MetaWorlds

What is MetaWorlds ?

MetaWorlds is a retro metaverse under development by me. It is inspired by Activeworlds, Secondlife as well as Minecraft and Cities:Skylines with their mods. The idea is to have a 3D virtual world creation software, rich in possibilities, relatively easy to use and with a retro aesthetic. Also, it will not offer NFT, because the metaverses do not date from the Meta project, nor from web 3.0. This is an old idea, carried out several times since the 90s.

MetaWorlds during a development session at the end of April 2022

At the begining, Snow Crash

The idea of ​​the metaverse is presented among others in the novel Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson, published in the United States of North America in June 1992, then in France in February 1996. In the book, the metaverse was created by hackers who use the code a lot. Everything is represented in 3D around the avatars, which are either in high resolution and 3D, or in low resolution and also possibly in 2D. We learn that low resolutions are generally possessed by those who cannot afford better avatars. Indeed, the metaverse has become the product of a capitalist company founded by some of the hackers behind the project.

The universe of Snow Crash is retro futuristic for people of our time. It's a cyberpunk world of the 90s. I like the idea of ​​creating using code, and having several avatars of different resolutions cohabiting. On the other hand, being anti-capitalist, I decided that MetaWorlds could not become the property of a company. The code will be under a free license, and it is also for this reason that I will not offer any NFT or any link with cryptocurrencies. If the link with cryptocurrencies interested me for a moment, web 1.0, the moments of pure creation on Minecraft, or in the past on ActiveWorlds, and the sharing of ideas that people do on the net, make me want to preserve it from what money can do with it. I'm not teaching anyone here what web 2.0 and then 3.0 are doing to the web. The metaverse is heading in the same direction, and it's unfortunate because it's still little experienced by most people. Their first experience of this technology will be conformist and capitalist. That makes me sad.

My first experience, Active Worlds

I knew the experience of a metaverse on Active Worlds around 2005 or 2006. That is to say 10 years after its creation. At the time, you had to pay to have the status of a citizen, and otherwise you could visit the worlds as a tourist. Some worlds offered tourists to build and protect their plots. Otherwise, the vandalism was frequent. Active Worlds is an exciting subject especially for its first world, Alpha World. In this world, a community of builders has formed and the world has been filled with all kinds of constructions, roads, information boards and also territories. There are still archives of some of the things you might encounter there, though unfortunately, as was the case with websites of the past, much of Alpha World's history has disappeared in Internet amnesia.

Active Worlds offers very simple tools to copy, move, rotate and animate objects in the world. You can't really do more with the software. But, using scripts, you can create interactive scenes to take Internet users into a story you want to tell. I quite like this idea, and I have enjoyed building and testing things with whatever means at hand when using this software. What I want to find is this federation of people around creation and friendship as I have the feeling that there was on Alpha World during a period.

This topic is being written. Thank you for your patience :)
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