Metauni is a community of scholars in the Metaverse, with 3D virtual environment and voice chat provided by Roblox and whiteboards and other open source tools scripted in Luau. We use Discord for livestreams and community organisation. All are welcome and it’s easy to join in, follow the instructions and then Enter the Hub.

Discord | YouTube | GitHub | Roblox Group | Twitter | Email

Yet it is not these gifts, nor the most determined ambition combined with irresistible will-power, that enables one to surmount the “invisible yet formidable boundaries” that encircle our universe. Only innocence can surmount them, which mere knowledge doesn’t even take into account, in those moments when we find ourselves able to listen to things, totally and intensely absorbed in child’s play – Alexander Grothendieck

For information about past events and videos see the events page. See a problem? File an issue. You might like to review the Roblox rules. Submit orders for merch in the #merch channel on Discord (thanks Ken!).

metauni Day

We meet once a week for seminars. To join enter the metauni Hub and click the “Join now” button on the What’s On board.

Dwarf block: Times are given on Thursday AEDT. The beginning of the block is 8am Thursday AEDT. Names in itatlics are the co-organisers of the seminar.

• Foundations 8:00-9:00 (Billy Price, Will Troiani): the nature of mathematical objects, logic, Gödel’s theorems
• Tea break 9:00-9:30
• Euclid 9:30-10:00 (Ken Chan, Dan Murfet): Euclid’s Elements on virtual blackboards.
• Singular Learning Theory 10:00-11:00 (Edmund Lau, Dan Murfet): Singularities are knowledge.
• Tea break 11:00-11:30
• SLT supplemental 11:30-12:00: Mathematical background for the main seminar.
• Code 12:00-1:00: livestreaming the construction of metauni (in the Rising Sea Discord).
• Tea break 1:00-1:30
• #metauni-dev 1:30-2:30: development meeting (in the Rising Sea Discord).
• Disruption 2:30-3:00 (Adam Dorr): towards a science of technological disruption.
• Tea break 3:00-3:30
• Cell Learning Theory 3:30-4:30 (Michael Chappuis, Dan Murfet): learning and computation in biology (starting 3/2/2022).

Elf block: Times are given on Thursday AEDT, the beginning of the block is 9pm Thursday AEDT. Names in itatlics are the co-organisers of the seminar.

• Landau-Ginzburg 21:00-22:00 (Will Troiani, Dan Murfet): on the geometry and (bi)category theory of isolated hypersurface singularities.
• Cryptography 22:00-23:00: (Eleanor McMurtry) on universal composability.

For videos from the seminars, see the pages for the individual seminars (linked above) or the YouTube channel. If you are a speaker in one of the seminars, see the instructions for speakers.

Build your own

While metauni is meta in the sense of being in the Metaverse, it is also meta in the sense that we want to help you how to build your own community like metauni. The simplest way is to use one of our private servers:

• Circular Concept with persistent metaboards, Admin Commands. Free.
• Iteration of Concept with metaboard, Admin Commands, and Coin Run challenge in an environment built from a snapshot of Songspire (making of). Free.
• Random Concept with persistent whiteboards, Admin Commands, 8-fold board, Weiqi board. Free.

Setup is easy: click on the Servers tab and Create Private Server. For more see the private servers page.

Why?

We started running events in Roblox in 2020 due to COVID lockdowns in Melbourne, Australia. To our surprise we found that we actually enjoyed it, especially as compared to events in Zoom. It still isn’t clear to us exactly why it is better, but here are some ideas:

1. Creative Expression. The ability to manifest your own will, creatively, in a shared space makes it feel real. This feeling of reality buttresses the rest of the experience. Creative acts range from the individual and simple (demonstrating your attention by following the speaker between boards, or saying “thanks” to the speaker by writing it in fancy colours on your personal board) to the social and complex (see the Pillars Incident).

2. No Video. In Zoom the feeling of co-presence is based on being able to see other people’s faces. This is better than lecturing to a blank screen, but it is also exhausting. In a 3D environment you get a sense of other people paying attention to what is going on, without having to constantly see their faces and your own.

3. Play is Serious. When unexpected things happen (red bouncy chairs, people abducting you in a floating boat, personal board climbing, etc) and they are fun, it reinforces a sense of shared experience and refills our “I want to be here” tank for a while. It seems that for virtual events to work, this mix of “serious” content and play needs to be carefully managed to keep these tanks nonempty.

