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The metaverse: welcome to the next online frontier

• People will create digital avatars of themselves to explore the online world, and one another, as they shop, socialise, learn and work in a virtual universe

Monique Verduyn —

An embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it — that is how Mark Zuckerberg described the metaverse in his founder’s letter of October 28 2021. That same day Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta as part of a major rebrand. Since then everyone and their dog are talking about the metaverse. But what is it?

The metaverse does not exist, at least not yet. But we have been visiting so-called metaverses for decades. The term was coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash, which paints a bleak, dystopian future dominated by technology. The world is run by mega conglomerates and inequality is extreme. How disappointingly familiar that sounds.

In the book, however, Stephenson is warning us against this postapocalyptic dream world, not actively persuading us to plug into it. But his vision of a virtual realitybased successor to the internet, in which people create digital avatars of themselves to explore the online world, is a great starting point for understanding the metaverse.

Remember Second Life? An immersive shared virtual space, it peaked in the late 2000s with millions of users devoting hours of their daily lives to living digitally. When it faded from the headlines, many assumed it had died a slow and quiet death. On the contrary, the platform continues to have a small but loyal community of “residents”, as they call themselves, logging on to experience what a metaverse could look like.

Will it revolutionise how people connect with one another? Or is it just another marketing buzzword? Not according to Zuckerberg, who says presence will be a defining quality of the metaverse: “Like you are right there with another person or in another place … you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine — get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create as well as completely new

experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today.”

Embodiment is key. On social media networks and websites, we have usernames and thumbnail pictures, but in the metaverse you can customise your own elaborate avatar, from how it moves and speaks, to how it identifies, thinks, feels, learns and is aroused.

The Acceleration Studies Foundation, an international community of scholars and philosophers, points out that there is no single, unified entity called “the metaverse”; rather, much like websites on the internet, companies are building virtual realms that they will promote in the hope our avatars will hang out there together, in this digital “parallel” world, where they can socialise, play

games, shop and do business.

Today, 4.6-billion of us use the internet to access information and services, communicate and socialise, buy and sell goods, and entertain ourselves. The metaverse will allow us to do all that and more, the major difference being that the distinction between being offline and online will be much harder to delineate.

Existing in the metaverse will be the equivalent of living inside the internet. This opens the possibility of the creation of a new world, a new economy and new possibilities. Retail therapy, for example, promises to be a lot more entertaining than online shopping as we know it. Stores and brands will have their own interactive worlds in which you can walk around with friends, try on clothing, check out the latest technology, and choose the right clothes for your height and body type. That is taking the current way of buying online and elevating it to a new experience that is likely to appeal to many and be a lot of fun.

TECHNOLOGIES

In the weeks after Facebook’s announcement, tech stocks have added hundreds of billions of dollars in market value. For Nvidia, Meta and online game platform Roblox, that equates to $230bn between them. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said the metaverse could eventually grow to be a multitrillion-dollar industry, with companies in a race to get to 1-billion metaverse users so the winner can set the standards. Not bad for an emerging universe.

The Covid-19 pandemic, which accelerated the rise of virtual communities — such as social media platforms that became important tools for people and organisations to stay connected, interactive gaming worlds and mixed reality activations — proved just how possible it was for our on- and offline worlds to blur.

Remaking the internet as a three-dimensional place will require accelerated computing. When, not if, that evolution happens, technologists expect it to be as transformative to society and commerce as the web and the smartphone. Extended reality (XR) — combining augmented, virtual and mixed reality — will play an important role. Central to the metaverse is the idea that virtual, 3D environments that are accessible and interactive in real-time will become the medium for social and business engagement.

According to the World Economic Forum, digital assets will be linked to real-world economic activity in the metaverse. Companies and individuals will participate in commerce in the same way they do today. They will be able to build, trade and invest in products, goods and services. The success of these environments will depend on the widespread adoption of extended reality.

As the number of people who use the metaverse increases, lots of different types of data will be generated. Data being the new gold, its value will surge, making its reliability and security paramount. That is where artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain will come together to secure the storage and sharing of all this data, and its reliability.

Every virtual economy needs money, so there is an enormous opportunity for blockchain and crypto assets to move to the mainstream. Cryptocurrencies work like virtual cash in virtual worlds. Transactions are almost instantaneous and the blockchain technology behind them is designed to build trust and ensure security.

Another aspect of blockchain and cryptocurrency will be key in the metaverse: nonfungible tokens (NFTs) as the foundation for value creation. These may be pieces of art, sports trading cards, in-game items, and much more. They are essentially

unique digital items, where the ownership and other information are coded into the token, stored on a blockchain. If NFTs become a common tool for trading goods, they could help accelerate the use of XR ecosystems as places where people combine elements of the digital economy with their offline lives.

