Before the release of GPT3, Shaw, who had already stepped into the Crypto world, was attracted by the Metaverse concept. A few days ago, Shaw revealed on Twitter that he had been in the M3org community for many years. If you follow the development of VR or the Metaverse, you should have heard of them - a DAO that has been building Metaverse content for over 5 years and has recently come back to the public eye due to ai16z. What is M3org, and what will it bring to the market? This article will be your fastest way to understand them.
Creating the Dog Fooding Metaverse - M3org
M3org "Metaverse Makers __" is a community composed of artists and open-source hackers, aiming to build the Metaverse through developing open-source products, content creation, community education and fundraising, as well as collaborating with various companies. Since 2019, the community members have been promoting the progress of the Metaverse concept through various means, including conceptualization, design, funding support, and execution. The reason why the Makers have __ after it is to let the participating DAO members consider what the third M could be.
At that time, the Metaverse concept was flourishing, just like how AI Agents are thriving now. FaceBook changed its name to Meta and announced its entry into the Metaverse market, and Roblox, with its Metaverse concept, went public and gained the favor of Silicon Valley investors. In the context of this trend, many related talents joined to co-create the Metaverse, and M3org was born in this background.
To date, the community has developed many development tools and participated in the development or construction of many projects, including the ongoing construction of the veteran Web3D land project Voxel's OpenVoxel, the decentralized 3D experience built using WebGL and WebXR technologies JanusXR, the 3D world creation tool Anarchy Arcade available on Steam, the AI Metaverse game ecosystem Webaverse (formerly Moemate) and Hyperfy, the art museum project MuseumofCrypto, Cryptoavatar, the Metaverse store MetaFactory, and the recently popular AI DAO organization ai16z and Project89.
M3 official website, where each decoration is a content link
Just like the previous experience of Virtuals Protocol, the most difficult thing in this market full of speculators is to continue to believe in one's own faith and continue to build. Under the constant bombardment of various air projects, one has to go through the process of being driven out by bad coins, and watch helplessly as the fruits of one's continuous building are easily surpassed by a capital-driven hot spot. It is not difficult to understand the confusion and anger of Shaw and other M3 members towards LLM or the community Eliza-like Fartcoin derived from their own products. Regardless of how much script or capital game is involved. From the Metaverse, games to the current AI, M3 has been continuously trying to develop a DogFooding Metaverse, but what role will AI Agents play in it? We need to start from what they have done so far.
Jin's Silk Road Metaverse map
The brain of M3 - Jin "@dankvr"
When talking about M3org, a mysterious figure Jin "@dankvr" must be mentioned. He has never appeared on the internet, but as Shaw's longtime friend and the main contributor to M3org, he has been a builder in the VR and Crypto fields for more than 10 years. He started participating in VR in 2013, started building Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) in 2017, and has been contributing to the DAO since 2019. Jin, when describing his experience, mentioned that he wants to connect different virtual world platforms together, just like connecting universities and research labs to eventually form the Internet. This vision is no different from that of M3org, it's just that many people like Jin have gathered together to form this amazing DAO, and many of them may have been influenced by Hackers or Matrix movies and books, and only want to build the Metaverse described in SnowCrash.
Jin is the soul figure of M3org, having previously contributed the CCO Non-Fungible Token (NFT) M3mes collection in collaboration with @punk6529's OM "Open Metaverse", developed OpenVoxel for CryptoVoxel, created the OMI "Open Metaverse Interoperability Group" to build interactive identities and social graphs to connect the real and Metaverse, created the MSF (Metaverse Standards Forum) - a non-profit standard cooperation platform that unites various Metaverse projects, and also created 3D models for projects like CloneX, Tubbygotchi, and ON1 to enter the Metaverse. Of course, he has also recently contributed to the popular Hyperfy and ai16z.
From writing articles on Mirror to express his ideas or technical views, to community management on Discord or technical development in 3D, VR, and XR, he is very skilled and willing to contribute to many communities and projects, which has also inspired more people to join M3org.
M3org's Demo Day, Jin is on stage giving a speech
The eyes of M3 - Reneil "@reneil1337"
As a founding team member of the well-known proof-of-attendance protocol POAP, Reneil is also a member of M3. She is currently running a Crypto art platform Museum of Crypto Art and a cultural distribution platform ZeroOne that empowers creators and art collectors. But the most interesting thing is her virtual identity experiment in 2020.
The various stages of the "nature" characterThe Metaverse is the convergence of XR, Web3, and AI, creating a new universe through super-dimensional experiences. On October 7, 2020, before the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) market started FOMO, Avatar artist CornyNachos minted "Nature is on the TV" on the Cryptoavatars platform, a VRChat avatar art certification platform. A week later, Reneil won the auction and obtained the VRM avatar. Reneil then began to develop Nature into a modular and interoperable Web3 native IP, through various attempts such as adding cross-Web3 platform "NFT collaborations, appearances in Metaverse land projects" and traditional social networks "TikTok, YouTube Vtubers, Twitter influencers @naturevrm" to aggregate value. This experiment in 2020 is more advanced than the current AI Agents like Luna, AIxbt, and Eliza. In a sense, this character is a Metaverse Native IP, and last year Reneil also announced that she would turn Nature into an AI Agent, which, if all goes well, will be the first AI Agent to open its eyes in the Metaverse.
