The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything

by Matthew Ball

Gaming is a different story. When the industry began to emerge in the 1950s, no standards for virtual objects, rendering, or engines existed. In many cases, the companies producing these games were pioneering computer-based content. Apple’s Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is still the most common audio file format used to store sound on Apple computers; it was created in 1988 and based on game maker Electronic Arts’ 1985 general purpose Interchange File Format standard. Furthermore, video games were never intended to be part of a “network” like the internet. Instead, they existed to run on a fixed and offline piece of software. Virtual worlds today have so much technical diversity for this reason, but also because of the intense computational and networking demands of modern gaming—everything is purpose-built and individually optimized. AR and VR experiences, 2D and 3D games, realistic and cartoon-styled worlds, high concurrent users and low concurrent user simulations, high-budget and low-budget titles, and 3D printers—all use different formats and store data differently. Full standardization would likely mean underserving one application, falling massively short on another, and so on—often in unpredictable ways.