The world and its digital double. Like a shadow made of data that everything projects and that in certain cases can take its own shape.
Think of a football or American football match and imagine a system that reproduces on your tablet what you are watching on television, effectively transforming it into a video game and offering real-time statistics of all kinds, as well as the possibility of seeing the actions from any point of view while they are unfolding.
“It is very likely that the metaverse will be something like this and certainly not another Second Life,” says Peter Moore when we meet him during a visit to Europe. “Metaverse is a new name for something that is already happening, that is the duplication in the form of data of everything around us, but it all lies in understanding how we will visualize this information”. Born in 1955, Moore is by birth a “boomer”, yet in the field of digital entertainment he has an experience that few others can boast: he was the head of Sega America when the Japanese multinational still produced the beautiful and unfortunate Dreamcast console; in Microsoft he fought the overwhelming power of the Sony PlayStation by making the Xbox grow; he headed the sports division of Electronic Arts in the years that saw Fifa become the best-selling football videogame in history; he was CEO of Liverpool Football Club, his favorite team. Today he is vice president of Unity Technologies, a company founded in Denmark in 2004 that produces one of the most used graphics engines in video games.
“That’s what I’m talking about”, he explains himself pulling out an iPad on which there is a screen of what appears to be an electronic game dedicated to mixed martial arts, or if you prefer mixed martial arts (Mma). “It is the transposition of an MMA match that was digitized while it was taking place thanks to our graphic engine. As you know, you can even choose the subjective view of one of the two fighters as the view”. To recap: Metacast, this is the name of Unity’s technology, digitizes sporting events to make them an interactive show and intends to do so in real time. Being able to make such a service usable from any connected smartphone or TV is no small feat. Moore claims that currently between the live event and its double there is a few seconds of delay, but work is being done to shorten the time and in the meantime the company has already imagined other uses, convinced that “that from shops to hotels many will have need a three-dimensional representation that is easy to have or to offer, “he emphasizes. The dream, even in Metacast’s case, isn’t exactly new. At Ceatec in Tokyo, a technology fair that had become an important stage in the early 2000s, a company like Toshiba had imagined something like this. More recently, Formula 1 has begun to leverage the cloud and artificial intelligence to add more and more layers of information to the airing of races. “The data? Now they are part of the show and with them the analyzes made by the Ai”, Robert Smedley, chief engineer of Formula 1 had told in July 2020. they started to see in real time the scores related to the performance of the cars, the comparison between the past champions and the drivers in the race, the evaluation of their skills in the different phases starting from qualifying, the results of the cars in corners and at low speed, the constancy of the stables, the prediction of who will have the best chance of winning. Metaecast adds three-dimensional graphical representation, doubling the show. “To do this we need some cameras that send the images to our system, which then translates them into pixels and then makes them live again in digital form,” concludes Moore. “The delay is now ten seconds. But I am sure that we will soon come to shorten this time frame to cancel it. And it’s not just the audience. Even the athletes themselves will be able to use a similar tool to analyze every move, right or wrong. It may be wrong. This, from our point of view, will be an important piece of tomorrow’s sport. “
We’ll see if things really turn out like this. But on one point it is necessary to allow Moore’s company to have a rather ambitious plan in hand. Bloomberg predicts that the turnover of the metaverse could reach 800 billion dollars, yet if you look back, every attempt to transform the Web into a 3D environment has failed. From Second Life to Home, a similar application for PlayStation, they all turned out to be holes in the water. Here, however, we are talking about sport, which has a much larger audience than that of electronic games or of those who have bought a virtual reality headset. In short, even if this does not work, it is likely that Mark Zuckerberg will have to change the name of his multinational company again, definitively leaving certain representations of our online life to cinema and literature.
(Pictured: Peter Moore, Vice President of Unity Technologies)