The hidden side of the metarers: what impact on the real world?

No longer navigate the internet but on the internet ": this is the bet on which Facebook plays its future by becoming Meta. Meta for" metarers ": a parallel, virtual and persistent world, in which everyone can both work, play, haveA social life and creating. A real digital revolution announced, a race in which the main players in tech are launching.

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The concept is not new: the word metavers itself comes from a novel published in 1992, the virtual samurai.Its author, Neal Stephenson, also summarized the potential both whimsical and dystopian: the hero, tenant of a clapier in a real decay, enjoys the status of samurai and hacker respected through his avatar in the virtual world.The idea of this virtual "second life" was also sketched in cinema, but above all it has taken substance in video games.The aptly named Second Life (2003), a virtual unwanted virtual universe in which everyone could shape their avatar, their objects and their environment, prefigured this famous metarers.Everything existed in virtual sauce: social life, political meetings, brands shops, artist performances, scams, prostitution ... But success was short -lived: the soufflé is completely fell around 2008.

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Video games as pioneers

So why now?Why would the metarers arouse our interest if he has failed in the past?First, because uses have changed.In 2016, augmented reality was popularized by Pokemon Go, which made it possible to capture in the "real" world of virtual monsters via the screen of your smartphone.Other video games, among the most popular today, already have a taste of metarers: Fortnite users, a multiplayer combat game, find themselves there to exchange or attend concerts;Minecraft allows its players to shape their universe from A to Z;Roblox pays for creators.

The current pandemic also played a role, accelerating the adoption of digital uses: telework, videoconferencing, trade and online games exploded.Finally, and above all, the technologies allowing to envisage the metavers arrive at maturity: virtual reality glasses are almost within everyone's reach, while graphic engines generate decorations worthy of cinema in real time.The blockchain, architecture at the base of cryptocurrencies, even makes it possible to imagine a viable virtual economy.And 5G and soon 6G networks could ensure data flow rates compatible with fluid virtual experiences.

Timing is therefore perfect for the conquest of the metarers.The fact remains that connect billions of users in a 3D and real -time universe still poses colossal technical challenges."In the near future, I see more the metavers as an aggregate of interoperable platforms, each resorting here to virtual reality, there for augmented reality, here to classic terminals like computers and smartphones, with very different degrees of realismAccording to uses and needs, "said researcher Indira Thouvenin, a virtual reality specialist at UTC.

En tout cas, cette évolution pose des questions capitales - d'ordre écologique, sanitaire, sociologique - sur le devenir de nos sociétés. Rêve technophile ? Horizon ultime de l'humanité ? Science & Vie prend en tout cas acte de cette révolution annoncée, et a sondé l'internet du futur.

We already have a foot in the metarers!

Digital has conquered the world.The metavers take advantage of a favorable context to develop.A majority of humans are active on social networks.

Out of 7, 89 billion human beings worldwide:

5.29 billion, or 67 % of people use a smartphone

4.88 billion, or 62 % of individuals use the Internet

4.55 billion, or 58 % of people use social networks

1974: Role playing on table, Dungeons and Dragons propels its readers into an imaginary world where they must cooperate to survive.

1991: Based on textual descriptions, Dikumud is the 1st multiplayer adventure video game to become popular on the Internet.

2003: Second Life is on everyone's lips.This video game allows you to evolve in a virtual world entirely in 3D.

2016: free and operating augmented reality, Pokemon Go reaches 50 million downloads in 20 days.

2021: The Facebook company takes the name Meta and announces the advent of the meta-verse, a virtual world where users can play and interact.

The video game is the king of entertainment

If it is one of the most recent graphic arts, video games progress at a dazzling speed in the world.Already far ahead of cinema or music in terms of turnover (CA), this industry even tarnished an exceptional peak following the pandemic of Covid.Note that almost half of the income come from the game on mobile.

3.2 billion: it is, cumulative, the number of hours spent on Fortnite by all players in April 2020. The American video game then had 350 million accounts, against 250 million in 2019, an increase of 40 % in one year.

6:58 am: This is the time spent on average daily on the Internet by a person between 16 and 64 years old in the world.A time calculated all uses combined (streaming, social networks, reading, music, radio, podcasts, video games).The French devoted 2 h 25 per day in 2020.

300 million: this is the number of users of the US videoconferencing application Zoom in April 2020. They were only 10 million before the start of the pandemic.Some 42 billion minutes of videoconferences took place at the same time.

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1. First enter ... the dazzling progress of technologies

VOIR LE VIRTUEL

The metavers will not materialize overnight, but two technologies already promise us access, based on one of the most instinctive and used senses: vision.On the one hand, virtual reality (VR) immerses us in the virtual by isolating reality thanks to a helmet.On the other, augmented reality (AR) superimposes virtual elements to the real.If the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift, released in 2016, only offered a window on a very pixealized world, recent models now offer a much more immersive rendering.They also freed themselves from their umbilical cords."It is less and less necessary to be connected in wired to a computer," observes Romain Lelong, founder of the Reviatech company.

