Hello, there! Metaverse has suddenly become a trending topic, we have been hearing about it a lot on social media.
Imagine you meet your family members or friends, but not really, meet in the 3D visual world. That is created artificially. You enter this world while you're sitting in your room, by using a special headset or glasses.
Similarly, you're studying or shopping, you do almost all the things that you do in the real world, but not in the real world, instead in this virtual, artificially created world, using this special VR headset or glasses right from your room. *Insane*
Doesn't that sound a bit strange?
Friends, the Metaverse promises something like this for the future. It is considered a technology that would replace the internet in the future, and will become the future of humanity. I think we will see that more AI will be used in different fields in the coming time.
WHAT IS METAVERSE?
The word Metaverse is made up of two words "Meta" + "Verse". The word Meta is derived from Greek, it is a prefix that basically means 'Beyond'. And the Verse comes from the word 'Universe.'
Metaverse is basically used to refer to an artificially created world. The Internet can also be said to be a separate world but when you go on the Internet and search or view something, it is mostly limited to 2 Dimensions only. Whether you use your phone or your computer, these are two-dimensional screens.
But when talking about the metaverse, the metaverse would be a world where you can totally be in it, in 3 Dimensions.
Like when you watch a move, you wouldn't be watching the movie only as a viewer, means you will not be looking at the screen, You would experience being in the movie.
For example, you're watching a football match on the television, You will only see the video of it on the screen, which is in 2 dimensions. But technically, if we use VR (virtual reality), then you would get a 360° experience of watching the football match around you.
It will try to create an experience that would make you feel as if you're actually at the match.
As you might see in a virtual reality concert, singers perform on a digital stage, and you see them as animated figures through VR headsets.
The word Metaverse was first used in the year 1992. In the Sci-fi book Snow Crash written by Neal Stephenson.
In this novel, he talked about a dystopian world, a world where real-life has been destroyed the outdoors wasn't livable for humans anymore, so everyone lives confined to their homes and spends their life in virtual reality. He presented the ultimate evolution of the Internet as a kind of virtual interaction that can have a direct impact on the real world. Virtual reality, the artificial world, was referred to as Metaverse by him.
In 2003, a game called Second Life was released you could play this game on the computer, and create a another life in this game on the computer. Meeting people virtually, buying items, buying properties in the game, exchanging goods and services, and creating realistic looking avatar (character).
Similarly, the word Avatar was used here for the characters in the virtual reality that you could created they'd be your Avatars.
Obviously, this word became more popular in the rest of the world with the release of the 2009 film Avatar, there are one more popular film have made with the concept of virtual reality is Ready player one.
Like this 3D animation of Mark Zuckerberg created by him, this 3D character is the Avatar of Mark Zuckerberg who look alike.
When Facebook decided to change the name of their company to Meta. Saying that they want to adopt the Metaverse, this word was made popular again they want to expand from being a social media company to a Metaverse company.
Recently, many companies tried to create their virtual worlds and Metaverses.
Mark Zuckerberg defined the Metaverse in this manner.
"And you're gonna be able to do almost anything you can imagine. Get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create, as well as entirely new categories that don't really fit how we think about computers and phones today".
HOW METAVERSE WORK?
First, let's understand how the Metaverse is created. Various technologies are used here, to actually create the Metaverse such as Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality.
The first is Virtual Reality (VR) this technology already exists today but to use this, you have to wear these kind of heavy headsets.
And the problem is that if you have them on for more than half an hour, they start causing headaches, and motion sickness as claimed by many users.
As well, the things that you can see in virtual reality headsets now, the level of technology that we have today is quite poor. The animation quality that you see in virtual reality games and movies, videos you can see is not realistic.
It is also being hoped that something that would definitely improve with time. Although these heavy headsets with the new technologies, they would keep getting smaller & slimmer in the end they'd be the size of normal glasses. Where it wearing it and taking it off would be as easy as wearing and taking off a pair of glasses, what will actually be possible, only time will tell.
The second technology is Augmented Reality (AR) It would mean that some artificial elements mixed with our real world, it wouldn't be a complete Virtual Reality.
A good example of this is the game Pokémon Go on it, when you look at the real world through a smartphone, you can see artificial Pokémon out there. It seems like they are mixed in the real world around you. And there are many smartphone applications available that they use AR.
