A Metaverse for Traveling Between Game Worlds
Programmers and researchers are investigating opportunities to travel virtually from one metaverse to other game worlds. The M3 Organization focuses on combining virtual universes, allowing players to literally move from Decentraland to Minecraft, and then to The Sandbox or VR Chat. This organization started six months ago and meets every second week in Mozilla Hubs.
Travelling between different virtual worlds through a metaverse is not that easy. Each game world is build using different software. For example, VR Chat uses C++ and Unity, while Minecraft is all about Java and LWJGL. Because of these different program languages, something needs to glue these worlds together. That's what the M3 Organization is after.
At the moment the glue is - in most cases - just a hyperlink between the two. But ultimately it would allow one avatar to move freely through the metaverse between different game worlds. The avatar would be changing shape along the way to match the standards of each world.
What's M3? And what's a metaverse?
The M3 Organization is a group that wants to create an open standard that fits all metaverse creators. M3 stands for Metaverse Makers Mastermind. With metaverse they refer to a three-dimensional computer-generated world, filled with creations by people with many conflicting goals. However, everybody agrees to interoperable and evolving standards to keep the virtual world open for everybody.
A metaverse is not about recreating reality. Instead it's a virtual world that can be viewed through a variety of devices, from smartphones to computer screens and VR headsets. The metaverse is not controlled by one single company. Therefore there's not one business responsible for the goals and standards within the metaverse.
A bit like a passport
You could look at this system between game worlds a bit like a passport. The passport for example communicates between the different worlds and allows an avatar to move freely between them. To some extend this is something we are already seeing among blockchain games. By using MetaMask we're already able to use the same wallet address to play for example Brave Frontier Heroes, Gods Unchained and Decentraland.
However, even though these games could offer a sense of interoperability through player-owned tokenized game assets, it's not what the M3 Organization is aiming at. They want to connect 3D computer-generated worlds. This would mean that we need to be able to travel smoothly between Cryptovoxels and VR Chat, and from Minecraft to Decentraland.
An individual passport for example, needs to be interoperable between virtual worlds, programming languages and different blockchains. Even though Metamask allows to store different avatars for Cryptovoxels and Decentraland, it can't connect to for example VR Chat and Minecraft. That's why we need an open standard to allow general communication between different virtual worlds.
Posted from my blog: https://www.nederob.nl/2020/03/17/a-metaverse-for-traveling-between-game-worlds/