Processors and batteries, now integrated into helmets, are enough to manage the heavy applications.And even the nausea problems observed are about to be resolved."They come from a gap between the head movement recorded by the inner ear and what our eyes see on the screen," explains Laure Leroy, computer researcher at Paris 8 University.

However, latency is going to be damaged: some recent models thus display 90 or even 120 images per second, "a threshold beyond which the discrepancy felt by the brain becomes less annoying for the majority of applications", assures the expert.

Augmented reality is spreading thanks to consumer public devices. Applications already make it possible to incorporate digital objects into the real environment filmed by a smartphone. What test, for example, the place that a piece of furniture takes in your living room. The iPhone 12 incorporates a Lidar sensor, which measures the depth of field by laser pulses. This would digitize real objects "on the fly" and in 3D, or to map environments to better increase them. Still very expensive, augmented reality headsets, such as Microsoft's Hololens 2, add interactivity with the virtual. "They anchor virtual objects in your environment so that you interact with them," describes Romain Lelong. Their assets: sensors and processors that analyze your gestures and make them coincide with your environment and with the virtual object. Everything remains perfectible: while the field of human vision extends over 210 °, the Hololens 2, it only covers 52. Above all, the challenge is to pick up all this technology in a light product, as glasses. Even, one day, to get rid of portable equipment and produce holograms. The path is still long, but manufacturers are launched there at full speed.

TOUCHER L'IMMATÉRIEL

Seeing will not be enough.For a complete immersion, you will also have to touch, feel the virtual world.

This is where the so -called "haptic return" accessories intervene.In a few years, a myriad of very high -end prototypes and products came out of the labs.Gloves surmounted by an exoskeleton or with inflatable micro-pairs create resistance to simulate a grip of virtual objects.That's not all: the jacket of the Parisian start-up Actronika aims to feel the rain or the wind on your body, thanks to 20 miniaturized and independent vibrotactile actuators reacting to the thousandth of a second.Stand straight and you will feel the drops on your shoulders;Lean forward, they will land on your back.For its part, the Korean company Tegway attacks the heat of the sun thanks to a thermoelectric combination delivering temperatures between 4 and 40 ° C.

Return of force, vibrations, heat ... virtual sensations develop.But let's keep your feet on the ground."It is undoubtedly illusory to want to reproduce all the sensitivity of touch with an object. So, to compensate, we trich," exhibits Anatole Lécuyer, specialist in haptic at Inria.A famous experience illustrates this point: "Place a dummy hand on a table and slide yours under the table. After a few minutes of packaging, if you see someone type on the false hand, you will have the reflex to remove yours", he describes.Visual and hearing information can deceive our brain and help build a tactile virtual experience.A malignant way of combining minimalist and sensation.

2. Then believe it ... the need for an interconnected universe

INCARNER UN AVATAR

The success of the metarers will depend on our ability to "merge" with our virtual avatar, to believe it. And for that, the avatar will have to transcribe in all fluidity the movements of its pilot, but also to be able to express a palette of emotions, from the smile to the frowning so that, in the face of a virtual mirror, everyone recognizes themselves in his double. In short, it will be a question of finding the accuracy of a film in "motion capture" like avatar, but ... at home. "In this mission, the men-machine interfaces will be capital," reveals Stéphane Natkin, professor emeritus at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts and Director of the Martingales Company, video game company. This requires finely capturing the user's gestures. "Ar and VR helmets are increasingly incorporating sensors to recognize the movements of the hands, body, face and monitoring of the gaze," notes Romain Lelong. For its part, "the iPhone 12 now targets 30,000 points on a face via infrared sensors for facial recognition, notes Matthew Ball in his test, Metaverse Primer. With this technique, tools like the Unreal Engine graphics engine recently Allowed to animate in an ultra-realistic, and live faces of avatars.

As in the cinema, where the human eye fills the gaps between the 24 images per second of the film to offer a feeling of fluidity, deep learning programs are led to rebuilding a fluid movement from parcel data."The training of these AI requires massive databases, which explains that only digital giants work on these techniques," said Julien Pettré, a researcher specializing in animation at INRIA.The fact remains that this realism is very expensive in computing power and is not yet compatible with real time.But then, to maximize the feeling of incarnation, to what extent must be pushed realism?"Our research shows that the realism of the movement is more important than the definition of the Avatar itself," says Ludovic Hoyet, specialist in virtual humans at INRIA. There are certainly compromises to find. "

REJOINDRE DES MILLIARDS DE PERSONNES

In 2020, Fortnite signed a media tour de force by broadcasting a live concert by rapper Travis Scott in the game, who brought together some 12 million spectators.But this feat was a sleight of hand!"Today, the most massively multiplayer video games are actually capable of connecting only a few hundred players per server," said Stéphane Natkin.The 12 million spectators of Travis Scott were, in fact, dispatched in tens of thousands of places.The discrepancy is great with one of the fantasies of the metarers: connect millions of individuals within the same universe.

