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Lately, we've all been seeing and reading this term Metaverse, everywhere. The term has attracted worldwide attention. To an extent, talking about what Metaverse meant is like talking about what the Internet meant in the 1970s. The building blocks of the new form of communication were in the process of being formed, but no one knew what the reality would be. While this is true, at the time the "Internet" was coming, not every idea of what it would look like is true. On the other hand, a lot of marketing hype is wrapped up in this idea of Metaverse. Facebook is particularly vulnerable after Apple approached the bottom of the company due to Apple's move to limit ad tracking. It is impossible to separate Facebook's vision for the future, as everyone has a digital wardrobe to swipe from the fact that they want to make money by selling virtual clothes.
While it may seem that the metaverse is a product of Meta’s wild ambition, that’s not the case at all. Some would argue that the metaverse Mark Zuckerberg spent so much time describing during the Connect 2021 conference keynote already exists, while others see it as the next evolution of the internet known as Web3 or Web 3.0.
Now everyone wants to know what it is and how it works. If you are looking for answers on Metaverse, this article can help you.
What is metaverse?
A metaverse is a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection and it can be defined as a simulated digital environment that uses augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and blockchain, along with concepts from social media, to create spaces for rich user interaction mimicking the real world.
It covers nearly everything, such as games, meetings, and shopping. To access Metaverse, you must first put on a headset, after which you can connect to the virtual reality interface.
History of Metaverse
The term metaverse was coined by Neil Stephenson almost 30 years ago in his science fiction novel Snow Crash, in which he imagined living avatars encountered in realistic 3D buildings and other virtual reality environments.
In recent years, Metaverse has come to represent the utopian convergence of digital experiences driven by Moore's Law, to enable a rich, real-time, globally-interconnected virtual- and augmented-real environment that will enable billions of people to work and play.
Does the Metaverse Already Exist?
If the metaverse is to become an embodied internet, then it must have certain properties that separate it from isolated virtual reality experiences like Second Life.
What Will be the Power of the Metaverse?
The metaverse will be driven by diverse forms of technology such as cloud infrastructure, software tools, platforms, applications, user-generated content, and hardware. In addition to the technical requirements, the metaverse will include various user experiences including, but not limited to, entertainment, gaming, commerce, social interactions, education, and research.
Why do holograms include Metaverse?
When the internet first arrived, it started with a series of technological innovations, like 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 were the building blocks that were then used to make the abstract structures we know the internet for websites, apps, social networks, and everything else that relies on those core elements. And that's to say nothing of the convergence of the interface innovations that aren't strictly part of the internet but are still necessary to make it work, such as displays, keyboards, mice, and touchscreens.
With the metaverse, there are some new building blocks in place, like the ability to host hundreds of people in a single instance of a server (ideally future versions of a metaverse will be able to handle thousands or even millions of people at once), or motion-tracking tools that can distinguish where a person is looking or where their hands are. These new technologies can be very exciting and feel futuristic.
However, there are limitations that may be impossible to overcome. When tech companies like Microsoft or Fa Meta show fictionalized videos of their visions of the future, they frequently tend to gloss over just 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 a similar problem, on top of the not-insignificant issue of figuring out how people can wear them around in public without looking like huge dorks.
So, how do tech companies show off the idea of their technology without showing the reality of bulky headsets and dorky glasses? So far their primary solution seems to be to simply fabricate technology from whole cloth. The holographic woman from Meta's presentation? I hate to shatter the illusion, but it's simply not possible with even very advanced versions of existing technology.
Unlike motion-tracked digital avatars, which are kind of janky right now but could be better someday, there's no janky version of making a three-dimensional picture appear in midair without tightly controlled circumstances. No matter what Iron Man tells you. Perhaps these are meant to be interpreted as images projected via glasses both women in the demo video are wearing similar glasses, after all, but even that assumes a lot about the physical capabilities of compact glasses, which Snap can tell you isn't a simple problem to solve.
This kind of glossing over reality is frequently present in video demos of how the metaverse could work. Another of Meta's demos showed characters floating in space is this person strapped to an immersive aerial rig or are they just sitting at a desk? A person represented by a hologram does this person have a headset on, and if so how is their face being scanned? And at points, a person grabs virtual items but then holds those objects in what seems to be their physical hands. This demo raises so many more questions than it answers.
On some level, this is fine. Microsoft, Meta, and every other company that shows wild demos like this are trying to give an artistic impression of what the future could be, not necessarily accounting for every technical question. It's a time-honored tradition going back to AT&T's demo of a voice-controlled foldable phone that could magically erase people from images and generate 3D models, all of which might've seemed similarly impossible at the time.
However, this kind of wishful-thinking-as-tech-demo leaves us in a place where it's hard to pinpoint which aspects of the various visions of the metaverse will actually be real one day. If VR and AR headsets become comfortable and cheap enough for people to wear on a daily basis a substantial “if” then perhaps the idea of a virtual poker game where your friends are robots and holograms floating in space could be somewhat close to reality. If not, well you could always play Tabletop Simulator on a Discord video call.
The flashiness of VR and AR also obscure the more mundane aspects of the metaverse that might be more likely to come to fruition. It would be trivially easy for tech companies to invent, say, an open digital avatar standard, a type of file that includes characteristics you might enter into a character creator like eye color, hairstyle, or clothing options, and let you take it everywhere. There's no need to build a more comfortable VR headset for that.
