has its raison d’être … for now.