Each time you ask the question “What is the metaverse?” you may get a slightly different answer. You may hear vague descriptions with buzzwords, such as digital presence, virtual reality, gamification, and the like. However, in an interview with Forbes Magazine, Justin Trevor Winters, visiting professor of screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University, offered a far more expansive and intriguing explanation. He said, “The metaverse as we understand it today will unleash a world within our world, where anything is possible. Whatever you can dream, you can create. It’s going to be evolving as we get more and more involved, but in a nutshell, it’s really the art of the possible for a community.”
“The art of the possible”; however intriguing, still sounds vague, but the metaverse is evolving, and our understanding of it continues to deepen. The New York Times’ Brian X. Chen breaks down the concept, explaining that “The metaverse is the convergence of two ideas that have been around for many years: virtual reality and a digital second life.” If it still seems opaque, it’s because it is, or more precisely, it’s because as a society, we’re not completely there yet. As a community, our social interactions and our lives are mostly led in the external world; whether we’re meeting friends, or running errands, or going to work, much of what we do lives outside of the world of virtual reality (though there may be slight overlaps here and there). The metaverse sustains a different future for us: a life lived mostly (or at times exclusively) in the digital world, where we would also spend our money in addition to our time. How would we do that, you may ask? With cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens on the blockchain, of course.
What is a non-fungible token? Non-fungible basically means not interchangeable and unique. Examples in the analog world may help to understand the concept; currency is fungible, a dollar can be interchanged for another dollar; a unique baseball card, or one of a series of limited art prints is non-fungible. A non-fungible token is a unique unit of data that is stored on a blockchain digital ledger and is not interchangeable, but can be sold or traded.
Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, were almost accidental by design, a collaboration of sorts between Glitch CEO Anil Dash and artist Kevin McCoy in 2014, in a hackathon (i.e., an accelerated computer programming competition) initiated to devise a way for artists to authenticate and track their work in the digital world (which has often gone unattributed due to the ease of digital duplication). In fact, both Dash and McCoy were so enthusiastic about the outcome of the hackathon that they decided to give a live demonstration in May 2014, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, where they presented their new creation –“monetized graphics.” The demonstration was simple – McCoy sold a video clip to Dash on a blockchain called Namecoin, allowing its ownership to be traced and controlled on the blockchain ledger. This became a unique, authenticated, one-of-a-kind digital artwork that could not easily be duplicated, and could be sold and traded digitally, in a similar way that authentic one-of-a-kind artworks are sold and traded in the real world. The concept went on to be further developed, with the art world embracing this new, futuristic, and highly lucrative medium (McCoy’s first ever NFT went on to sell for $1.4 million at Sotheby’s). With the art world leading the way, the entertainment industry and others soon followed, flooding the digital space with NFT options in an ever-expanding metaverse. Even the founder of Twitter decided to issue his first ever tweet as an NFT, which sold for nearly $3 million.
Winters was pleasantly surprised to see this development. He had just founded the production company Verified Labs and was in the process of securing capital for an independent film written by a former student, when he was approached by Theta, a blockchain company with recognized Theta tokens – one of the top 30 cryptocurrencies in the world. Until then, Winters didn’t realize how the evolving understanding and appreciation of the metaverse would lead to an influx of resources in the entertainment industry. Suddenly, there was an opportunity to bypass a lot of red tape associated with traditional funding models, because artists and production companies could receive direct input and financial support from their immediate communities, and the individual members of those communities could own a percentage of the final product.
As far as the art world is concerned, the metaverse, at its best, claims to set our artistic visions free; it’s a way to democratize the production of artwork, a way to link the artist to their work in the digital world, and yes, a way to monetize such artwork in compelling ways. However, the vision of the metaverse goes way beyond the art world. The real makers of the metaverse are animators, coders, and computer science engineers, who are constantly building towards a different future. A future that imagines entire worlds in the metaverse – where you can create, buy, and sell goods and services, go to school, visit a library or museum, see a concert, join an interest group, go to the movies, shop your favorite brands, and do any number of things virtually that you do now in the real world. Consider, for instance, the popularization of the internet in the 1980’s, or any other piece of technology that seems so necessary today; whatever we are afforded through technological advancements now required an imagining of a future that was malleable and versatile.
This is perhaps one of the greatest advantages of studying computer science and animation. In highlighting the joint effort of faculty who contributed to the Interactive, Gaming and Immersive Media (IGI) minor at LMU, Dr. Ray Toal, chair of the computer science department at the Frank R. Seaver College of Science and Engineering, emphasized the practical uses of augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR). He said, “AR/VR covers a wide range of human activity. There are AR/VR applications in health, in education, to help us better understand history; sometimes it is even called an empathy engine, because it can be used for positive change, and to build the world we want to live in.” LMU’s undergraduate animation program is ranked 8th in the nation, providing students the opportunity to redefine the world. With the IGI minor, students are exposed to an interdisciplinary alliance that reveals how technical and creative disciplines can greatly enrich each other. Students take courses in programming, video games, animation, analysis, writing, knowledge representation, and worldbuilding, allowing them to develop the skills and tools to be engaged in more immersive storytelling. Ana Carolina Estarita Guerrero, LMU’s Animation Artist in Residence, is excited about the field, sharing, “As we move closer to a future in which our physical and virtual identities merge, the ways in which we interact with both worlds are going to, and are already, changing massively. We are moving into a society where everybody needs a basic understanding of how interactive immersive design and games work, but that’s just the beginning.”
The kind of storytelling that LMU students are learning is all-encompassing; students often talk about the empathetic nature of storytelling through IGI, how one can inhabit someone else’s perspective through virtual reality. Recently, Frank R. Seaver College of Science and Engineering students Michael Elias and Megan Reyes, were among the winners of the XR Hackathon organized by Facebook/Meta. Their project, “Stunt Doubles,” was a regional winner in Spark AR Track 2: Hand and Body Tracking Performance AR Effects. Such events are not unusual for students to undertake, as the IGI minor has become quite popular. The shift in both technology and the entertainment industry can be attributed to that, of course. Both Elias and Reyes express their excitement for taking part in this shift, and what it means for the future.
When asked about what’s next in relation to the metaverse, Winters believes that there’s much more to come; this is why his production company has partnered with actor and artist Jon Heder, best known for his role as the lead character in the cult comedy film “Napoleon Dynamite.” Together, they’ve come up with the Order of the Tigons, an independent NFT project, with Winters’ company producing and Heder serving as the artist. So far, Heder has produced a collection of 7,777 unique digital art collectibles; they had their first drop on the Theta blockchain in February, and have been pleased with the reception since.
In the past, it would have been unthinkable to be able to create something with the input of a community, with shared ownership and traceability, in a media that can circle the globe within seconds. It’s a unique model, fitting for an interconnected, global culture in a future that is still being discerned. The journey into the metaverse is just beginning; companies such as Microsoft and Facebook (now Meta), Google, and Apple are convinced of the transformative effect the metaverse will have on our daily lives. If we are able to do and experience more in a virtual world, our lives in the future could be far more complex and expansive than what we can even imagine today.