But that's not as fun to imagine.
Rise of Metaverse
In fact, Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Meta (formerly known as Facebook), estimates that it may take five to 10 years for Metavers' main features to become mainstream. But Metaverse is growing aggressively.
You can see the ultra-fast broadband speeds, virtual reality headsets, and the continuous-on-online world already on and on, even if they are not accessible to everyone.
What is the Metaverse right now?
The paradox of defining the metaverse is that in order for it to be the future, you have to define away the present. We already have MMOs that are essentially entire virtual worlds, digital concerts, video calls with people from all over the world, online avatars, and commerce platforms. So in order to sell these things as a new vision of the world, there has to be some element of it that's new.
Spend enough time having discussions about the metaverse and inevitably someone will reference fictional stories like Snow Crash the 1992 novel that coined the term Metaverse or Ready Player One, which depicts a VR world where everyone works, plays, and shops. Combined with the general pop-culture idea of holograms and heads-up displays these stories serve as an imaginative reference point for what the metaverse a metaverse that tech companies could actually sell as something new could look like.
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.
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 are 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.
When will Metaverse come?
So the question is, how long will it take to move from the various proto-metaverse to the massive metaverse? Mark Zuckerberg believes it will happen by the end of the decade, but it could also be much sooner because the basic elements are already in place. Today's Internet-backed infrastructure allows large crowds to gather in virtual environments, such as Travis Scott's VR concert in Fortnite with over 12.3 million players tuned in. While this current infrastructure is very effective, it will need to be further developed to support the idea of Metaverse Industry experts.
We also have the hardware to render realistic virtual environments and avatars in 3D. The leading manufacturer of virtual reality headsets is owned by Meta, Oculus. Since its first release at Microsoft in 2016, HoloLens has been supporting a variety of enterprise usage cases, including mixed reality smart glasses. In addition, Apple is rumored to be releasing its AR and VR headsets in 2022. HTC, Pico, MagicLeap, and other manufacturers are making rapid progress. Different hardware platforms, while Cascade technology architectures are shifting various computer loads on back-end server infrastructure to edge devices. Unity Furious is a prime example of streaming fully interactive real-time 3D environments where environment rendering is handled by their automatically scaled GPU server infrastructure. Metaverse will be a ubiquitous computer experience where users can take advantage of traditional devices such as computers and mobile devices as well as enhance the experience with emerging immersive AR and VR wearables.
Finally, the same innovative technology that has been disrupting the financial services industry since the Bitcoin network came into existence in January 2009 can be used to enable data continuity in the metaverse. NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, are a great example of how blockchain technology can be used to verify ownership of digital assets, and 3D virtual reality platforms already exist that take advantage of them.
MarkPetit, vice president and general manager of Unreal Engine at Epic Games, said in a recent interview that Metaverse would require a "shared virtual world that includes perseverance." This means that for the ideal customer experience, the user must be able to travel the world with their digital goods. An example of this would be the user's NFT shoes purchased from Nike in the future for use on avatars on Meta's Horizon platform, but also in other virtual worlds such as Fortnite and Minecraft.
Another example, Decentraland, is a completely decentralized world with no central leadership. The world is based on the Ethereum blockchain and is controlled by a decentralized autonomous body. Through this organization and voting, players can control the policies that determine how the world behaves. Decentraland also has a decentralized currency, the MANA, which can be exchanged for other currencies on cryptocurrency exchanges.
In the future, decentralized could be one of the many decentralized worlds that form part of the metaverse, in which digital assets and currencies will flow as fiat money and material goods are exchanged in the real world by people living in different countries.
Today, just as there is no one who owns the Internet, Metaverse will have many important players in space, even if they don't own it, and companies like Meta, Microsoft, Unity, Epic Games, Roblox, and others want to be among them, so they are pouring billions of dollars to make the sci-fi dream come true.
India's role in the construction of Metaverse
The IANS report also found that Mark Zuckerberg said that as social networks take the initial steps to create augmented reality (AR) driven metaverse experience for billions of people, India and its vast pool of talent will be a big part of that journey.
Speaking at the company's 'Fuel for India' event, Zuckerberg said that he was really excited about the role that India would play in shaping the future of the metaverse, the successors of the mobile internet.
"This is because India's engineers, developers, and manufacturers and the entire vibrant startup ecosystem are playing a big role in shaping the future. By 2024, India is on track to achieve the world's largest app developer base. It already has. One of the largest 'Spark AR' developer communities, Zuckerberg told Vishal Shah, VP, Metaverse during a conversation.
Future of Metaverse
Mark Zuckerberg-owned Meta also announced new tools to help people build for the Metaverse, including Presence Platform, which will enable new mixed reality experiences on Quest 2, and a $150 million investment in immersive learning to train the next generation of creators.
What are the problems with the metaverse?
Addiction and mental health. If you have watched Ready Player One, you know exactly how metaverse can affect your mental health. Addiction to the virtual world might not only lead to mental health problems like depression, anxiety but cause obesity and heart problems due to the sedentary lifestyle.
Conclusion
Metaverse is just an idea. Soon, this could become a reality as many big technology companies are betting that it will be as big as it is, even if it is not as big as today's internet. Anyone who doesn't have to wait for personal virtual experiences to create a vast world can join platforms like Decentraland, Horizon Workrooms, or Roblox to at least get an idea of what the future holds.
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