Another example of it is, the Google Glass that was released in 2014. A product that was released and taken back without people finding out about it.
But Google Glass had a huge hype around 2013-14, glasses with which you could add virtual elements in the real world. When you wear it and look at the road in front of you, there be a map at the corner of the glasses,
You could capture to someone through the camera, while looking in front of you, even while walking, this feature was heavily criticized. There was the issue of privacy because they had a camera many places had already banned them because with people wearing them, no one knew who was being recorded when.
In fact, this was mocked so much that eventually, the Google Glass was a huge flop.
USES 5G, CRYPTOCURRENCY, BLOCKCHAIN, NFTs
Apart from this, having 5G technology in the Metaverse is also talked about. If we're to create a huge virtual world we did need to constantly upload and download a huge amount of data for this, we needed extremely high internet speeds as 5G.
Additionally, Blockchains and cryptocurrencies are also mentioned, when talking about the Metaverse. When money would be spent to buy anything in the Metaverse, they can't be real money of course, because everything is digital so there would be a need for digital currency.
This is where Cryptocurrencies come and because there's a large number of transactions constantly, they'd need to be kept secure. There would be a threat of hackers, or the threat of data breaches too, to keep these secure, Blockchains might be used.
How can Blockchains keep the data secure, if you want to buy property or any asset in the Metaverse, It is said that it'll be accomplished through NFTs.
Non Fungible Tokens, you can think of NFTs as tokens, that exists on the blockchain, and can prove the ownership of any digital asset. How would you prove that you own a particular digital asset in the Metaverse? An NFT will prove it.
WHEN METAVERSE WE USE?
Although all these technologies exist individually on a basic level, but by combining them, and creating a true Metaverse will take a lot of time.
Mark Zuckerberg estimates that it would take about 5 to 10 years, for the key features of Metaverse to become a part of the mainstream.
Some experts believe that it would actually take decades, before something like to the Metaverse could become so popular.
Will this Metaverse be successful?
Does anyone wants it and is there a demand for it? And it is a very interesting question.
Because if you look at the technologies like Google Glass, there were a lot of efforts put into making it popular around 2014. Many celebrities and influencer went around wearing it, showing how cool they were.
But eventually, the Google Glass was a flop there are many reasons for the lack of response, they had a battery life of 3 hours only, looked weird, privacy issue, etc. Many countries went about banning them.
But, there was an even more important reason behind the failure of Google Glass.
They didn't have any feature that the people truly needed. It did look very cool, a futuristic technology and the people who owned one of these, they could show-off the features of the Glass.
Real life use was next to none anything you could do on Google Glass, you could already do it on your smartphone and better. Just take your phone out of your pocket and use it there was basically no use case for the Google Glass.
Metaverse sounds very cool but something similar can be said about the Metaverse too. It is very cool to try it for the first time, seeing how you can sit in a 3D virtual environment and communicate with others, having 3D meetings, but realistically why would you people go through so much trouble such everyone needs to put on the glasses, and call everyone else on the 3D setup.
It's easier to simply take out the phone and get on a normal video call or talk to them via messaging that's much easier to do so. It would be very difficult for a this kind of technology to become mainstream. No one wants to put in so much efforts. Only the things that are simple would be successful.
CONCLUSION!
If you spend more time in the Metaverse, the more data they would be able to collect from you threat to privacy and data theft. You are tracked on Facebook by all possible means, what content that you like, the accounts follows you are shown only the things that you like.
In my opinion, the second point of more significant is do we really want to distance ourselves from the real world so much that we forget how to live real lives. That we spend all our lives in this fake artificial world.
If this virtual world becomes so addictive and immersive, people will stop worrying about the real world. Somehow it will definitely have an effect on our mental health as well. It will be very depressing.
Think how dangerous it would be when such a virtual world is being created, Mark Zuckerberg would become the literal God of the Metaverse. If he gets control over everything. If the Metaverse truly becomes successful, and people start doing everything in the Metaverse, think about the level of power with that one person and one company.
This might be danger for privacy. What is your opinion on the Metaverse? What do you think?
Comment below to let me know.
I hope you found this article to be informative. Thank you very much.
