What is the Metaverse, Exactly? Everything you never wanted to know about the future talks about the future.
HEARING TECH CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg or Satya Nadella talk about it, the metaverse is the future of the internet. Or it's a video game. Or maybe it's a very uncomfortable and worse version of Zoom? It's hard to say.
To a certain extent, talking about what is meant by the “metaverse” is like discussing what the “internet” was in the 1970s. The building blocks of this new form of communication are in the process of being built, but no one really knows what it will actually look like. So while it was true, at the time, that the "internet" was coming, not all ideas of what it was like were true.
On the other hand, there's also a lot of marketing hype wrapped up in this metaverse idea. Facebook, in particular, is in a particularly vulnerable place after Apple's move to limit ad tracking hit the company. It's impossible to separate Facebook's vision of a future where everyone has a digital wardrobe to shift from the fact that Facebook really wants to make money selling virtual clothes.
So, with all that in mind…
Seriously, What Does 'Metaverse' Mean?
To help you understand how vague and complex the term "metaverse" is, here's an exercise to try: Mentally replace the phrase "metaverse" in a sentence with "cyberspace." Ninety percent of the time, the meaning won't change substantially. That's because the term doesn't really refer to one particular type of technology, but rather a broad shift in how we interact with technology. And it's very likely that the term itself will eventually become just as archaic, even as the specific technology once described becomes commonplace.
Broadly speaking, the technologies that make up the metaverse can include virtual reality—characterized by persistent virtual worlds that persist even when you're not playing—as well as augmented reality that combines aspects of the digital and physical worlds. However, it doesn't require that the space be accessed exclusively via VR or AR. Virtual worlds, such as aspects of Fortnite accessible via PC, game consoles, and even mobile phones, can be metaversal.
This also translates into a digital economy, where users can create, buy and sell goods. And, in a more idealistic vision of the metaverse, it's interoperable, allowing you to carry virtual items like clothes or cars from one platform to another. In the real world, you can buy a shirt from the mall and then wear it to the movies. Today, most platforms have virtual identities, avatars, and inventory tied to just one platform, but the metaverse lets you create personas that you can carry around as easily as copying a profile picture from one social network to another.
It's hard to decipher what all this means because when you hear a description like the one above, the understandable response is, "Wait, isn't that already there?" World of Warcraft, for example, is a persistent virtual world where players can buy and sell items. Fortnite has virtual experiences such as concerts and exhibitions where Rick Sanchez can learn about MLK Jr. You can plug in your Oculus headset and be in your own private virtual home. Is that really what "metaverse" means? Just some new kind of video game?
Well, yes and no. Saying that Fortnite is a "metaverse" would be a bit like saying Google is the "internet." Even if you could, theoretically, spend a lot of time in Fortnite, socializing, buying stuff, studying, and playing games, that doesn't mean that it covers the entire scope of the metaverse.
On the other hand, it's just as accurate to say that Google is building parts of the internet—from physical data centers to layers of security—it's also accurate to say that Fortnite creators, Epic Games, are building parts of the metaverse. And it's not the only company doing it. Some of that work will be done by tech giants like Microsoft and Facebook—the latter was recently renamed Meta to reflect this work, though we're still not familiar with the name. Many other companies—including Nvidia, Unity, Roblox, and even Snap—are all working to build infrastructure that might become a metaverse.
It is at this point that much of the discussion about the metaverse comes to a halt. We have a vague understanding of what things currently exist that we might call the metaverse, and we know which companies are investing in the idea, but we still don't know what it is. Facebook—sorry, Meta, still don't get it—thought it would include a fake house you could invite all your friends to hang out with. Microsoft seems to think it could involve space
virtual meetings to train new employees or chat with your remote coworkers.
The tone for this vision of the future ranges from optimistic to fan fiction. At one point during a…Meta… presentation on the metaverse, the company showed a scenario where a young woman was sitting on a couch scrolling through Instagram when she saw a video a friend posted of a concert taking place halfway around the world.
The video then moves on to the concert, where the woman appears in an Avengers-style hologram. He could make eye contact with his friend who was physically there, they could both hear the concert, and they could see floating text hovering over the stage. This seems cool, but it's not really advertising a real product, or even a possible future product. In fact, this brings us to the biggest problem with the "metaverse."
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What is the Metaverse, Exactly? Everything you never wanted to know about the future talks about the future.
Why Does Metaverse Involve Holograms?
When the internet first came along, it started with a series of technological innovations, such as the ability to let computers talk to each other over great distances or the ability to hyperlink from one web page to another. These technical features are the building blocks that are then used to create the abstract structures we know about the internet: websites, apps, social networks, and everything else that depends on those core elements. Not to mention the convergence of interface innovations that are not strictly a part of the internet but are still needed to make it work, such as screens, keyboards, mice, and touch screens.
