Periodic Table of the Metaverse

Remember when we were in high school in India, China, Russia, US or elsewhere? We sat in a classroom with the Periodic Table on the wall. Chemists will tell you that it is the foundation of their field. It guides us in chemistry. I found a similar guide to the Metaverse.

Today’s Metaverse is very small. Each site wants to keep you there. This echoes the tactics in the dot com years by such sites as AOL and Yahoo. Both built massive portals for this reason. But the first Web (1995–99) was about you being able to click a link and go anywhere on the Web. Later developments in the Web built this out. Now we are in Web 3, whatever that is. I argue that Web 3 shares the property of being able to go to many sites. This is axiomatic. Our very use of “Web” comes from the spider’s web. The sticky threads in that web became the hyperlinks of the Web, from 1989 to the present.

Web 3 has avatars that move around. This gives us the first property of Web 3. Avatars can go to different sites.

Avatars take human form. Thus avatar-avatar interactions are a major way to engage users.

Irony. We went from Web 1.0 with its browsers in full circle to avatars meeting each other, just like we do in real life. And in real life, meeting someone in person is often considered the most important thing, for business or socializing. For this, being able to shake hands, dance etc are common. This uses real life as a metaphor to guide us to possible interactions.

We get these properties:

1] Avatars visit different sites.

2] Avatar-avatar interactions better engage users.

3] Avatars touch each other.

It is early days. The Web was born in 1989 by Berners-Lee and we were always able to visit different websites, thanks for webpages written in HTML. But for Web 3, we have trouble with Property 1. Firms are grappling with revving hardware, simply to improve the UX for you with an avatar made for only 1 site (their site). They might be using this as a possible reason to put off the ability for your avatar to go to different sites.

Property 3 runs into Facebook’s safety shield. (Also made by other firms with sites.) This was to protect female avatars from being molested by male avatars. But the shield can be avoided via the use of hyperlinks from an avatar’s underwear to a punishment site. If a Predator touches the underwear, he gets Jumped to the punishment site. It plays audio and video to evoke nauseous reactions in the operator of the Predator.

Here is our analog of the Periodic Table.

Start at the top left. Is there a Predator? If so, is he sexually molesting an avatar? If so, go to the right box. The solution to this is the Jump hyperlink.

But if the Predator is not sexually molesting, he might just be doing an assault. That gets us to the little box showing an eye. This indicates where he might be assaulting the eyes of a male or female avatar. The solution is to put a transparent lid, like the safety shield, just around the eyes. And we put a Jump hyperlink from the lids to a punishment site.

Maybe there is no Predator. We go from the top left to the big box of Good Jumps. Here the interactions are benign. The box shows the most common cases. You can see a handshake at the top left. Underneath is a fist bump. An elbow bump is to its right. And there is a foot bump. And a high 5. Etc.

Here is an example. We call it the Jump Swap. Ted comes from Place.com. Sue comes from Boxy.org. They meet in XYZ site. They chat and agree to do a Jump Swap. They Hi5. Ted is Jumped to Boxy.org. Sue is Jumped to Place.com. Each ends up at where the other person came from.

When Ted appears in XYZ, he is carrying a record of the previous site he was at. Just like your browser does for you when you go to a link. Sue has a similar thing. They need to touch, because this is how XYZ associates them. Prior to this, they are just 2 avatars chatting. But the Hi5 is defined to tell XYZ that Ted and Sue want to swap. The Hi5 tells the site to associate them in that way. It takes place.com and makes it the destination for Sue, and it takes boxy.org and makes it the destination for Ted. Then it invokes the Jumps.

Wait! Why can’t Ted and Sue just talk in VR or instant message (or whatever the equivalent is in VR) to do this? They can. But that can involve more manual steps. Typing means every letter is a potential point of failure. And listening to a destination in a vocal message has the same problem. And here, we deliberately made the starting sites have short names. Longer names, or names in other languages makes it harder.

There are more types of Jumps. Figure 4 shows what can be called the handedness of some Jumps. The handshake can happen with right hands exor left hands. They can be different Jumps. Ditto for the others.

Thus the Good Jumps of Figure 2 will include Figure 4.

Plus all the Good Jumps so far are for 2 persons. We can have 3 avatars interacting as in Figure 5.

Here is how a 3 body interaction might turn out. There are 3 avatars — Sue, Dinesh and Doris, all in XYZ.com. Sue Jumped there from ABC.org. Dinesh and Doris came from elsewhere. They chat. Sue persuades them to visit her site. They touch fingertips. Dinesh and Doris are Jumped to ABC.org. Sue remains behind. Perhaps to meet others in XYZ and send them to her site.

The 2 examples for Figures 3 and 6 beg the question. How does a site know what each Jump means? Go back to the Taxonomy table, where now it includes Figures 4 and 5. Sites can agree on a common meaning of the interactions between avatars. This can be shared with the software that is used to make the avatars. The hope is that by attaching useful meanings to each interaction, we can simplify and improve the UX for the avatars.

One way is to deliberately leave some entries in the table unassigned. These can be left to groups of users to define. Different groups can give different meanings to an interaction.