You’ve probably seen or noticed that when you launch your Whatsapp, Instagram, and Facebook, you’ll see ‘from Meta’ at the bottom as the app launches. Recently Facebook changed their company name to meta because they plan to build something called the Metaverse. We should be talking about the Metaverse and be excited about it because it will change our lives! We need to understand what it is, why we should be excited about it, and how it can change the community.
The term metaverse was coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, where humans, as programmable avatars, interact with each other and software agents in a three-dimensional virtual space that uses the metaphor of the real world. Stephenson used the term to describe a virtual reality-based successor to the Internet.
CONCEPT OF METAVERSE
Throughout history has constantly been moving towards more and more engaging mediums. We’ve gone through text to photos to videos, from reading books to spending our time to TiK ToK and other social media on the Internet. The Metaverse is what comes next.
According to Wikipedia, a metaverse is a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection. In futurism and science fiction, the term is often described as a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal virtual world facilitated by virtual and augmented reality headsets.
The future we’re going to have would be an internet that you are not just looking at through a screen, but you are right inside of it. Think of what you could do right now with friends; shopping, chatting, watching videos on YouTube, playing games, etc. Now imagine that in the time it takes you to snap your finger, you could be doing those things virtually in a way that feels real with the presence of people you want to be with. It’s a living, shared, eternal virtual universe; that’s the meta vision of the Metaverse.
Live Out your fantasies.
The Metaverse will allow people to live out their fantasies. In one single evening, you might be fighting your enemies in a combat game with the knowledge that you are safe at home, or you could be playing chess with a friend in New York.
Express yourself the way you want
On a similar note, you could also express yourself the way you want it. Like the profile picture you have on your social media platforms, in the Metaverse, you won’t just have an image; you’ll have an avatar, a filled dimension living to depicture of you where you could wish to be taller, and you have it, or wish to have a bigger forehead, and you’ll have it, you could choose any gender you want, any race you want any creature you want.
Create Choices you want
Meta is working towards creating a completely real image like the Avatars. This won’t be a game. It’s real life. This realism, combined with the other number of choices you get, makes it feel like you are not being constrained by the body that you are physical. In real life, you could be physically disabled in a wheelchair, but in the Metaverse, you could fly.
Teleportation
I’ve always dreamt about the idea of teleportation, especially when I’m stuck in a traffic jam! That horrifies me because I’m always trying to be efficient with my time. Nothing of such would happen in a metaverse as each person can create a room and the aesthetic that you want others to see, you can then invite other people you want to appear within it, and boom! You have it. It would just be the equivalent of clicking a link on your browser.
New Learning Environment
Metaverse also includes learning, just the way we see our library now as the old version by the advent of typing what we want to know on Google. The Metaverse would make typing words on google an old version as you can learn about things by just touching them or even looking at them, and you could be able to attain information about them more visually.
More Productivity
The Metaverse is going to make us even more productive, for instance, I’m working from home, ln the Metaverse, it will also be possible, but, it would present a more optima environment where you could decide to be surrounded by others or sit alone; whether in an office space or a magical jungle. It’s up to you to decide whether you want a completely quiet environment when you work or you want to play music.
The Metaverse allows us to input faster, a lot of us grew up writing with a pen, but now, people are shifting to tapping on keyboards. In the Metaverse, we’ll be making use of voices gestures and even make things happen by just thinking about them.
Meta is working on electronic myographys input devices that could detect our nerves’ impulses. The signals from what your brain is telling should be what your fingers are doing by translating those fingers to the corresponding actions in the virtual space. in other words, you’ll be able to send a message to someone by just a slight motion of your fingers
How Soon Should We Expect the Metaverse?
In 2022, meta is coming with a headset Codenamed ‘Project Cambria’, a high-end VR headset designed for Facebook’s Metaverse. The company tested the device during its recent Connect conference sometime in October 2021.
The headset would be comfortable enough and be able to track your real facial expression; it would then become easier to hold virtual conferences seeing people’s real-time facial expressions. Facebook promises to sell this headset at a highly subsidized rate to make it affordable for many people. So the Metaverse is right here already.
Participants in the metaverse phase
Top companies building Metaverse
- a) Epic Games. Epic Games, the company behind the popular immersive game Fortnite, was always perfectly poised to build the Metaverse.
- b) Facebook (Meta)
- c) Niantic
- d) Nvidia
- e) Microsoft
- f) Decentraland
- g) Apple
Opportunities in Metaverse
The New Economy
The Metaverse would create a new economy. The meta is developing a store within it where anyone could be a seller. You can create virtual clothing; you can craft a virtual experience and ask people to try it. We are then not just constrained by the physical materials we can get hold of.
Every forward-thinking brand will make sure they have a presence here. If we spend the whole time in the Metaverse, then that’s where we meet people and appear to others. Our virtual appearances or virtual homes are important, just like our physical homes.
How will the economy in the meta work?
Transactions on this economy will largely depend on crypto to ensure that people don’t just buy a product in the metaverse store and begin distributing it. Crypto Blockchain has a unique set of identities particular to just one person that makes products bought on Metaverse unique to every original owner.
What are my fears?
For metaverses, information privacy is an area of concern because related companies will likely collect users’ personal information through interactions and biometric data from wearable virtual reality devices. Data collection on the level of measuring our brain activities
User addiction is another concern. Internet addiction disorder, social media, and video game addiction can have mental and physical repercussions over a prolonged period, such as depression, anxiety, and various other harms related to having a sedentary lifestyle.
Experts are also concerned that metaverses could be used to escape from reality. Virtual experiences addiction may make you lose touch with what’s real.
Conclusion
The Metaverse combines virtual reality, augmented reality, blockchain, and social media. It is a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social interaction using virtual reality headsets.
The obvious benefits of Metaverse improve our experiences, expression, teleportation, knowledge, and productivity. Metaverse is the next generation of social media. The Metaverse will feel normal like the Internet is now.
The Metaverse is not one thing: one moment it’s here, another moment it’s out, it’s not a question of if we’re going to get there, the Metaverse is here, and it’s going to keep evolving towards what the company meta spoke about.
It’s not just a Facebook thing; it’s the universe. That is why these big tech companies together are slowly but surely creating it. Facebook is just the first one to make it official.
