This week our VentureBeat team hosted a new Metaverse conference called MetaBeat. The San Francisco event drew hundreds in person and more online to hear about something we don’t talk about as often as gaming: the business metaverse.

I crossed the line from gaming to enterprise to attend the event, and moderated a session with Richard Kerris from Nvidia on the Omniverse platform. I also moderated a panel with Neil Trevett of the Khronos Group and others on metaverse standards. You could say that as a game writer I didn’t belong there. But nothing is less true. From the beginning, when Sami Khan, CEO of Atlas Earthtalked about creating a metaverse for his daughter that could enhance her real world experience – I felt at home.

The metaverse is going to be so epic that it will take the efforts of the entire gaming and tech industry and enterprises of all kinds. Working together, they could create a vortex of continuous improvement that will take us to the metaverse, just as so many technologies came together to make the web possible, ubiquitous and teeming with great content, said Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Omniverse and Simulation Technology at Nvidia, in another standards panel I moderated at MetaBeat.

At MetaBeat, I still found a lot of leakage between the boundaries of the enterprise metaverse and the gaming metaverse. And that’s what I live for. Kerris and I spoke again about the potential of the Omniverse to bring order to the chaos of creation. If we can standardize around USD (universal scene description, a 3D standard originally created by Pixar) for 3D objects or use glTF for lightweight 3D on the web, we can share those creations in virtual worlds. Kerris believes the Omniverse Cloud will empower makers around the world to lend a hand in the great task of interoperability.

I naively asked Kerris if Nvidia, with a market cap of $327 billion, should just build the metaverse. And he said no. Because the metaverse is the network, he said. It’s like asking someone if they should build the web. The open metaverse will not come from one company, as in Ready Player Onebut from everyone who works together, using tools like the open-source Blender 3D modeling app that millions of amateurs use today.

As Neil Trevett (organizer of the Metaverse Standards Forum), the head of the Lebaredian and Khronos Group, agreed, building the metaverse is a task that cannot be entrusted to a few companies. It should be carefully developed by companies from all sectors in collaboration.

Players and users will be able to express their creativity and bring passion into those worlds. The metaverse can be built not only by professional developers, but also user-generated content. And what was left had to be built by artificial intelligence. Yes, that’s a big burden to impose on AI. All the hard work, the sheer amount of content, scaling up the worlds so that they were all as big as the world of Middle-Earth – that’s what we needed AI to build for our metaverse.

That AI would have to be generated by the AI ​​chips Nvidia is working on like Grace Hopper or by rivals like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices or Arm and Qualcomm. Those companies are worth trillions, and they are the mighty titans of the semiconductor industry. And it will take all their ingenuity to make computers powerful and efficient enough to power the metaverse without melting the polar caps.

But the impending death of Moore’s Law (the promise of technological progress) will keep those companies from delivering the performance we need in the future. They will have to focus on new architectures and agile designs to get around the fact that we can’t build chip layers thinner than the ones we have today that are a few atoms thick. We need other developments like two-way 10G internet speeds coming from Comcast next year. We need infrastructure from Lumen, among others, and software from companies like Hadean and Improbable to allow software to transcend the boundaries of hardware.

To achieve takeoff for the metaverse, we need technologies powered by a virtual cycle of software powering hardware and vice versa. We need everyone to contribute to the flywheel. Meta is making a high-end VR headset called Project Cambria that is aimed at enterprises.

It will be very expensive, but companies will use it and AR headsets like the $3,300 Magic Leap 2 so they can train employees (saving them tons of money on in-person training by experts) and build a digital twin of their factories. .

Kerris said the largest companies in the industrial world believe in creating digital twins. Those twins will be used to perfect factory designs before companies like BMW and Deutsche Bahn and Siemens have to spend a penny on a real factory. Once the digital twin is perfect, those instrumented factories can be built, and the sensors in them will feed back data to the Omniverse and inform the designers on how to improve the designs for the next generation.

Enterprises finance the production and perfection of the high-end headsets and the chipsets that power them. Then the technologists will find ways to cut costs and bring those technologies to the mass market and people like gamers. From there, the flywheel takes another turn.

Once we get our hands on these great 40-series graphics cards from Nvidia — and take them away from those blockchain miners dealing with diminishing returns — game developers will have to create games that require a real-time internet to run correctly. be played.

We need Yuga Labs – in partnership with Improbable – to deliver not just 4,500 Bored Apes in a single concert space, but thousands more so we can throw the biggest parties ever. We need Epic Games to make a future Fortnite game with thousands of players and snipers who can instantly shoot five miles over shards. Or maybe we just need Brendan Greene to build his replica of Earth so we can have a sandbox world of epic proportions where we can play any game we want.

When those game developers do their part and bring billions more players to online games, Nvidia can reinvest all of its profits and create new generations of AI chips that can be used to build the ultimate digital twin, Earth 2, a simulation of the entire universe. planet, accurate to meter level.

That simulation will mimic the behavior of our atmosphere, influenced by so many butterfly effects from all things on the planet. Nvidia believes it will be such a good simulation — powered by the world’s supercomputers powered by AI chips born from gaming — that we’ll be able to use it to predict climate change.

And as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said, when we build Earth 2, we have this digital twin of the planet. We essentially get the metaverse for free. Okay, maybe it’s not free. But it’ll still be a damn good metaverse, powered by generations of flywheel pushing and pulling of hardware and software.

These were the metaverse hopes and dreams I saw people talking about on MetaBeat. We had hundreds of people from different gaming and ventures and chips – all working on the same thing as if it were our generation’s Manhattan project. The project that led to the atomic bomb was born in the desperation of World War II and ended that nightmare.

So many sci-fi novels remind us that so many things can go wrong with the metaverse. We need to remember things like privacy, toxicity and AI ethics, as we were told in an afternoon panel moderated by Everett Wallace, an Accenture leader and president of the San Francisco VR AR Association.

The Manhattan Project was an ominous thing that led history in so many directions. It could have destroyed our world. It restored freedom and democracy to the world. It could stop the next world war for generations. It gave us nightmares of nuclear winter. It led to the promise of nuclear energy. But I bring it up here because it was an example of everyone – the best and the brightest – all working together towards the same goal.

The metaverse should be the same. The marriage of big technology, the platforms, the content developers, the individual industries like manufacturing or gaming, the hardware and network makers, the chip designers, the brands, the investors – and the gamers.

It’s an opportunity to work across industry boundaries for the common good – as long as we don’t end up with a dystopia. The metaverse could be the pinnacle of our technological age, and its appeal is so strong that it even attracted Neal Stephenson, the sci-fi author who wrote snow crash three decades ago and coined the term ‘metaverse’. He’s all in to make sure the metaverse stays open.

I look forward to more gatherings of the metaverse believers like MetaBeat. We have our next event, GamesBeat Summit Next 2022 on October 25-26, where Stephenson himself will be speaking. We’ll have the Metaverse Standards Forum there, gaming pioneers like Mark Pincus and Will Wright, and many more people to give us the ideas to keep the flywheels spinning. We will continue our leadership in this area into the new year with our Into the Metaverse 3 event. And we will continue to collect these people – and I won’t shut up about it – until the metaverse is here.