What is This Metaverse of Which You Speak?
Welcome to Metaverse, an alternative digital reality with profound implications for us all. Tim Sweeney of Epic Games sees the growing Metaverse as the next iteration of the internet where people will work and play socialize, shop and even live full time. The creation of complex, immersive, virtual social spaces of the Metaverse as depicted in Snow Crash is currently being brought into existence by the best minds in technology.
The term Metaverse is shorthand to describe the concept of future iterations of the Internet linking permanent, shared virtual 3D spaces with a perceived virtual universe. Wikipedia defines it as “a collective virtual common space created by the convergence of enhanced physical reality and permanent virtual spaces, including the sum of virtual worlds, augmented reality and the Internet”. Whatever you call the Metaverse — mirror worlds, AR clouds, magic verse, spatial Internet, or immersive computing — a thing is certain: its here now and its only going to get bigger and more important.
Currently millions of people and technology companies are heading for the Metaverse… even if they don’t know it yet! And somewhere out there, a tech company that will soon be worth billions is building the killer Metaverse app for the day when literally everything is online.
While Fortnite is a 3-D game that can be played in 2-D, Somnium Space, (www.SomniumSpace.com) a user-created virtual reality world, can be experienced today in fully immersive 3-D virtual reality. Think of it as an digital reality where you can create your own virtual experiences, invest, own land, make a living, meet up, socialize, share experiences, play games and collaborate, even sleep!
The Metaverse will eat the Internet, and spatially aware computing apps will take over much of the 2D “pancake” software we use today. Computing as we know it will not only transform into the Metaverse, but will also transform way we do business, learn, socialize, and revolutionize life as we know it.
Markets, societies, entire economies and even small countries will grow up in virtual worlds. Liberland is one small example while Hollywood — using game engine technology — has turned to virtual worlds for films like The Lion King and television series like The Mandalorian.
The collective Metaverse is a digital dimension so rich and diverse that billions of people will interact with it every day. It is potentially a digital heaven on earth, a place where all our desires, dreams and hopes can be realized. One day soon even our pets, both digital and IRL, will even be able to enter the Metaverse.
As can be inferred from the above, those currently “in world” are far from the only ones who will participate in the Metaverse. In the next short years, virtual reality, augmented reality and the Metaverse will enable most people in the to be more productive than our current analog world work.
Citizens will spend part or most of their waking hours working, playing, or at least being connected to the enlargement of the real world and augmented worlds. The appeal of virtual reality worlds may lead some to problems and some will even choose to move completely into these alternative realities. These dark (for some) visions are being actively built by some surveillance capitalism tech companies but there are alternatives, and if we demand it, a real open and secure Metaverse is possible. A Metaverse that will be an extension and addition to our daily lives and will both improve and enrich in ways we can scarcely imagine today.
Virtual reality may conjure up sci-fi notions of an immersive video games and living in the future, in reality its simply utility, poised to become the most important technology in the world. The CEO of Epic Games Tim Sweeney predicted in 2017 that “we are three years away from taking a step into the Metaverse,” Somnium Space took that timeline seriously and now is one of the most advanced shards of the Metaverse available for anyone to explore for free.
In the next decade, we will collectively spend more time in virtual 3-D worlds than we do today on the 2-D Internet. As companies vie for cheap wearable computing platforms, consumers will begin to have access to the Metaverse with lower and lower cost and friction. Deeper and deeper immersion will be gained with muscle feedback, eye tracking, face tracking, body tracking, haptic feedback and even taste and smell being integrated.
Augmented reality will enable the transfer of real information through the interplay of the Internet, RFID, GPS, smart tags and networked portable information technologies. Objects in the physical world are mapped, tagged and stored in databases to create mirror worlds and data-augmented virtual models of the real physical world, which will create new virtual layer worlds of which Pokemon Go is only the first iteration.
While most current interactions on the Internet are via phone and computer in the very near future the highest fidelity input system will be a vibrant, living, entire world, where anything is possible. In short: the Metaverse
Sasha LeBaron
VR Community Manager, VR ESports Player, and Tech Thinker
