Bonus Episode: 2021 Metaverse Year in Review

Announcer:

Today on Building the Open Metaverse…

Ruth Suehle:

We're clearly at this inflection point where it's time for the next thing. But I think much like when we throw out any next tech word, there's so little agreement on exactly what it means. And so it's that big first hurdle of all agreeing on where we're headed and exactly what is meant when you use those words.

Announcer:

Welcome to Building the Open Metaverse, where technology experts discuss how the community is Building the Open Metaverse together, hosted by Patrick Cozzi from Cesium and Marc Petit from Epic Games.

Marc Petit:

Hello everybody, and welcome to this special end of year edition of Building the Open Metaverse, a podcast where technologists come to discuss how the community is Building the Open Metaverse together. So I'm super happy to be here with my partner in crime and co-host, Patrick Cozzi from Cesium. Patrick, welcome.

Patrick Cozzi:

Hi Marc, hi everybody.

Marc Petit:

And to keep us honest, we brought a special guest today with us, to talk about 2021 and do a little bit of this year review. Ruth Suehle from Red Hat has agreed to join. And Ruth, welcome back.

Ruth Suehle:

Thanks for having me back.

Marc Petit:

We had a great time talking about open standards and open source last time around, and we felt it was an important theme. So we're super happy that you're taking the time to be with us today.

Ruth Suehle:

Always glad to talk about open.

Marc Petit:

So what we're trying to do today is really traditional end of year, obviously look back at 2021. And it feels it's been an important year for the metaverse. And the three of us were wondering what happened? It felt like January 2021, the metaverse was a concept that was like, very geeky. And then it burst into the mainstream. And I remember when Tim Sweeney did SIGGRAPH in the year 2019. Metaverse -we were hesitant to say the word metaverse because it felt like, dystopian and geeky, and not a concept that was very compelling and suddenly somewhere in the first half of 2021, it became  mainstream. A mainstream concept all the way to the front page of The New York Times. So Patrick, what do you think happened?

Patrick Cozzi:

Well, Marc, we actually had a similar experience internally at Cesium, where we do these quarterly planning meetings. We call “refactors,” named after refactoring software, and early in the year when I started talking about the metaverse, I think people were maybe politely skeptical and now people are running around Cesium saying, hey, we're building the metaverse, right. So we felt the same energy as far as what has happened, I feel that the technology shifts are all coming together from hardware and software, from devices to GPUs, and socially people want to be immersed in 3D technology. And there's been a ton of fundraising, a lot of money flow in this year as well. Do you want to speak to that, Marc?

Marc Petit:

Which part of it?

Patrick Cozzi:

So there's been IPOs, there's been venture investment.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, it's hard to start thinking, for me, the vision that technology evolves linearly in a lower docking space. So there's a perceived sense of acceleration, but there is in fact linear revolution in that little docking space, so I believe in that. But I think what we saw this year is the fact that money rained onto that parade. We saw massive IPOs, Roblox in March, like shot up to trade to an almost 40 billion evaluation earlier in the year.  Late 2020, Unity showed up, Epic did their own, raising a billion dollars in April. And then we don't know how much Apple is investing, but we know they're investing quite a bit. And Facebook became very public in October about over that 10 billion investment mentioning 10,000 jobs, this is incredible. So I think that the endorsement by the financial community, there is a lot of other big capital raises and everything.

Marc Petit:

I think that's what made the topic race to the public awareness and raise The Wall Street Journal to CNN and to those things. It is also a sign of maturity when investors speak with their dollars, they don’t want to miss the train. And I think that's why we got that outburst of popularity around the metaverse.

Patrick Cozzi:

Yeah, that reminds me too of Matthew Ball, who was on episode one, helping us define the metaverse. He has an exchange traded fund now, right? That was launched this year on the metaverse. We've even seen Jim Cramer on CNBC talk about the metaverse, it’s really come quite a ways. Ruth, what do you think?

Ruth Suehle:

I was actually just talking to my kids about this last night and the way I explained it to a couple of teenagers, for sure. The money dropped, but also two other really important things I think happened this year. One is the pandemic forced us to start looking harder at ways to interact that aren't getting on a plane and going somewhere and having meetings in person. 