Think of how the App Store made our personal and professional lives so much easier. Whether we want to check the weather, buy movie tickets, order dinner, book a workout class or review our calendar for the day, we can experience and pay for products and services from anywhere. These digital consumer experiences have made us used to the idea that retail (the physical world) and digital (the virtual world) need not be separate at all.

THE FRONTRUNNERS

The possibilities of the metaverse are endless precisely because it is not just a tech phenomenon. Companies are actively building virtual environments. Fortnite is morphing into so much more than a hit battle royale game. Developer Epic Games has expanded Fortnite’s reach into virtual events and is hosting virtual concerts with millions of live viewers. Its newly announced Party Worlds are spaces designed for socialising, where players can hang out, play minigames and make new friends.

The gaming aspect is not going anywhere, but it is quickly becoming one part of a much bigger experience.

Nike has launched its own virtual world within (not on) the Roblox online video game platform, becoming one of the first major brands to take a step towards the metaverse.

Nikeland is an immersive virtual experience, where participants can perform norules sports activities and compete against other players in swimming, athletics or parkour events — using their smartphone’s accelerometer to record their physical movements and control their avatar online. It’s filled with courts, arenas and product showrooms, where you can buy digital shoes and apparel.

Microsoft already uses holograms and is developing mixed and XR applications with its Microsoft Mesh platform, which combines the real world with augmented reality and virtual reality. The software giant joined the metaverse recently with Mesh for Teams, which aims to make Teams a gateway to the metaverse.

Mesh came about largely as a result of the global pandemic. More than a year and a half into it, workers around the world had abandoned their offices and learnt to collaborate online. We became superefficient, negating the fears business leaders had about giving people the freedom to work from home.

But people missed one another. They missed chance encounters, catch-ups in corridors, chats in pause areas. They missed the nonverbal communication and cues we used to take for granted. We no longer have a choice how close we get to someone or how close we allow them to get to us. All these elements have an effect

on how we build relationships and careers. Mesh’s mixed reality includes holograms and avatars, allowing people in different locations to meet in a friendlier more natural environment than the online meeting spaces we have become used to, where everyone is looking at everyone all the time.

DATA PRIVACY

THE METAVERSE’S ULTIMATE AIM IS NOT JUST VIRTUAL REALITY, OR AUGMENTED REALITY, IT ’ S MIXED REALITY

Dr David Reid Liverpool Hope University professor

THE MARKET FOR BLENDING REALITIES IS GIGANTIC. WHOEVER CONTROLS IT WILL BASICALLY HAVE CONTROL OVER YOUR ENTIRE REALITY

Dr David Reid Liverpool Hope University professor

What does this possible future mean for humans? Dr David Reid, professor of AI and spatial computing at Liverpool Hope University, is adamant that the benefits of the metaverse will change our lives immeasurably. But he warns it also poses “terrifying dangers”.

He has been calling for urgent conversations to begin on how to police the metaverse before the technology becomes a reality in the next five to 10 years.

“People have been talking about how the rise of AI will significantly change society and everything we do. And that’s true. But the metaverse is at least as big, if not bigger, than the rise of AI,” Reid says.

“Because if you think about the way it works, the metaverse’s ultimate aim is not just virtual reality, or augmented reality, it’s mixed reality [MR]. It’s blending the digital and the real world together. Ultimately, this blend may be so good, and so pervasive, that the virtual and the real become indistinguishable. And the market for that is gigantic. Whoever controls it will basically have control over your entire reality.”

MR prototypes have face-, eye-, body- and hand-tracking

technology, and most have sophisticated cameras. Some even incorporate electroencephalogram (EEG) technology to pick up brainwave patterns. In other words, Reid says, everything you say, manipulate, look at, or even think about can be monitored in MR.

The data this will generate will be vast and extremely valuable. He stresses that no single company should ever exert control — it is simply too important for that to happen.

“People are worried about the influence that Twitter can have on politics right now,” he says. But in a completely immersive environment, how much more influence can you have on someone, when you can transport someone to a war zone and show them precisely what is going on?

“Likewise, how much more dangerous might social media pile-ons, or online bullying, become in the metaverse? I’d argue it has the potential to be far, far more extreme. The visceral experience of immersion can be exceptionally emotive.”

Dystopian? Maybe. But also utterly thrilling in its almost unimaginable scope. The implications for society will be huge, as will the limitless new opportunities it will create for generations beyond ours. From socialising to working to shopping, we have already gone digital by necessity because of the pandemic. To envision the rich possibilities of an all-digital playground and the multitude of amazing worlds that can be created, lived in and explored is rapturous.

And we don’t even know the half of it yet.

LIFE

en-za

2021-12-07T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-12-07T08:00:00.0000000Z

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