Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think so. You don’t need an alternate currency system. Unfortunately, a bunch of ideas have been conflated because people are trying to hype up different things. But this idea of large-scale multiplayer social gaming, that notion of the metaverse, there’s 600 to 800 million people playing that kind of game every month. So you know that’s real and that’s happening and it’s very much underway. VR has a much smaller audience. I don’t think you need VR to have anything like this. VR is hardware that may or may not enhance the experience for some usage cases. For some it will probably be better and for some it will probably be worse, but certainly there’s not any set of Battle Royale players flocking to VR. And the other thing is NFT is trying to equate digital or cryptocurrency to the metaverse. It’s like, well, it’s just a way of denoting money or value exchange. You can do that with money or you can do it with NFTs or whatever, but there’s nothing about this future digital economy that fundamentally requires cryptocurrency or whatever. What you need is interoperability. Interoperability can happen through a blockchain, it can happen through a database, it can happen through standards bodies with defining standards and protocols. And we’ve been doing it for hundreds of years since the railroads were standardized. And it’s not something that totally requires a novel technological solution. Yeah, I mean, even on the topic of cryptocurrency, it’s very frustrating. Blockchain and crypto is a really powerful technology that I think can enable a lot of the things that we’re talking about, but so many people use it to try to make money to create these bubbles and the hype and the meme coins and the so on and so forth that becomes much less about, that drifts far away and rapidly from things that are actually of value, which is the experience of playing Fortnite and how you look when you play Battle Royale. I mean, it sounds ridiculous to say, but it’s true. But that’s valuable. That’s like you have gold in the physical space. We know that holds value. How your outfit looks like in Fortnite, that as you’re saying, provably holds value. And so you want to connect like a standard definition of money value to that and not let it become this hype thing, which NFTs that you mentioned are just become that. It quickly drifts away into the land of people trying to buy and sell and trying to make money versus staying close to the thing that people actually value. Forget the money. It’s more about exchanging valuable experiences or things of value. So you can play Fortnite and then go to another video game and continue the valuable experience and then come back to Fortnite and do that kind of thing. So you’re saying there might be a way to do that to basically create standards the way the web has different standards for displaying websites and all this kind of stuff, or the communication that’s required on the networking side. So all the different standards that make the web work, there need to be those kinds of standards. What would those standards look like to enable the metaverse? We need a lot of different things. The one area where the standards bodies have been very successful in creating working standards implemented by all of the major engines today is in low level file formats for data interchange. The web has PNG files for 2D images and MP3 files for audio, and 3D has the Pixar USD file format, the Universal Scene Description, which is a description of the scene graph, the entire set of objects in the scene and all of their parameters so that any engine that supports those features could import that and then render the same scene as the engine they came from. Large parts of this work across Unreal Engine and Unity and Blender and all of these 3D packages of different sorts. And there’s the GLTF texture format, which stores textures and geometry and other low level data for 3D objects. When you see a Fortnite character, that file format together with the image file formats can store their static appearance, the shape of their body, even their animations and their different poses and the appearance of them, the different standard file formats could store all the sounds they make in their emotes, but we’re still missing a bunch of pieces. The biggest missing piece is the programming language that’s at the center of standardizing the metaverse. Now, if you look at the web, the web is a combination of a bunch of different technologies. The two biggest ones are HTML, which describes the 2D scene graph or the 2D layout of controls and objects on the webpage. But that’s just static data. It’s just a non-moving, non-animating webpage. And then you have the JavaScript programming language, which is used to manipulate that, to display things to the user and to implement anything you could implement in code. So it’s a little programming language that runs in your web browser and the metaverse needs something that performs that similar role. But the metaverse and 3D gaming in general needs something that’s rather more powerful, more safe, more scalable, and more capable than JavaScript because the metaverse is actually a more difficult technical problem than a webpage. A webpage like an app is just a single bundle of code and content that somebody, a company has prepared and they release it and it stays exactly what it is until they release a new version and it’s upgraded from version to version as it goes. But the metaverse needs to be a composite of code and content built by millions of different people that could potentially form a seamless world together.…

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