So a lot of things that people had been thinking about discussing saying, oh, we'll get around to that, suddenly happened a whole lot faster. I can't even tell you how many projects I've heard out that we're oh, we were actually already working on this. We just finished a lot faster than we thought we were going to. And the other is the hardware that we're going to need is becoming more available or at least closer, the ubiquity of 5G networks or at least reasonable ubiquity thereof, that will enable a lot of the things that we want to see.

Patrick Cozzi:

Yeah, I agree. We even saw 10 million VR headsets. So even VR, it was a pretty confidential up until 10 million units. I don't remember off top of my head, the number of cases they are, but it's also in the millions. And I think we discussed with Bill Vass on the podcast. I mean the ability to start streaming some of that real content, so you're less dependent on their device. And so you can create a piece of interactive, immersive 3D content that gets streamed to many web browsers. So yeah, there is this maturity, but I think the PR machine got crazy probably because of those investments.

 Marc Petit:

Actually, we saw it, Patrick, when we were working on our SIGGRAPH BOF. And by the time you told the story the other day, by the time we submitted it in March and we got to do it. The landscape around the metaverse was so different and the momentum and the request that we got were absolutely crazy.

Patrick Cozzi:

Yeah, absolutely. And Ruth, to your point on the devices, there's also been more early versions of AR wearables, right. That I think are getting people excited. And then I think a theme that we've seen throughout the podcast has been, whether it's going to be VR, AR, or our phones, or something rendered in the cloud, that's how you access the metaverse, but the metaverse is separate from the device. I think it's been an important topic.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, this was a big shift because when it was associated to VR, we made a controversial topic. And when people understood that it's all about immersive interactive and social first, I think it's the one thing that interests you over the year is that, that level of understanding that 3D enables that multi users and that social component. And in the metaverse you can do a lot of things that you did before, but you can do it with your buddies, with your partner, with your friends, with your colleagues, with your teammates. And I think that is something that is getting better understood, and people say, huh, I can see why this is a value. You know, why that VR thing was kind of something that was remote for people. So, but I think proving that the metaverse is social first and we see it in platforms like Roblox and Fortnite, where people go there to look, to listen to music, and watch animated content because they can do this with their friends. So I think it's a strong differentiator of the metaverse.

Marc Petit:

So another theme, I think we were discussing, we saw in 2021, which is highly notable, the momentum of Web3 and the appetite for more decentralization. And it shows up in different contexts all the way to some pretty extreme concepts, like the whole decentralized finance and the cryptocurrencies and all of that, and the NFT craze. I think it's one thing we have to note about 2021. It was the year when everybody had to learn what NFTs were. I mean, do we even understand? Ruth, do you understand what NFTs are?

Ruth Suehle:

I think I understand it. And yet if I try to explain it to someone else, it makes no sense, but I think that's what NFTs are. Like, nobody really understands how this thing has happened, how Christie's and Sotheby's and everyone has gone all in on these NFTs selling for millions and millions of dollars, but there's not really any rational way to make it make sense.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, for us through our colleagues, it's a topic that's important to us because if NFTs and smart contracts are the way that we can bring creators and artists a better share of the value of their work because they can participate in secondary sales, it would be an absolutely beautiful thing. 

But I guess the issue right now, those smart contracts are implemented using a highly centralized, unregulated technology, which I also I want to get into, deep blockchain or distributed? It’s a larger conversation here, but it's a very, very heavy way to solve the problem. So I think it's been a year of observations for me, we like a lot of things about decentralized ownership and abstracting the ownership of digital, like from a platform.

Marc Petit:

I think it's something we love having creators participate in secondary sales is something we love, but having this implemented in a platform that's kind of unregulated and a little bit of a wild west is something that personally I'm pretty skeptical about and trying to stay away from. So I am looking forward to 2022, and maybe to understand better how the decentralized models will work, how they're going to be regulated, how they're going to be fair because we see a lot of the scammy things going on.