With the metaverse, there are some new building blocks, such as the ability to host hundreds of people on a single server instance (ideally future versions of the metaverse will be able to handle thousands or even millions of people at once), or motion tracking tools that can tell where someone is looking or at. where is his hand? This new technology can be very interesting and feel futuristic.
However, there are limitations that are impossible to overcome. When tech companies like Microsoft or Fa—Meta show fictional videos of their visions of the future, they often tend to overlook how people will interact with the metaverse. VR headsets are still very clunky, and most people experience motion sickness or physical pain if they wear them for too long. Augmented reality glasses face the same problem, on top of the insignificant problem of figuring out how people can wear them in public without looking like a big fool.
So how do tech companies show off their tech ideas without showing the reality of bulky headsets and tacky glasses? So far their main solution seems to be just making the technology out of whole cloth. Holographic woman from Meta presentation? I hate to shatter illusions, but that's not possible even with very advanced versions of existing technology.
Unlike motion-tracked digital avatars, which are a bit sluggish right now but could get better someday, there's no stuttering version of making three-dimensional images appear in mid-air without tightly controlled circumstances. It doesn't matter what Iron Man tells you. Perhaps this is meant to be interpreted as an image projected through the glasses—after all, both women in the demo video wear similar glasses—but even that assumes a lot about the physical capabilities of the compact glasses, which Snap can tell you isn't a simple problem to solve.
This kind of masking reality is often present in video demos of how the metaverse can work. Another Meta demo shows characters floating in space—are these people strapped to an immersive air rig or are they just sitting at a table? The person represented by the hologram—is this person wearing a headset, and if so, how is their face scanned? And at some point, someone picks up virtual items but then holds them in their physical hands.
This demo raises more questions than answers.
On a certain level, this is fine. Microsoft, Meta, and every other company that shows wild demos like this trying to give an artistic impression of the future, doesn't have to explain every technical question. It's an old tradition that goes back to AT&T's demo of a voice-controlled foldable phone that could magically erase people from images and produce 3D models, all of which might have seemed equally impossible at the time.
However, some sort of wishful thinking-as-technology demo leaves us in a place where it is difficult to determine which aspects of the various
ai visions of a truly real metaverse someday. If VR and AR headsets become comfortable and cheap enough for people to wear every day—a substantial “if”—then perhaps the idea of a virtual poker game where your friends are robots and holograms and float through space could come a bit closer to reality. Otherwise, you can always play Tabletop Simulator on Discord video calls.
The sparkle of VR and AR also obscures the more mundane aspects of the metaverse that might be more likely to come to fruition. It would be very easy for tech companies to find, say, standard open digital avatars, file types that include characteristics you might put into character builders—such as your choice of eye color, hairstyle, or clothing—and allow you to take them with you wherever you go. There's no need to build a more comfortable VR headset for that.
But that's not fun to imagine.
What's the Metaverse Like Today?
The paradox of defining the metaverse is that to be the future, you must define the present. We already have MMOs which are basically entire virtual worlds, digital concerts, video calls with people from all over the world, online avatars, and trading platforms. So to sell these things as a new vision of the world, there must be some new elements.
Spend enough time discussing the metaverse and someone will inevitably refer to a fictional story like Snow Crash—the 1992 novel that coined the term “metaverse”—or Ready Player One, which describes a VR world where everyone works, plays, and shops. Combined with the common pop culture idea of holograms and heads-up displays (basically whatever Iron Man has used in his last 10 films), these stories serve as imaginative reference points for metaverses—metaverses that tech companies could actually sell as something. . new—could look like.
Mentally replace the phrase "metaverse" in the sentence with "cyberspace." Ninety percent of the time, the meaning won't change substantially.
That kind of hype is as vital a part of the idea of the metaverse as any other. It's no wonder, then, that people promoting things like NFTs—cryptographic tokens that can serve as certificates of ownership of a digital item, sort of—are also latching onto the idea of the metaverse. Sure, NFTs are bad for the environment, but if it could be argued that these tokens might be the digital key to your virtual mansion in Roblox, then boom. You've just transformed your hobby of buying memes into a crucial piece of infrastructure for the future of the internet (and possibly raised the value of all that cryptocurrency you're holding.)
It's important to keep all this context in mind because while it's tempting to compare the proto-metaverse ideas we have today to the early internet and assume everything will get better and progress in a linear fashion, that's not a given. There's no guarantee people will even want to hang out sans legs in a virtual office or play poker with Dreamworks Mark Zuckerberg, much less whether VR and AR tech will ever become seamless enough to be as common as smartphones and computers are today.
It may even be the case that any real “metaverse” would be little more than some cool VR games and digital avatars in Zoom calls, but mostly just something we still think of as the internet.
© What is the Metaverse, Exactly? Everything you never wanted to know about the future talks about the future.
Source: https://www.pkbmcelahcahaya.edu.eu.org