I really keenly feel that the 3d world adds a new dimension to the social interaction (since you are fixed in space in Zoom, I guess it actually adds three new dimensions). Just the fact that I can stand next to someone, even without saying a word, is a kind of connection that is really lacking in Zoom. Roblox events feel much more socially natural to me than video calls do (even without video). Imagine an in-person meeting, but instead of being free to move physically, you are strapped into a chair with your head facing forward. All of the other attendees have the same constraints. You proceed to inject your discussion into one another. That’s what Zoom feels like in comparison to Roblox. – a student

Roblox is a utility platform for large-scale 3D social environments (see Baszucki keynote and their SEC S-1 filing). We chose Roblox because of its massive user base and accessibility on a wide array of platforms (43 million daily active users as of early 2021) and user-friendly tooling supported by many tutorials (Roblox Studio). It’s remarkable that you can deploy an attractive 3D world with 100 simultaneous multiplayer users for free, in minutes, from your laptop. While you can make ugly things with Roblox, you can make beautiful things too.

Metauni is inspired by the Free University of Berlin, Lianda and Sabishii University.

History

Current contributors are Daniel Murfet starsonthars, Billy Price, James Clift, BenSBk, Ethan Curtiss and Lucas Cantor HeadOfMusic.

• 14/1/2021 - History start, got Discord integration working, intro video.
• 16/1/2021 - Update with clickable documents, audio plinths and working teleports, another video.
• 17/1/2021 - Rewrote Discord bot to use MongoDB, fixed some bugs, implemented slide presentations (video).
• 17/1/2021 - Implemented popover “fullscreen” GUI for looking at slides, synced to the presenter’s current slide. There is a video demoing this feature as well as recapping the other features.
• 18/1/2021 - Instructions for building your own node to be read in conjunction with this blog post for the database and this one for keep alive (now superceded by Billy’s excellent guide, see below).
• 20/1/2021 - Implemented the challenge system, with the first two challenges for the first event #1A, #1B see challenges.
• 20/1/2021 - BP has posted detailed instructions for setting up your own node.
• 26/1/2021 - Discord bot rewritten by BP to use HTTP POST rather than a webhook, and repl.it database rather than MongoDB. The Rising Sea node has two new areas “Solar Peak” and the “Well of Past Events”.
• 27/1/2021 - Social media accounts up and running (LC on Instagram, DM on Twitter).
• 31/1/2021 - Added new talk area for Ziling Ye’s event (The Island).
• 1/2/2021 - Working whiteboards (by JC) and a new talk area (the Music Tower) for Lucas’s event.
• 10/2/2021 - Weiqi board first release on the Roblox Toolbox (construction video).
• 11/2/2021 - Whiteboard and Viewer first release on the Roblox Toolbox (created by JC).
• 17/2/2021 - Updated whiteboards, now drawing is visible to new players in a server, significant performance improvements (JC).
• 18/2/2021 - New administration features: kick, ban, control of whiteboard access (by BP).
• 25/2/2021 - First public release of AdminCommands (by BP).
• 1/5/2021 - Updated whiteboards, new replay feature (by JC).
• 16/7/2021 - Public debut of the talking boards and the locus concept.
• 22/7/2021 - Debut of the personal boards and rewritten code for the replay boards (by BP).
• 4/11/2021 - Debut of the “What’s On” board in the metauni hub.
• 11/11/2021 - First VR test in a live event.
• 21/11/2021 - Personal whiteboards now support VR, and board subscriptions (demo).
• 9/12/2021 - First open source of the metaboard.
• 18/12/2021 - First release of private servers.
• 23/12/2021 - First release of persistent boards.
• 27/12/2021 - First release of the orb system for integrating Roblox’s spatial voice into metauni.
• 29/12/2021 - Re-release of the admin commands and update to use new boards.
• 8/1/2022 - Switch to spatial voice for metauni events.
• 27/1/2022 - Integration of the Avatar Editor (by Violet Sky!).

Music in the Rising Sea:

• “Pop with Toys” by Lucas Cantor - in our event video and on the audio plinth near the knot.
• “Forgotten Sacrifice” by Lucas Cantor - in the Cave of Forgotten Sacrifice
• “The Deification Of Naram-Sin” by Lucas Cantor - at the Solar Peak.
• “A Metric Based on Insects” by Will Troiani - in the Blind Cave.