Ruth Suehle:

And to be fair, plenty of technologies have seemed irrational and weird and nonsensical and all sorts of other adjectives like that when they first appeared and then 10 years from now, we'll all be like, well of course NFTs. Why did we ever think that didn't make sense? Maybe.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, I agree. It's going to be interesting, what about the momentum of Web3? Well, how do you interpret that, that Web3 momentum?

Ruth Suehle:

Well, we're clear really at this inflection point where it's time for the next thing, but I think much like when we throw out any next tech word, there's so little agreement on exactly what it means. And so it's that big first hurdle of all agreeing on where we're headed and exactly what is meant when you use those words.

Marc Petit:

One of  the notable things for me-  I'm against-  a very biased opinion, by the way today, I'm Marc from Epic. I'm not the neutral host that I usually am. I will allow myself some opinions and as you know at Epic, we have a very public fight with the walled gardens and, some fees that we consider are out outrageous. So anyway, I'm not going to get into this, but I think it was interesting of course at Epic we've been thinking about this for some time but the amount of scrutiny that the big Web 2.0 companies and their practices around those platform fees, those storage fees,  and even data collection got into limelight. I think it's something interesting.

Marc Petit:

And I think it hopefully signals that the regulators are starting to pay attention. And maybe as there is a platform change on the technology side, I'm an optimist as you guys know, it could be an opportunity to kind of redefine a lot of the rules and to get something that's more fair and we don't pay things with our data and we have improved privacy and a better level playing field. So I think that for me, it would be the beauty of decentralization moving a little bit away from those walled gardens, because we had those big integrated products. I think that's what you call them politely. Don't call them well, walled gardens for that big integrated platform product. So hopefully 2021 could be remembered as the year the thinking was shifting on those companies, they could do no wrong in 2018, 20, 19, 2020, they were the stars of the stock market. And they were leading the free world. And I think in 2021, I think we've solved up on some of those big companies.

Ruth Suehle:

I don't know about doing no wrong. I think we've done a lot of wrong with walled gardens and there's a huge opportunity here as we move to the next thing to right those wrongs, but also the huge danger of just dramatically making them worse. And I think that's the key to making sure that all of this is done openly - open source, open standards, everything open, default to open, as we've long said at Red Hat is to avoid some of those hazards. To make it a truly open world in every sense of the world, excessively technology wise, making it a world for everyone, and not for the few.

Patrick Cozzi:

Here, here on open! Especially open standards and open source. And I think all software, whether it's geospatial or not, they're there to kind of bring the data to life, whether that data was scanned from the real world or data that an artist made in a form of a 3D model, and those creators deserve fair value exchange. So for the value they create, they deserve to be able to claim a fair amount of that. And I know we're not in the prediction section yet of the podcast, but I'm hoping we see some great movement there.

Marc Petit:

Absolutely, so maybe we can segue into open standards and open source I think. Ruth, I want to come back, one thing you said about being open and I think it was Vlad from Unity said this on the podcast, I think. But we don't know what the metaverse is going to be. And there is a lot of troubles to solve, technical problems. And I think his point of view is that if we can experiment in the open so that we can share the learning, this is how we move the agenda forward. And I think that was a striking comment for me, this notion of experimenting in the open and learning together.

Marc Petit:

I guess it's the basis of academics. But I think as an industry, the more we can foster that experimentation in the open and shared learnings, I think it's the antidote to some of the risks that you were calling out. Because it's true there's a lot of unresolved problems and we need to leave businesses space to create original solutions and differentiate themselves and create value and capture this value. We're not denying that, but if we want to build an open world and evolve the internet, I think this being very open, very experimental, for me is probably a good concept.

Ruth Suehle:

Yeah, when we talk about the principles of open source software development, we call that more politely, “rapid prototyping,” but sometimes a little less politely, “fail faster.” Fail faster so you can solve the problems faster.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, when it comes to building the open metaverse, I think we're at this stage where we need to be very explicit about our failures, as you say, fail fast forward - another term that was used in the past so that, we all learn and we all can converge on something that works for everybody.

