The elephant in the corner of the room for the Metaverse seems to be that relatively few problem domains actually benefit from a 3D spatial UI. Our retinas are

The elephant in the corner of the room for the Metaverse seems to be that relatively few problem domains actually benefit from a 3D spatial UI. Our retinas are 2D; our brains think in 2.5D at best: and unless we're chasing each other around a virtual landscape in an MMORPG or we're manipulating 3D geometry, it's not clear that 3D does anything but get in the way. You could even argue that the Metaverse effectively exists already today, in the form of multi-user domain-specific collaborative apps such as Figma, Etherpad, Google Docs etc - if only there was a way to liberate the data from the presentation layer. One could then do a fancy multiplayer 3D window manager in VR to blend it all together, but this feels like eyecandy rather than a fundamental improvement. That said, there's no question (in my mind) that we need a common real-time data layer to share the data securely between the different apps and experiences who build on it, and it'd be cute if the spatial stuff did exist in the same coordinate space somehow for ease of interoperability. If nothing else, 3D spatial file managers would be fun (bring back FSN!). If anyone is interested in such a thing, we're actively looking for folks to help build out genuinely open metaverse stuff on Matrix (https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1453869116847239175 https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1453869116847239175).