Phillip Wang: Making the Metaverse Open and Accessible
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Episode Summary
People often conflate the idea of the Metaverse with VR experiences, and while VR can be one medium in which people experience the Metaverse, it is merely a subset. The work that Phillip Wang and team are doing on their virtual social platform called Gather helps demyth this common misunderstanding.
For Phillip, the Metaverse is about creating a strong sense of connection, presence, and place no matter where you are. The vision then, is for the Metaverse is to provide people with easier access to opportunities anywhere, whether it’s the ability to work, learn or socialize.
To accelerate this vision, Phillip focuses on solving the problem of accessibility and cultural acceptance for Metaverse experiences. Instead of seeing the barrier to mainstream adoption as a technological problem, he instead sees it as a societal acceptance gap. He cites people’s frequent association to gaming and VR experiences as the Metaverse as a deterrent for them to participate, because they don’t identify or are not familiar with these platforms
The type of users on Gather exemplifies the many use cases that haven’t yet been satisfied on, say, gaming or VR platforms, and present themselves as indicators of what should be built to get more people participating in the Metaverse. On Gather, we see virtual workplaces, academic conferences, brand launch parties, housewarming parties and even weddings take place.
The way in which Gather made these experiences as accessible as possible was by building it in a 2D format in the web browser. In this way, anyone can enter a Gather experience and start interacting with their environment immediately, without being met with an intimidating or confusing interface. This decision was made only after Phillip and his team explored Watch and VR app product ideas and realized how limiting closed app ecosystems can be. They were then inspired by the open architecture of the internet, where Phillip himself has benefitted so much from using open source code, the Linux system, and platforms like Github.
Phillip’s philosophy for the Metaverse is akin to his principle towards building Gather, which is that open is better than closed. Open platforms help with innovation and enable innovation on many layers. Similarly, he hopes that people will work towards creating an Open Metaverse with various layers of innovation. The broad level of innovations he sees as critical are:
Decentralized identity and ownership: how can people have interoperability across experiences and easily plug into new experiences and worlds?
Infrastructure: what are some foundational tools and services that people will want to build on top of (ex. audio, video, chat, marketplaces, etc)?
Creation: what are the fundamental ways in which people will create places and things for the metaverse (i.e. Unreal Engine)?
When it comes to the major ways in which Phillip thinks the Metaverse will be different from the real world, the lack of physical limitations and how we work with that is top of mind. For example, instead of walking, running, or flying to places, simply teleporting for movement would speed things up. There’s also a lack of constraints around physics, so you could build, say, buildings with infinite levels.
About the Guest
Phillip Wang is the CEO and Co-Founder of Gather. Prior, he spent time building technologies to support more fulfilling relationships across distances at The Siempre Collective, ranging from wearables, audio/video apps, to VR. Before that, he spent time at Facebook, Cruise, Microsoft, and as a researcher in deep learning at CMU. Phillip graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a degree in Computer Science.
Show Notes
[2:45] Gather’s evolution from app, to VR, to web
[5:15] How people work, learn and play on Gather
[10:15] Importance of Metaverse products being accessible
[11:45] Open source creation tools
[13:35] Open Metaverse philosophy
[22:45] Open marketplaces and trade across platforms
[26:35] The Metaverse is not VR
[28:55] Zoom fatigue and the future of work
[31:55] AI’s role in building the Metaverse
[36:20] Mechanisms and interactions post Skeuomorphisms