Patrick Cozzi:

So that experiment in the open was one of my favorite quotes of all the podcasts thus far. And it's interesting. So for Khronos, I've been involved in The Khronos Group and glTF specifically, I think, for almost a decade at this point. And in 2012, 2013, we started doing all the specs and development in the open on GitHub, which was kind of like a far out concept then, but now if you go to The Khronos GitHub page, there are so many different projects, whether it's Vulcan, glTF, et cetera. And I think a lot of the kind of trust from the community and a lot of the growth of the ecosystem came from the fact that we were just so open so early.

Marc Petit:

I mean, from an open perspective, it was a good year. We saw another open source game engine, O3DE. I think that was great. I think it's a great thing for the industry-  like a very sophisticated, important piece of technology made its way to the world of open source. So we have an episode coming up, Patrick ,with Royal O’Brien from O3DE. I look forward to that episode, because we believe that open source game engines are a good thing for the world.

Patrick Cozzi:

Yeah, absolutely. Now, I'm really thankful to The Linux Foundation and AWS for launching an open 3D engine and it looks like they've really put a lot of investment in.

Ruth Suehle:

Yeah, it's going really well too. So I'm also on the governing board for O3DE and so I'll just put in the shout out for people to come contribute because that's how open source works. We would love to see more folks getting involved. Discord is incredibly active, so that is totally the place to start, GitHub of course, but just hop in the Discord and find the thing you're interested in working on and get rolling.

Marc Petit:

I know Ruth, you're also involved with the Apache Software Foundation. So how was 2021 there?

Ruth Suehle:

Well, it's been great from the perspective of software development in general, but we've always worked virtually, so no big deal. We keep rolling the way we have, but also like the rest of the open source world. There are things that we were accustomed to doing in person when we meet up at events and ways that the whole pandemic life going on for another year has affected things like fundraising. So more the same, but also more challenges. I would say.

Marc Petit:

It's a bit unexpected that you would see funding challenges.

Ruth Suehle:

Well, this is a whole other road that we could talk about-  foundations and funding and how that's been through the pandemic. In some ways it's been great. In some cases companies have had travel budgets that they needed to reallocate somewhere else. And in other cases, they sort of did a little panic and, and maybe didn't do the things they had always been doing. So it's had a different effect on different open foundations. I participated in a project last year called First Responders where we got some folks together who recognized that the pandemic was having a serious effect, particularly on open source events, and to make sure that projects and foundations that needed financial help, we're getting it. So everybody's kind of banded together and made sure that everyone who wants to make it to the other side is going to make it to the other side. And I feel really good about that.

Marc Petit:

And for us I mean Patrick, everything we are studying the podcast, we've heard, we've been living in this dual world of glTF and USD. And we've seen this conversation unravel and be touched upon almost that with every one of our guests. And I think it's great, one is an open standard, one piece of open source. I think it's interesting because it raises a lot of, first - it reaches the awareness of the difference between open source implementation of something versus an industry defined open standard.

Marc Petit:

And we had this episode and Ruth, you were there with us, on governance models. I think it was very telling and ever since, that conversation keeps on coming back because around there's a lot of goodness about USD. Pixar is doing an amazing work designing USD and we have an episode coming up with Guido Quaroni, the father of USD, and we get a little bit more insight on the work that he did with his team at Pixar.

It's just a brilliant piece of engineering. And everybody acknowledges that what VR is doing with this, we heard from Michael Kass as well. It's nothing short of amazing in terms of what they can do with it. But then there were still these nagging questions about the governance behind it. And how do we make sure that the industry or the community wants to build an open metaverse, if this is becoming the HTML or the metaverse how should that be governed?

Marc Petit:

And I think it's a question and that we start to see coming back podcast after podcast and conversely the glTF approach, which is like open standards and committee driven is good. And the question is, can you drive enough consensus and that velocity so that it makes a difference, right? We see a lot of value there. So it's an interesting debate. Patrick, did you form an opinion through those past like eight or nine podcast recordings when we touch on the topic every time?

Patrick Cozzi:

I mean, even over the past, maybe three years. Yeah, I think I have formed an opinion and a prediction. And I do believe that a full production authoring pipeline where you may have dozens of specialized artists, it requires something like USD that's very full featured, very complete, and there's a ton of software built on it when it comes to publishing to lightweight efficient transmission in the metaverse. I think glTF is in a sweet spot right there. So I think just from a technology perspective, both of those can live together quite well. And we can have a nice bidirectional transcoding pass.

