Announcing Mscape.io: A Community-driven Metaverse Landscape Framework & Map
The metaverse has emerged as a promising arena, guiding use cases for Web3 project teams. It holds tremendous promise for using the amazing technologies once siloed among different communities to transform the way we live, work, and play in an increasingly digital economy.
People spend an estimated 40% of their waking moments online: working on Slack, meeting on Zoom, streaming videos on Netflix, shopping on Amazon, or swiping on Tinder. Web3 projects envision a more seamless, immersive, and democratic digital future in the metaverse.
Stretching across NFT art, play-to-earn games, online world-building, distributed communities, and other virtual environments, leisure and work are finding common ground in the digital sphere. This increasing digitization of life is bound to grow at an unprecedented rate, especially given the strong online foundation already established by Web 2.0 in our daily lives.
Mscape.io Addresses the Need for a Metaverse Landscape
Just as Web 2.0 required significant investments in infrastructure, Web3 will require new models for, and investment in, decentralized data storage and transmission. Filecoin and IPFS are the leading solutions for this. They stand to play a major role in the development, growth, and maintenance of the metaverse. Today, over 300 projects ranging from application developers to technology providers rely on IPFS to store data in a decentralized, resilient, and efficient manner.
With so many teams launching and growing on top of the IPFS and Filecoin stack, the community could use a metaverse landscape to visualize and identify projects in this category. And so, say hello to mscape.io! A community-driven website and tool that allows anyone to explore metaverse projects and technologies, including what each team is building.
Framework for the Metaverse
Mscape draws a distinction between projects and technologies. Projects are metaverse experiences like games or virtual art galleries; i.e. they are built with the use of other technologies. Technologies, on the other hand, are the tools that support and enable projects.
The ecosystem is divided into four layers, starting with projects. These usually consist of either games or virtual worlds. They provide users with a space to interact with each other in a shared virtual setting. Some examples are Sandbox and Cryptovoxels.
Then, the website groups technologies into three distinct layers. First comes the technology to design experiences. These are basically engines or software frameworks that provide the core of what developers need to create virtual worlds. Some examples of these are Webaverse and the Nvidia Omniverse.
User capabilities are the second layer of metaverse technologies. These can refer to tools that provide added services such as identity, avatars, value transfers, and communications. Ready Player Me, Tafi, and Caudceus are all popular solutions.
Finally, we have infrastructure. This refers to technology that provides the groundwork for key metaverse functionalities such as connectivity, interfaces, and persistent storage. Filecoin and IPFS are prime examples of infrastructure solutions for the metaverse along with other tools like VivePro2 and Pimax.
Each technology layer is required to build metaverse applications. However, the framework used in the landscape is a living one and will evolve over time as the ecosystem does.
How to Contribute
Mscape is a community-driven, open-source project that lets users contribute in two ways:
- by adding new content
- by evolving the framework that organizes the content.
Follow this handy guide for detailed instructions on how to contribute to the landscape directly. Contributions will be published regularly.
The mission of decentralized storage is to empower open communities working together to change the world wide web. With this open-source metaverse landscape, the Web3 community can see firsthand the projects, technologies, and humans working behind the scenes today to build the metaverse of tomorrow.
