Visual excellence for the Metaverse

 It's flattering, yet ironic. Everyone is talking about the Metaverse now: Microsoft are adding avatars in Teams, Facebook is renamed Meta, everyone makes avatars... Yet, we have been building the Metaverse for many years, and what we did years ago was so ahead of its time: for reference, this article is an eye-opener, it put things in perspective....  https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/10/30/playstation-home-in-2009-looks-better-than-meta-facebooks-horizon-worlds-in-2021/?fbclid=IwAR0Whp6cY7FcG6ySxkQJFFVFf8HV83QvGvc3zVoz3U5pcB_LqycYXyZ8d4k&sh=1162d571d98f

PlayStation Home started in 2007! And see the screenshot below: that was Atom Republic's first release, 9 years ago! What we did in PlayStation Home did look a lot higher fidelity than most of today's attempts at the Metaverse, at least in terms of photo-realism. 

Find here a 2012 blog post from PlayStation, showing the variety and the quality of what was proposed at the time on the platform: https://blog.playstation.com/2012/12/17/ataris-40th-birthday-winter-holidays/comment-page-2/

As an artist, I fell in love with virtual worlds when I saw PlayStation Home, it inspired me to create Atom Republic, to be a developer for PlayStation Home.Then in 2014, I created Atom Universe to become the most realistic virtual world ever made! 

Striving for photo realism, I tried to make Atom Universe the most beautiful Metaverse experience possible; this is a screenshot of what Atom Universe looked like back in 2015 on PlayStation 4: yes, this was over 6 years ago. This image below is a real in-game screenshot, not a mock-up:

In stark contrast, this is what Facebook propose in terms of visual fidelity, to me it feels like a step back in time by 20 years:

Arguably Facebook's Meta, VR chat, Roblox etc are going for a cartoony/stylised approach. Still: I think we can do a lot better with today's awesome technologies, like face scanning and the Unreal Engine.

Please understand: I am not here to diss the competition. I just want to stress how ahead of its time PlayStation Home was back in 2007, and how it inspired me to strive for visual excellence. I must insist: with Atom Universe -some call it PlayStation Home's spiritual successor- I wish to perpetuate the push for high standards of visual quality. I hope it will show!