Patrick Cozzi:

The governance though is still to be determined because as you advance say, glTF to add attributes and behaviors to help support say, interoperable 3D assets within metaverse experiences, I would move my car between Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft. If we want to be able to transcode from glTF to USD, USD may require some modifications and I don't yet know how that's going to happen.

Ruth Suehle:

I'm excited to hear that USD episode. I was going to add while we're giving shout outs to projects and technologies and all of that, we should also give a nod back to our friend David and the Academy Software Foundation, all the work they have going on, which I hope is going to have some better collaboration with O3DE in the next year or two.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, we saw, it's been a good year for the Academy Software Foundation. We're big fans of what they're doing there. 

So should we move into all doing that prediction game so that we embarrass ourselves a year down the road listening back to the episode?

Ruth Suehle:

No, it's the scary part!

Marc Petit:

Always the scary part. Well, I can start, I have a prediction. I predict that Epic is going to release Unreal Engine 5, and it's going to be a watershed moment because it will show people that we have the potential to create a metaverse that indistinguishable from the real world, whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, I leave it up to everybody to form opinions. I mean, there is a context where it's good things like for digital twins and GIS, you want your cities to look like cities as we have just seen. 

Marc Petit:

And I think there's a lot of consequences when you can't believe your eyes anymore. When you're used to using your eyes to see, I can see if something -  seeing is believing-  you remember that. So, I'm not going to get into that, but I took it easier, right? And I cheated - but my prediction is Epic's going to release Unreal Engine 5. It's going to make a huge difference, a very, very biased prediction.

Ruth Suehle:

Okay, I was going to cheat in a different way. And instead of predicting exactly, I'm going to offer a hope, can I do that instead? Which is that at some point in the next year, we can, and all come together as a broad open source world and figure out how to do this together, because I'm seriously afraid that the train has gotten away from us. I feel like every day I have a new bucket of headlines that use the phrase company specific name metaverse, and that's not what this should be. And I'm very afraid that that train has already gone so far down the tracks, that it's going to be hard to unify them in some open source, open standards fashion. So that's my hope is that we make that happen in the next year. And if I would like to tack on a pipe dream it's that maybe we come up with a new word besides metaverse, because I think it already has a really bad rap and maybe one company sort of took half of it and used it for themselves.

Patrick Cozzi:

Ruth, those are great, great predictions. I was actually thinking that I do believe that the future of the internet is 3D immersive and social and collaborative. That's definitely happening. The term metaverse is out to be determined, but definitely a lot of buzz right now. And I like your view for the open metaverse marc, and we named this podcast and the SIGGRAPH session that, on purpose specifically “open metaverse.”

I guess, since both of you're cheating a little bit on predictions, I may do the same. I do think in 2022, that we will get an answer around USD and glTF and how we can move forward together, and how we can kind of help enable full authoring and publishing for the metaverse.

Patrick Cozzi:

I also, if I can continue my prediction, I personally think I've liked what I've heard from just so many big players entering the metaverse around their interest in openness. And I really hope in 2022, we can really hold everyone to that, right? And I think we'll see bridges built. I use Cesium for Unreal as an example of a bridge that just unlocked so much value to both sides of that. And I hope we see some surprising ones there, where maybe two big companies partner that you wouldn't have thought would've happened in the year before.

Ruth Suehle:

Oh, then I'll tack onto yours in mind that all of these companies that want, I'm using my air quote fingers -to do things openly in an open source fashion, actually do that. And don't just use them as buzzwords.

Marc Petit:

Yeah and I fully agree, and not only we do - Patrick and I, we do the podcast, but also we try to hold people accountable. First, we are trying to get them to come on record to say, we need to do it. And then we have, we're trying also to make things happen and have some very, very pragmatic goals in terms of trying more interoperability. I mean, we recorded with Martin Enthed from IKEA a few days ago, and he was reminding us that exchanging materials stuff look the same, still not quite a solved problem. So, it's kind of looking at the glass half empty, there are still, as an industry after 25, 30 years, we're still struggling to make things look the same. We can exchange polygons now, and the forecast when we are going to have to exchange fully simulated worlds with playback with such a high level of fidelity is daunting.

