The Universal backlot: The tools of the metaverse | Jon Peddie

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Jon Peddie recently hosted a talk for our GamesBeat Summit 2023 event about the Universal backlot, a metaphor borrowed from the movies about the tools for making the metaverse.

Peddie, the founder of Jon Peddie Research, has specialized in computer graphics analysis and advice for decades and is the author of a three-book series on the history of the GPU, or graphics processing unit.

He started by defining the metaverse as “anything you want it to be.” Omid Rahmat helped create the deck but he wasn’t able to make the talk.

“And I’m not being facetious trying to define and label something some single entity as the metaverse is never going to work,” he said. “First of all, in a perfect metaverse, there’s only one metaphor, and everyone who has space in it will have the option to roam freely, exchange virtual goods, manage transactions, communicate and interact freely with everyone else. That’s the ideal.”

But that means that you have to have standards and interoperability, he said. And while there are standards and attempts at forging some unified, holistic approach, it’s unlikely we will really ever get to one metaverse, Peddie said.

“Just as there are many any standards like jpg, png, Tiff, etc., — the data interchange formats for image files,” he said. “There are likely to be many standardized versions of the metaverse as well. So collaboration is only going to be possible when there’s a clear sense of ownership. That means that for a guy with a TIFF file, who wants to share that with someone who wants to use it as a JPEG file, for your purposes that can degrade or create a red flag.”

It’s a red flag because,