That's the problem, isn't it... we barely have support for this kind of thing in 2D.
If I make a chair in SolidWorks, I can't even drag-and-drop it into a 3D printer, let alone open the document to use it in the Sims or in an email client. When I drag and drop an email into Excel I get a dialog box asking about what the delimiters are, and woe is me if I want to drag and drop an image to share it with another networked device. To get anything to work, one needs to be constantly aware of filetypes, which applications support which files, and the quirks they have when importing/exporting files (text encodings ftw /s).
If we can't figure out metaverse-style interactions on text files, the only way it's going to happen with car files is in one company's interoperatability walled garden.
Yes, as I read the article I thought about interoperability between applications as a related problem. There has been lots of effort put into this over the decades with things like OLE and in some sense, object-oriented programming in general. They've achieved some success but it feels like they've always fallen far short of the level of reuse and interoperability envisioned, and for basically the same reasons alluded to in the article - even if you can solve the easier technical problem of defining protocols, there remain the harder technical and design problems of mapping semantics and user interfaces between application environments, and the social problem of divergent interests and priorities between the developers of those environments.
Absolutely, interop will be just as janky as it is today, if not more.
It will probably be a combination of "works but with problems" and explicit deals between some companies for certain things where they explicitly put the work in to allow some things to carry over.
But my point is the whole Metaverse is marketing hype. The premise is really just that if the real world is one 3 dimensional surround universe you can experience, the Metaverse will deliver other such 3 dimensional surround experiences for you to go from one to the other.
The amount of things you can also move between all these "real"/"virtual" worlds is probably gonna suffer from all the issues we have today as well when moving from the real world and all the various 2D worlds.
But again, take out all the expensive hyperbolic terms. What we're talking about are just very obvious logical next step.
Assume a very good VR setup, now assume a scanner that can take a 3D surround image of say your favorite teddy bear. What do you do? You make a feature that lets you bring that 3D scan into VR.
This is the same as bringing a 2D photo of your teddy bear into your current 2D computer environment.
In my opinion, nothing here is far fetched, even though people will probably have patents for these ideas, they just logically come out as obvious next step for this new technology.
And it'll go the other way around too. You will be able to carve some 3D cup in VR, and then 3D print it into the real world. And that's the same as drawing something in Photoshop and printing it.
The only change here is that when you add that third dimension and make it surround, everything starts to feel more "real". Which is where people are starting to hype it up with mental hyperboles like a Metaverse, or calling things New Worlds, Other Universes, etc. But the only change from today is adding the 3rd dimension.
Think about a Zoom videoconference call with 5 of your friends where you make the background a photo of Mars. The only reason we call that videoconference and not: "Jump into a parallel universe in the deep landscape of Planet Mars with your friends and experience a new reality" is because it doesn't have the 3rd surround dimension.
If I make a chair in SolidWorks, I can't even drag-and-drop it into a 3D printer, let alone open the document to use it in the Sims or in an email client. When I drag and drop an email into Excel I get a dialog box asking about what the delimiters are, and woe is me if I want to drag and drop an image to share it with another networked device. To get anything to work, one needs to be constantly aware of filetypes, which applications support which files, and the quirks they have when importing/exporting files (text encodings ftw /s).
If we can't figure out metaverse-style interactions on text files, the only way it's going to happen with car files is in one company's interoperatability walled garden.