This connectivity limit is not the only one. "In a multiplayer game, no user sees the same thing at the same time. To give the impression of fluidity between updates, the program constantly simulates the probable movement of other players," says Stéphane Natkin. The "real" real time is much more complicated: "It is a huge challenge in terms of latency, even for a handful of users, because it is necessary to update the vision of the whole environment for each avatar at a lower rate than 20 milliseconds, threshold considered critical for a fluid experience ", exhibits Dominique Boullier, researcher at Science Po. Reason for which the meta-verse will not resemble the persistent and often fantasized photo-realistic universe. In any case not immediately. "There is an enormous optimization work to know what to represent, what degree of realism, according to the experience sought," concludes Indira Thouvenin, researcher at the University of Technology in Compiègne.

S'ALLIER AUX I.A.

To offer a convincing experience, augmented reality faces a challenge as colossal as necessary: the interface (smartphone, glasses, etc.) must be able to analyze the real before adding its content.An essential prerequisite for developing user assistance services.An example ?Ask your augmented reality glasses where your keys have gone, and they will analyze the history of their images to point them out.They could also anticipate the object with which you are likely to interact - after you have prepared a broth, suggest spices to add.

These examples seem futile, even disturbing?However, they are those on which Facebook Reality Labs researchers are working on.In partnership with thirteen other laboratories, they published in October a database with free access of 2,800 hours of first -person filmed videos.In these slices of daily life, each sequence has been annotated, that is to say described by vocal narration.This mass of data will be used to cause deep learning programs capable of recognizing their "human vision" environment.A paradigm shift: current automatic vision systems, whose performance has exploded in recent years, are mainly trained from photos and videos taken from an external view, "spectator".The switch to the first person is judged capital to enrich the assistants in augmented reality.

3. Finally, build a company towards virtual property

Here we are.Equipped, connected and in number.And now ?

The meta-verse site is gigantic.Fortunately, there is no shortage of virtual architects: like the internet before him, the metarers can count on its users to build themselves.In recent years, so -called "sandbox" video games have enjoyed sparkling success.They project players into open virtual worlds, which these same players shape entirely thanks to tools with handy tools.Everyone can create objects, buildings, even cities.In Minecraft (130 million monthly players in 2020), some reproduced the Titanic, the former Pekinois summer palace or the Cité Minas Tirith of the Lord of the Rings.In Roblox (150 million monthly players in 2020), users even build games in the game.

Obviously, these creations, kinds of virtual properties, have not escaped the laws of the market.Long considered as the ancestor of the metarers, the second Life (2003) game had already built its success on the possibility of buying or selling all kinds of creations using a virtual currency, Linden Dollar.Except that at the time, these virtual savings remained very limited.

"They were partitioned and depended on the game editor, who ultimately has your creation, Note Primavera de Filippi, researcher at CNRS and Harvard University. However, a viable and incentive virtual economy implies that creators can easily sell theirWorks, transfer them to other virtual worlds, and keep their hands on their intellectual property. "

Today, a technology allows you to consider such a system: blockchain.

This architecture, which founds cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, is based on a decentralized and incorruptible network.All transactions are verified at regular intervals by the users themselves: they can make their computer available to the network to validate exchanges and prevent fraud."With cryptocurrency, confidence in the monetary system no longer comes from a central institution like the bank, but from all users, capable of reading and verifying all transactions," describes Olivier Blazy, computer teacher atThe Polytechnic School.A real economic revolution.

Since the arrival of the Bitcoin network in 2009, other blockchains have proposed fundamental innovations.Ethereum, founded in 2015, makes it possible to exchange not only classic cryptocurrency tokens, but also unique tokens with a clean and interchangeable identity: NFT (non -fungible tokens).These NFTs can be backed by virtual works to serve as a title deed."This means that if I bought an NFT on Roblox, this virtual object would exist on the decentralized blockchain platform, which is not controlled by Roblox. I could therefore use it on other platforms, lend it orRealing him like any physical good, "illustrates Primavera by Filippi.

Metals backed by block-chain already exist: Sand-Box or Decentraland games allow you to buy and resell land and virtual goods in the form of NFT.These exchanges can count in millions of dollars.But blockchains come up against a major problem: they are not yet able to operate on a large scale.Ethereum, for example, currently caps at 15 operations per second, against 4,000 for a system like Visa!A limit resulting from the very principle of blockchain: its decentralization."Use a large number of users to validate a transaction takes more time than resting on a single central player as a visa", points to the researcher at Crest Julien Prat.

LA CLÉ DE LA VÉRIFICATION

To get around this problem, the track favored by Ethereum is to create a network of "second layer", dealing with part of the transactions outside the main network in order to relieve the latter.Competing blockchains, like Solana, plan to dethrone Ethereum thanks to more effective verification mechanisms ...

But also by reducing the number of verifying nodes."At the expense of decentralization and the incorruptibility of the network", points Alexandre Stachtchenko, consultant at Blockchain Partners.With its Diem blockchain (ex-libra), Facebook/Meta plans to give the verification role to a reduced number of companies and no longer to all users.The stake is colossal, because which will dominate the virtual economy will dominate the metavers.