What Is the Metaverse: Where Does This Concept Came From

What is the metaverse and where does the concept come from?

The term Metaverse dates back to Neal Stephenson and his dystopian online punk novel Snow Crash. The novel was published in 1992 and is considered the canon of the genre, along with William Gibson's Neuromancer, which describes a virtual reality data room called The Matrix.

Snow Crash's metaverse is a 3D VR space accessed through personal terminals and VR headsets, which have much in common with the Oculus Quest and other VR headsets. This three-dimensional space is presented to its users as an urban environment created along a hundred meter wide street, the street. Stephenson writes:

Like any place in real life, the street is subject to development. Developers can lay their own small off-road paths. You can build buildings, gardens, signs, as well as objects that don't exist in real life, such as giant floating light shows, special neighborhoods where the rules of 3D space-time are ignored, and areas where you can play freely. people can go kill each other.

If Stephenson's vision of the meta-version sounds familiar, it's because multiplayer online games (MMOGs, or more commonly MMOs) share many of its characteristics. For example, in Second Life (launched in 2003), users can customize realistic avatars, meet other players, create virtual items, own virtual assets, and exchange goods and services.

You can reference a virtual experience such as Second Life as a prototype. Why the prefix? Because they exist in isolation, each is a digital island where virtual residents and assets never leave. The metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg wants to create is not a great virtual experience, it is the next version of the Internet.

We have moved from desktop to web to mobile “ from text to images to video. But that is not the end of the story, Zuckerberg wrote in a recent letter to his staff. The next platform will be even more complete: an integrated web where you immerse yourself in the experience, not just look at it. We call this the Metaverse and it will affect every product we build."

Does the meta entry already exist?

For the metaversion to be integrated into the Internet, it must have certain characteristics that differentiate it from isolated virtual reality experiences like Second Life.

Venture capitalist Matthew Ball describes them on his website:

The Metaverse is a huge, interoperable network of real-time 3D virtual worlds that are constantly synchronized and shared by an almost unlimited number of users with a sense of individual presence and with a continuum of data such as identification, history, sources, objects, communications, and payments. .

For clarity, let's list the properties of metavers:

• very extensive
• compatible
• published in real time
• 3D worlds displayed
• synchronized
• persistent
• unlimited user
• individual presence
• data continuity

Metaverse: an example of futuristic retail

In fact, the meta tag will be created when a user can enter a giant virtual shopping mall that can experience as many as the virtual space can receive, buy a unique digital product, and then sell the same digital product in it a few weeks later. be a completely different virtual world, or maybe on Twitter, eBay or OpenSea.

Some may say wait a minute; I saw this photo.

Originally written by Ernest Cline and published by Random House in 2011, the movie Ready Player One was directed by Steven Spielberg and is possibly the best visual example we have of what the metaverse might look like conceptually.

However, there are some fundamental differences in the film regarding the experts' opinions on the upcoming metaverse, including the fact that there is only one main scene in the film, Oasis, which consists of a metaverse created by the game company. fictional Social Games. Another key difference is the primary use of VR hardware for communication in the image version of the Metaverse, as some experts believe that VR is generally underused compared to AR hardware (not identified in image ).

What will drive the Metaverse?

Metaverse works with a variety of technologies, including cloud infrastructure, software tools, systems, applications, custom materials, and hardware. In addition to technical requirements, the Metaverse will include a wide range of user experiences, including but not limited to entertainment, gaming, business, social interaction, education, and research.

When does Metaverse arrive?

The question then is how long does it take us to go from several primary metavers to large metavers? Mark Zuckerberg thinks this will be the case by the end of the decade, but it could be much sooner when the basics are in place.

The structure behind the internet today allows for large numbers of people to come together in a virtual environment, such as when over 12.3 million gamers attended a virtual reality concert in Fortnite with Travis Scott. This existing infrastructure is very impressive, but will likely need to be developed to support Metaverse industry professionals.

We also have the hardware to create a realistic 3D virtual environment and avatar. Take a look at the leading virtual reality headset manufacturer, Oculus. Microsoft has supported various corporate use cases with its HoloLens mixed reality headset since it launched in 2016. Also, there are rumors that Apple will release its AR and VR headsets in 2022. HTC, Pico, MagicLeap and other manufacturers are quickly coming up with new features. different hardware platforms, while the particular technology architecture turns various workloads into peripherals through the back-end server infrastructure. Unity's Furioos is a great example of streaming a fully interactive real-time 3D environment.

Finally, the same innovative technology that has revolutionized the financial services industry since the creation of the Bitcoin network in January 2009 can be used to enable data continuity in the Metaverse. NFTs, or unalterable tokens, are a great example of how blockchain technology can be used to verify ownership of digital assets, and there are already 3D virtual reality platforms that take advantage of these benefits.

Marc Petit, VP and CEO of the Unreal Engine at EPIC Games, said in a recent interview that the metaverse would require "permanently shared virtual worlds." This means that for a seamless customer experience, users should be able to go from one universe to another with their digital objects. An example of this would be that NFT user shoes purchased from Nike will be available in the future for use as an avatar on the Horizon Meta platform and also in other virtual worlds such as those in Fortnite and Minecraft.

Another example, Decentraland is a completely dispersed world with no central control. The world is built on the Ethereum blockchain and managed by an independent distributed organization. With this organization and voting, players can control the politics that determines how the world behaves. Decentraland also has its distributed coin, MANA, which can be exchanged for other coins on cryptocurrency exchanges.

In the future, Decentraland could be one of many scattered worlds that are part of the meta-exchange, where digital assets and currencies flow between them, just as fiat money and physical goods are shared by people living in different countries in The real world.

While no one would own the Metaverse per se, any more than anyone on the internet today, there will undoubtedly be many major players in this arena and companies like Meta, Microsoft, Unity, Epic Games, Roblox and others will be among them. . it is because they are investing billions of dollars in the reality of the sci-fi dream.

The metaverse is just an idea that science fiction writer Neal Stephenson first outlined in his novel Snow Crash. It could become a reality soon, as many big tech companies are betting that it will be as big, if not bigger, than the Internet today. Those who don't want to wait for one-of-a-kind virtual experiences to form a giant world at home can take part in systems like Decentraland, Horizon Workrooms, or Roblox to get at least a glimpse of what the future might look like.

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