Adrien Basdevant (E12): ‘The Future of Metaverses is Still Unknown’

Adrien Basdevant (E12) a lawyer specialised in digital law, recently submitted a report to the French Government on the development of metaverses, their applications, opportunities, risks, and environmental impact. He shares his conclusions with us.

ESSEC Alumni: What led you to work on the metaverses? 

Adrien Basdevant: I’ve always been fascinated by the impact of technologies on society. I began by writing books, in particular an essay entitled The Data Empire on algorithms and the law. I then pursued my exploration of these subjects as a member of the French National Digital Council (CNNum), where we examine these issues with a multidisciplinary group of researchers.

EA: What are the aims of the task you were involved in to develop metaverses? 

A. Basdevant: This is an exploratory task, commissioned by the Ministries for the Economy, Culture and Digital Technology, and led in collaboration with Rémi Ronfard, director of research at INRIA, and Camille François, a researcher at Columbia University. The aim is to enlighten the debate on a subject prone to confusion, by presenting the challenges for France, identifying opportunities and risks, and offering a common outlook for the national ecosystem.

EA: How do you define metaverses?  

A. Basdevant: A metaverse is an online service which offers access to shared and ongoing 3D simulations in real time, to immersive experiences we can all take part in.

EA: Can you give us some practical examples of metaverse applications?

A. Basdevant: Metaverses will come in many forms. Some will be built on blockchains, others no. We will be able to enter them with or without head-mounted display (HMD). Some will be geared towards the general public, with elements of social networks or video games, such as the Epic Games project, which has invested more than $2 billion in a major partnership with Lego. Others will be designed more for professionals, such as those developed by Nvidia or Microsoft for industrial sectors.

EA: What are the main challenges for metaverses at present? 

A. Basdevant: The report is more than a hundred pages long, which gives you some idea of the vast number of issues! In short, at the heart of the subject, there is a fundamental question of soft power: metaverses herald a new era of cultural and media creativity. Before we get that far, a number of technological challenges are still to be met, in particular with regard to standardisation and inter-operability, in addition to training in modelling, 3D or coding and so on. There are also economic, societal and environmental questions. Which technological bricks should we invest in, for example? How do we avoid replicating the attention-grabbing techniques that internet has familiarised us with? How do we reconcile these innovations with energy-saving efforts?

EA: At this stage, what is France’s position with regard to metaverses?

A. Basdevant: We spoke to more than 80 of the sector’s players in France. These interviews revealed that there is a great deal of confusion around the term ‘metaverse’. Everyone has their own definition: ‘It’s immersion’, ‘It’s internet’, ‘No, it’s the web!’, ‘It’s a blend of technology’, etc. One thing we noted, however, is that people have become wary of the metaverse since Facebook/Meta’s marketing campaign in 2021.

EA: What potential does France hold in the metaverse sector?

A. Basdevant: France boasts numerous assets, with the proven success of major firms such as Ubisoft, Dassault Systèmes and Ledger, in addition to several acquisitions of innovative start-ups by American groups  – Pixyz by Unity, Clay AIR by Qualcomm, or Sketchfab, co-founded by our colleague Alban Denoyel (E08), by Epic. The French sector for creative immersion has also given rise to world-renowned production studios, such as Atlas V, Small, Backlight Studio, Stage11, Innerspace, Emissive, etc.

EA: Given these elements, what is the state of play of the metaverse sector in France? 

A. Basdevant: French metaverse pioneers and nuggets can be divided into two ecosystems. The first encompasses virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality (or interreality), while the second includes blockchain, Web3 and NFT.

EA: Is France in the lead in this area, compared to the rest of the world and in particular Silicon Valley? 

A. Basdevant: Beyond the Facebook/Meta projects which attract a lot of media attention, major Silicon Valley players are currently adopting diverse strategies and visions for the future of immersive technologies. A major part is focused on applications for professional audiences. Others, such as Snapchat, Niantic or Apple, are betting on augmented rather than virtual reality, sometimes with a highly critical view of the dystopian aspect of virtual reality, which is accused of isolating users from each other and the world around them. To my mind, the most interesting initiatives come from South Korea, a country which positioned itself well in advance and is particularly ambitious in this area.

EA: Your report outlines the focus points of a ‘metaversal’ strategy for France. What do you mean by that?

A. Basdevant: There’s a lighthearted side to our use of this term, intended to emphasise the numerous possibilities and multiple outlooks of immersive social technologies and to encourage imagination and creativity in these areas. We thus offer an open exercise, the Metaversal Mona Lisa, which consists of imagining all the possible versions of the Mona Lisa: a virtual reality Mona Lisa whose various layers of paint can be explored with a Lynx mask; an augmented reality Mona Lisa, which would allow young visitors to the Louvre to add graffiti to the work and see the creations of other artists and amateurs in an immersive gallery, or a Mona Lisa made of tokens, to enable capital raising and the creation of a Friends of Mona Lisa CAD, etc. Beyond the fun aspect, using a metaversal Mona Lisa helps to explain the variety of metaverse formats and distribution channels, as well as highlighting the predominance of certain gatekeepers who are often overlooked when it comes to adding value to the cultural sector. Lastly, it serves to encourage more regulation.

EA: Your report puts forward 10 proposals. Could you summarise them for us? 

A. Basdevant: We believe metaverses provide an opportunity to regain leading positions in worldwide digital services. We are thus calling on the State to send a clear message of confidence to entrepreneurs and investors through a public policy in support of the sector, for which France 2030 and the organisation of public orders could form key elements. We also believe it is necessary to develop a rigorous analysis of the various value chains of metaverses, which would provide better guidance in terms of strategic investment areas, risks to sovereignty or capital flight. Lastly, we recommend funding interdisciplinary research initiatives to develop experimental metaverses driven by societal needs (culture, health, education or environment) in addition to providing means to assess sociotechnical threats via empirical studies.

EA: Among your proposals, you suggest adapting legislative texts such as the GDPR. What does this mean exactly?

A. Basdevant: Metaverses are based on data collection technologies. Augmented reality headsets and telephones or virtual reality masks, for example, scan users’ whole surroundings. This raises potentially new and significant personal data issues. Some countries, such as Chile, have taken precautionary steps by creating ‘neuro rights’, which establish the freedom to decide who is authorised, or not, to monitor, read or alter your brain.

EA: Still on the subject of regulation, you encourage France to take part in the development of international standards in this field. Why and how?

A. Basdevant: The future of immersion technology has yet to be shaped and will depend a great deal on the technical standards to be laid down in the coming years, much in the same way as was done for internet. We thus urge the French State to join the bodies negotiating these questions (the W3C ‘Immersive Web’ working group, or the Metaverse Standards Forum consortium, etc.) in order to contribute upstream to the development of standards, rather than enduring the consequences downstream.

EA: Finally, you recommend taking the environmental impact of metaverses into account as of now. What data do we have on this at present? 

A. Basdevant: Meteverse technologies are criticised, and rightly so, for their high energy use, which runs counter to current aims to reduce carbon footprint. Innovation in this sector must be led with this in mind; more specifically, it must aim to serve sustainability and sobriety, and not the opposite. That said, we lack accurate measurement and data in this matter. That is why we are calling for wide-scale, long-term, interdisciplinary studies and research in the field.

Interview by Louis Armengaud Wurmser (E10), Content Manager at ESSEC Alumni.

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