Failed Screenwriter

I sadly missed the Metaverse U conference at Stanford. Watching some of the interviews collected by Henrik Bennetsen on YouTube I noticed the common theme - that the metaverse is going to unleash some sort of utopia. Then again that might have had a little to do with the questions.

The idea is basically to get people to answer these four little big questions:

1. What excites you about current metaverse technology?
2. What concerns you about current metaverse technology?
3. What will be most the surprising impact of metaverse technology on society within the next decade?
4. What barriers will metaverse technology never overcome?

Our hope is to build a time capsule.

The last comment is telling - a time capsule. Granted, we commonly find time capsules humorous, most for their utopia-esque dreams. Technologists are all too prone to such dreams, thinking the latest technology will usher in a kinder, more just, utopian world.

I'm guilty of being a bit utopia-esque myself, especially in this blog with immersive drama. Being utopia-esque scares me a bit because I believe it clouds our vision. I've been a product manager for most of my career and the one thing you develop a skill for is sniffing out bullshit from higher ups. Everyone has half baked ideas but it seems the higher you go in an organization the more they mistake these ideas to be clear and well thought out. So when a half baked idea is green lit, it's up to an underling to discovers just how many holes a half baked idea has. Sometimes the holes kill the idea, other times it is pushed through. And as the saying goes, in the world of software no one knows if the finished product is broken or not, it isn't like a new car coming off the assembly line where everyone can see it's missing a wheel.

So with TapBot, my open source project to bring immersive drama to the metaverse I will try and avoid all pie in the sky, half baked ideas. And I should start by better clarifying the goal of TapBot. When you come right down to it, TapBot's first goal is simply to deliver tools artists can use to create storytelling in the metaverse through the use of avatars and graphical characters. Maybe that isn't the perfect wording yet, but it is closer to the heart of the project and should keep it focused. Eventually I see TapBot taking advantage of AI and semantic web technologies to build out that tool set. One way to think of it is if others are building the semantic web to be utilitarian, TapBot will build it out for entertainment. One thing TapBot will not be doing is reinventing the wheel. The inspiration for coining the term immersive drama was to remove much of the theory part that has enclosed interactive story development. TapBot will look to steal technology and apply it to entertainment. That might not make it sound so appealing, but the truly fascinating part will be seeing what artists create with the tools. Over time the theory will develop from their creations and not the underlying technology.