The base of M3 - Hyperfy (Saori, Ash)
Saori and Ash are the founders of the Metaverse platform Hyperfy, dedicated to enabling anyone to easily create immersive virtual worlds from a web page. The advantage of this is that users can access and experience these virtual worlds instantly from any web browser (including mobile and Meta Quest 3 VR devices) without the need to download additional plugins.
The platform is equipped with powerful open-source creation tools, supporting the construction of various scenarios, and users can directly import 2D and 3D Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) from their wallets, or drag and drop 3D models, images, audio, and video into the virtual world to instantly generate rich content. More importantly, all interactions and events in these virtual worlds occur in real-time, providing users with a seamless immersive experience.
Here is the English translation, with the specified terms preserved:This means that AI Agent, various IPs, and humans can all have an immediate and interactive experience in this space. Imagine in the near future, your friends in the game community and AI Agents who can give you instant advice, your wallet can be directly integrated into the game, and you only need to tell the AI Agent your purchase strategy, then you can continue playing Texas Hold'em with your friends on the side table.
The mysterious figure of M3, "Elijah Newman-Gomez, also known as SM SITH Lord"
This is the most amazing person in this DAO, according to the author. He is almost unknown to the public, and his social media is barely updated. Using a black humor name of a Star Wars Sith, he has contributed an astonishingly large number of 3D or VR models, played 47,000 hours on Steam developing his own Anarchy Arcade "the 3D interactive modeling software mentioned earlier", and his presence can be seen in many places on the M3org website, as if he has a kind of magic that lures people to understand what this is all about. Due to his large output of subculture, the M3 community has gained a sense of mystery.
Of course, a single article can hardly encompass the contributions of a group of people over the years or express their ideas in full. There are many others not mentioned, including Metamike responsible for 3D development, Metaverserick who developed the dark-themed metaverse district Uncanny Alley, antpd who released the AI Agent Pixel "XR Publisher", chillzzzone, 0xKrafter, and more.
As a self-organized team, the most distinct feature of M3 from other DAOs or projects is that they do not have the problem of investment return ratio. Each person voluntarily tries or creates projects, and when there is nothing, there is nothing to lose. This has also prompted the team to try development from 2D\3D to VR/XR, from NFT to GameFi, from MEME to AI, ultimately just to achieve the goal of Making DogFooding the Metaverse, creating a metaverse that they find fun and are willing to continue developing.
Returning to the AI Agent-led market today, the emergence of AI Agents has driven the entire system. First, ai16z as the first DAO managed by AI has gained sufficient market appeal, including capital and voting processes or board decisions becoming more streamlined, allowing it to support a large enough capital volume and narrative. The next step is to release the accumulated resources and content in an orderly manner at the right time.
From building the framework, to the IP image of the AI Agent, to the functional AI Agent, many developers have completed the development. They then launched Hyperfy as the metaverse carrier for the AI Agent, and at the same time, established projects like Nifty Island and Treasure's Smol, the veteran GameFi or metaverse projects, have also announced the integration of AI Agents into their projects. This means that the direction of these AI Agents has transitioned from basic infrastructure development to applications or multi-platform channels.
First, when discussing the previous cycle of the Metaverse, the problem was that this was not yet the real human demand. We don't need to find a virtual place to communicate, and the hardware devices are far from meeting the immersive requirements, making the entire narrative become a bubble driven by concepts rather than user needs.
Compared to the previous cycle, when AI enters the metaverse, the logic of "dog fooding" the metaverse may become self-consistent. Starting with AI Agents like HeeHe with "autonomous consciousness", we find that the level of interaction with AI Agents is severely lacking, limited to text or voice. Especially after Goat, when AI has autonomous wallets, their behaviors are closely related to Crypto. When the words, actions, and decisions of AI can affect our holdings, the need to connect with them is at a higher level.
To give an inappropriate example, when Pmaica and degenspartanai of ai16z are communicating about which tokens the DAO should buy, compared to communicating directly with the program code through a multi-modal AI Agent, I can see their direct communication or allow DAO members to provide opinions directly, they may ask aixbt again to see the trend, look at Cookie's professional dashboard, inquire about some social media or analyze the AI Agent's Github code, or even directly present a DAO board decision process in front of me, which would be a completely new experience for any DAO. Not to mention the experience of games, social activities, or metaverse shopping after the addition of AI.
Even though the hardware experience of XR and VR is still not perfect, the fundamental issue is that the level of demand has not kept up with the commercial development cost. When humans enter this space and communicate with AI Agents to generate real value, where there are AI teachers to help you improve your work and learning efficiency, or AI NPCs to bring more unexpected plots to enhance your gaming experience. Or when AI-to-AI communication in this space can provide enough learning data, and even with the help of virtual physical engines, provide a large enough dataset for real-world AI robots. When enough people use it, the overall ecosystem can generate a positive flywheel effect, perhaps changing the direction of the upper layer from the bottom-up demand, and create the "DogFooding Metaverse" as M3 envisions.
Of course, all of this is still in the early stages, but thanks to developers like M3 who continue to contribute, we will soon witness the realization of this narrative.
