Book Review: ‘The Metaverse, Building The Spatial Internet,’ By Matthew Ball

In this fully revised and updated edition of his internationally best-selling book, The Metaverse, and How It Will Revolutionize Everything, entrepreneur, investor, and blogger Matthew Ball presents the case for a successor internet which would be a persistent and interconnected network of 3D virtual worlds. The new edition has a different subtitle for the book, “Building The Spatial Internet,” signaling this is more than a new edition: it’s a new book. Indeed, over 70% of the content is new.

No one is better suited to write the definitive overview of the Metaverse than Matthew Ball. The former head of strategy for Amazon Studios, Ball began his career at Accenture, where he helped media and tech companies revise their business models and products for the digital era. After five years with Accenture, Ball joined former Fox Studios honcho Peter Chernin’s Otter Entertainment, producer of the Planet of the Apes movies and The New Girl tv series. With this experience in entertainment, Ball joined Amazon Studios as its senior strategy executive and worked there for three years, from 2016 to 2018.

“It was my experiences in 2018 that convinced me that this nearly century-old idea, and thirty-year old term, The Metaverse, was no longer fantastical, but instead a practical opportunity,” Ball told me in an email. “Specifically, I was playing a lot of Fortnite, experiencing its rapid changes week-to-week, as well as its broader transformation from a ‘game’ to a truly cultural product. I was also spending lots of time on the Roblox platform, which demonstrates just how potent and accessible no-code virtual world creation tools have become.”

The pandemic sent the world fleeing to these digital realms, and the games industry in particular experienced a significant increase in demand. No-one enjoyed this rise more than privately-held Epic Games, responsible for the hit cross platform game Fortnite. Epic also owns Unreal Engine, a platform for making 3D spatial experiences used by much of the AAA game and entertainment industry. In Fortnite, one hundred armed player characters participate in a timed battle royale. It has since evolved the social aspect of its game into Fortnite Creative, a collection of user-generated, 3D multiplayer environments where users now spend more than half their time on the platform. In it, Ball sees the future of the Internet.

A lot has happened since 2021. The Metaverse hype machine ran out of gas, and the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022, shifted the world’s attention to AI. Crypto crashed (although Bitcoin is back), taking web3, blockchain, and Metaverse talk with it. Apple introduced its Vision Pro mixed-reality headset without saying the M-word at all. They call their pass-through mixed reality experience “spatial computing.” Meta and its garrulous founder don’t talk about the Metaverse much anymore, even though they continue to invest over ten billion dollars a year in its development. Ball explains these developments in new chapters on AI, Computer Graphics, XR Devices, and blockchain, crypto and web3. He’s also added forty new graphics and charts. For all the shade thrown at the Metaverse by investors and the press, the number of US Securities and Exchange Commission Filings to use the term “Metaverse” has gone up.

In the first edition of the book, Ball gave us this definition of the Metaverse: “A massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.” To be honest, while true, this quite the mouthful. This time, Ball gets right to the point: “the simplest way to describe the Metaverse is as a 3D version of the Internet.”

To explain the future Internet he envisions, Ball first has to explain the history of the personal computer, the Internet, mobile phones, networks, cable infrastructure, streaming, video games, game consoles, and virtual and augmented reality. Because the Internet and what comes after it represents the convergence of business, history, and technology, intertwined like a golden braid, no technology, and few companies, go unmentioned.

The Metaverse, Building The Spatial Internet is so different from the first edition, it makes me wonder why Ball just didn’t write a new book. It is more up to date, but that makes it eighty pages longer. The additional length makes the story of the future Ball told so succinctly in the first book unfold at a slower pace. It’s true that books about technology have to be rewritten frequently to remain relevant bu, in this case Ball’s broad conception of the Metaverse as a 3D Internet will always be compelling.

When I asked Ball about a second book instead of a second edition he said “Truthfully, I never endeavored to remake the book (nor did it thusly come at the cost of another), nor did it arise from a need to “defend” or “update’ or “explain.” Norton was excited to do the paperback release, asked me if I’d like to do a new preface and/or intro, and I found myself in a sort of gravitational pull where I was excited (and couldn’t help myself from) adding, and expanding, and improving. The result of big leaps (AI, crypto, HMDs), significant but smaller progress (e.g. quantum computing, Verse, Epic x Disney and Lego), my own self-improvement, and reader feedback since the original book. I think it’s an incredibly better book – not just one that’s more up-to-date or “stronger” – and so I’m delighted that anyone who might otherwise have bought the original, can instead do this one!”

The Metaverse: Fully Revised and Updated Edition: Building the Spatial Internet can be purchased on Amazon for $27.90.