Building the Metaverse with Legacy in mind
“Legacy is a foundational principle to the creation of the infrastructure supporting a communications commons” - Astral_Druid
OMI, in collaboration with the Russian language groups RU, VRChatRU and the RockVR Club held a virtual presentation "VRConf" in VRChat on Tuesday 28 January 2025 at 17:00 UTC. We also bridged the event to our Discord Voice channel, to expand accessibility. The event was planned on github, where the page remains open for comments and feedback. The event was also live-streamed and is available on youtube.
We hope to improve collaborations across time zones and languages, and this was an example of a multi-lingual event, with it’s own set of challenges (some thoughts at the bottom).
Speakers
Julian Reyes (keyframe)
Julian Reyes is the Founder and Director of the Virtual Worlds Museum, whose mission is to explore, preserve, and share the evolution of immersive worlds. In recognition of his contributions to the XR industry and digital preservation, he was awarded the AUREA Impact Award 2025, alongside Lisa Egger of Arrival Space.
dr Karol Suprynowicz (74hc595)
Known locally as 74, they are one of 5 co-founders of Overte, a 3D artist, programmer and open source enthusiast. With a PhD in biomechanics, 74’s areas of interest are avatars and collaborative creation in virtual worlds.
Astral_Druid
Astral is the Founder and Creative Director of OurSpace, a not-for-profit commonwealth Metaverse platform being built by V-Sekai, an open source project team contributing to Godot Engine. Astral is working on developing a new frame for building the Metaverse called the Transplanar Ecological Society Model.
Notes from conversation
After the speakers presented their projects, they were asked to share what in their view are three aspects important to thinking about legacy:
Julian:
- Anthropological: what is the community doing? Different worlds have different cultures, ways of doing things, reasons for doing it.
- Technology: What is the technology stack, what are the assets etc
- Creative aspect: What art is being created?
Julian asks people to take care to document their projects with regards to these three areas, contribute to the characterisation and documentation of the worlds, or initiatives you care about, or are building, more generally.
Initiatives end, but the lessons, wisdom, assets and infrastructure are still valuable.
Related, there has not been enough tracking about where contributors go when initiatives shut down. The migratory patterns of the contributors to initiatives are important to understand better how to help the survival of the knowledge as it moves through the Metaverse landscape.
dr Karol Suprynowicz (74hc595), or simply, 74, talked about the ecosystem of how to build and maintain an initiative. They emphasised the importance of community as well, and the value of keeping knowledge from past initiatives, using the development of Overte from previous initiatives as example, and the use of Godot, VRM, the community contributions of glTF as examples of wider community participation working together in their own ways.
74’s emphasis on open culture is a key philosophy relevant to maintaining legacy. They warned about code rot and the need to re-invigorate code bases, which requires community input.
Astral_Druid complemented the points already made by re-iterating that building for legacy is a foundational principle of the Metaverse commons, something to incorporate at the planning stages, rather than something to think about later.
Astral noted that we are in a post-human, post-digital landscape, where the human and digital components are deeply intertwined. In that respect the Metaverse, and building its legacy, should be considered as part of the physical fabric of our existence and the needs, challenges and opportunities that this presents.
Astral noted that play forms a core part of what makes us human, and so building for legacy needs to be done according to game design, following principles of play, for example our desire for acknowledgement, “likes”, and the social, trans-boundary aspects of forming families and trust networks by choice.
Continue the conversation:
Github comments: https://github.com/omigroup/omigroup/discussions/505
(feedback and suggestions for future events may also live here)
Join OMI: Discord server: OMI - Open Metaverse Interoperability Group
chat: #omi-general
audio bridge: Weekly Meeting
VRChatRU group on VRChat: DM @VAV1ST for details.
We also had an ice-breaker casual conversation that preceded the event, which had very interesting contributions:
It is the year 2337
You found a box full of media from 2025 that contains something that can make you rich and make a lot of people’s lives better.How do you access the media?
The ice-breaker was discussed in the Discord omi-general channel, and when asked in the VRConf room, the same conclusions were reached, which, considering how far out the conclusion is, was pretty humorous.
iFire started off by saying that a time capsule made from a bluray writer with a usb 3.0 data and a usb 3.0 power plug and a bunch of bluray disks would be their choice. Aaron countered at the risk of optical media degrading over time. While m-discs are rated for 1000 years maybe, the group agreed that the trade off between useful alternatives and long-lasting alternatives was a tough one. Maximus recommended the rosetta stone approach, to include data in a variety of formats, along with different physical adaptors. This conversation then branched off into more technical considerations around which data formats to include, and how this could apply to 3D assets as well (read about it on the channel). The group however converged that the main challenge will be how to preserve data in a durable format, and this is where DNA makes an appearance, which is where the VRConf chat also got to! Julian noted that if the data is encoded in DNA, that removes the need for the rosetta stone, as the data can be translated to any format.
However, there was also general agreement that relying on technology only will not be sufficient. "The regular advice is an online storage system that is upgraded as long as people care" - As was the common thread in the event overall; people need to care.
Meta considerations: Multi-lingual, cross-cultural events
This event was the first collaboration between two groups who hardly even share a language. OMI has members across Europe and North America so time zones are already an issue. The cultures are different: RU seemed to have a more formal, structured way of approaching the VRConfs, while OMI approaches it more informally, similar to the casual conversations that happened on Spaces until now. This lead to some misunderstandings that was only cleared up last minute, and predictably caused some stress.
The event was moderated by a native English speaker from OMI, and the flow happened at length, in English, which a large portion of the audience had to sit through without translation. While the choice for simultaneous or asynchronous translation is a constant problem for multilingual events, the larger context is to think about the event in that international sense. This includes being considerate of the length any person in any language is speaking, as well as the topics that are covered. It is important that each side of the organisation team works on the convenience of its language if it considers it necessary to improve the "quality of life" of the meeting participants. Rather than having in depth conversations, shorter conversation or topic hooks that can lead people to content outside the event may be better.
A participant commented that while the topic was interesting, what the participant liked the most was learning about the interesting people presenting. This could be a very good angle for an international event: to have the speakers each from a different country, who may be well known in their own country but less so outside of it. They can present in whatever language they are comfortable in, and this forces a constructive appreciation about the language barriers.
Ultimately, we hope that the VRConf venue can host different events from different groups passionate about the Metaverse, in different languages, at a reasonable frequency, fostering international community.
If this interests you, the planning for VRConf events happens in our #media channel, in the VRConf thread. You're welcome!