Marc Petit:

But at the same time, we're constantly hearing it, maybe because we talk to the technologies and less with the business people, that could be where the difference comes through. Because I find myself much more optimistic than you when you said, yeah, we can assume the worst, but the people who are building it, as we talk to them, they're deeply aware that it's just bigger than every single company. And I think the running theme in this sense is that it's all going to be easier for each and every one of us, if we end up agreeing on some things, because if you want to be successful, we need this thing to exist and so we need to connect it.

Marc Petit:

So, I'm actually hopeful that - maybe let's predict something like, that the successor of our SIGGRAPH BOF for 2022, because Patrick and I have every intention to further the conversation there. Hopefully we can show, have some really concrete things to show and to say about moving the ball around, and maybe advancing that governance conversation around USD and better synchronization between USD and glTF. And maybe, who knows? New things, because it's not that we plan on doing things, but it's the people we talk to, when the momentum that we see that's kind of illustrated through the podcast and some of the meetings, I think is real. Patrick and I, we see some very sincere appetite to solve some of those problems.

Patrick Cozzi:

Yeah, absolutely. I think every individual we talk to is committed and is very serious about it.

Ruth Suehle:

I hope you're right. I'll call myself a cautious optimist. I'm usually the sunny optimist but on this, I'm going to go with cautious optimist. I hope you're right.

Marc Petit:

Patrick is expressing on open source, but you're seeing open source across so many different verticals. So I think you are cautious. We need to take stock of being cautious. But on the other hand, we have to swing for the fences. We have to go for it and try to make it happen because if we don't do it now, it's the early days. I think it's the more we wait the harder the bar is going to be.

Ruth Suehle:

Oh yeah, now we’re beyond time to wait. It's time to do.

Marc Petit:

Well, thank you. Thank you so much. I think it's time for people to take a break, forget about 2021, enjoy the vacation, get ready for 2022. It should be a big year for everybody, for our industry in general, for the tech industry.

Ruth Suehle:

I'm excited for all the events that we might actually have in person.

Marc Petit:

Oh yeah, getting back to that. But it's going to be interesting because we all know that post pandemic is not going to be pre pandemic. And so all that we need to do all of that new world. I'm kind of eager to find out the new ways. I'm so happy to not travel. Personally, I spend way too much time in my life in aluminum tubes. Don't want to do it ever again to be honest. So I'm looking forward to the metaverse as a business tool personally.

Ruth Suehle:

As soon as the events words were out of my mouth, I realize that's going to be the prediction. I'm most scared of failing. We're going to do this again in a year from now. And I be like, oh, we still didn't get to have events. How distressing?

Patrick Cozzi:

Well, I was just at the I/ITSEC conference, a modeling and simulation conference in Florida, and there were thousands of people in person on the floor.

Ruth Suehle:

I actually did do a few things in October. So open source summit, and we had O3DEcon. And those things were significantly smaller than in the past. Things were very different. I couldn't have coffee during keynotes, which is hard, but they went really well. So I'm going to continue to be cautiously optimistic.

Marc Petit:

Well, Patrick, thank you very much.

Patrick Cozzi:

Thank you, Marc and thank you, Ruth.

Marc Petit:

Ruth, we're so happy to have you again and, and to talk about open source and open everything. And I want to thank our audience. Week after week we get more and more feedback on the podcast. I think the topic is resonating with a lot of people. Our commitment for 2022 is to bring you more informed points of view and more interesting speakers, right, Patrick? Can we take this commitment? 

Patrick Cozzi:

Absolutely. 

Marc Petit:

New year's resolution - stick to the people who are making things happen and know what they're talking about.

Ruth Suehle:

It's a prediction we can count on.

Marc Petit:

It's a commitment. It's a new year's resolution. All right, thank you everybody. As usual, if you want to reach us, reach us on social. Tell us what you think. Tell us what you want to hear about us, your feedback, subscribe, listen, and do all those things you need to do. Thank you very much. Have a great vacation everybody.