The Full Potential of a Military Metaverse - War on the Rocks

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..." Like any newfangled term that captures the febrile imagination of the national security community, identifying what the metaverse means for defense isn’t always an easy task. For many, a defense metaverse appears to be merely the latest faddish concept in a dense constellation of defense jargon — a superficially explored term that draws excitement and ridicule in equal measure. And when the metaverse is discussed in a more substantive way in defense circles, it is often solely — and somewhat reductively — equated with training. In reality, however, should a metaverse or the metaverse actually materialize, it will elicit broader implications for defense — something that therefore warrants far deeper analysis. Indeed, a defense metaverse could emerge simultaneously as a key tool to enhance battlefield effectiveness and as a forum for intra-military communication and exchanges.

What Is the Metaverse?

Despite its increasingly ubiquitous presence across popular culture and the media, the term “metaverse” still generates an understandable amount of confusion. If one were to provide a workable definition, it would be the following: A metaverse is a series of interconnected and immersive virtual worlds that afford their users a sense of presence via agency and influence. The term was in fact coined over 30 years ago by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 dystopian sci-fi thriller Snow Crash. Stephenson’s metaverse is a virtual-reality successor to the internet, a world of escapism from a bleak and abject reality. Close to two decades later, Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One (later immortalized by Steven Spielberg on the big screen) brought to life a future where individuals could traverse multiple virtual worlds in one universe dubbed “the OASIS,” which shares much with popular visions for the metaverse today.

Part of the opacity surrounding “a metaverse” can be tied to how the term is used colloquially. It is often employed interchangeably with “the metaverse.” In reality, these are two different things. A metaverse is a single virtual world. Theoretically, any corporation or group of programmers can create a metaverse, much like any individual or entity can create their own network. This is how most “metaverses” seem to be emerging — a series of virtual worlds where corporations maintain the servers, dictate user conduct, and determine the ways in which each space can be employed. The metaverse, however, is a single shared world based around an open architecture, whereby different entities and interoperable servers interconnect via a shared set of agreed-upon standards and interfaces, much like how the world wide web allows a diverse range of resources — from documents to weather forecasts and cat memes — to be accessed on the internet through a common protocol. While the metaverse remains the aspiration for many programmers and gamers, coordination challenges across the differing stakeholder communities exist. Developing a common protocol or standard is an organizational problem, and as a result in the near term it is far more likely that we will see the emergence of various balkanized metaverses.

Compounding the definitional obscurity of “a metaverse” or “the metaverse” are popular media portrayals of what it seems to be — the terms are often used synonymously with virtual reality and augmented reality tools. A focus, however, solely on visualization or the interfaces — like a headset — by which a person may access the metaverse gives short shrift to the technologies that will likely drive user engagement. Incredible graphics, a headset, and haptic gloves seem sexy, but a tedious meeting that lacks user agency, even with those tools, will remain a time-sink with little immediate utility. To create the types of immersive experiences that can drive presence, the metaverse will be undergirded by a range of technologies: hardware like headsets, mobile devices, and sensors; networking technologies; compute; virtual platforms, like 3D simulations; and tools that facilitate connectivity between virtual worlds. It will also incorporate payment mechanisms like digital currencies, along with a diversity of content and services like games, television shows, or banking that motivate work and play. The technologies that support each of these categories present their own wicked technical challenges, which is why opinions vary on when various “metaverses” or “the (open) metaverse” may emerge — some gamers believe that it will take less than a year, while others speculate that it could take a decade or longer.

Even if the metaverse or multiple metaverses are more than ten years out, it is in the Pentagon’s interest to start taking these technological developments seriously and begin brainstorming how a metaverse may serve defense — particularly given traditional acquisition and fielding timelines."...