THE BASICS YOU NEED TO KNOW AND UNDERSTAND ABOUT METAVERSE

Metaverse became a buzzword when Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement that Facebook would be renamed as Meta. All of a sudden, everybody is talking about the metaverse, and everyone is looking forward to the new era.

I was aware of the term ‘multiverse’ (thanks to Avengers movies), when I saw ‘metaverse’ showing up in different articles, blogs and discussions, it intrigued me to deep dive a bit and understand what this buzz is all about. This article is collation of different concepts, vision, theories, viewpoints and technological explanation about the metaverse, which I came across in last few months. The way metaverse is conceptualized today and more advance thoughts to come in the future, one thing is for sure, this will take a lots of creative and innovative minds to make this applicable & successful both in terms of experience and economy.

The critical question remains that, with more than 160 tech giants currently working on creating the metaverse, how will designers bring this vision to life?

There is no concrete definition of the metaverse, as each person may describe it in a different way. But a general definition places it as a real-time conversation or interaction between people within an online environment. Casey Newton provides a further definition based on a discussion with Mark Zuckerberg, he describes it “as the next iteration of the internet in which it supports online 3D virtual environments through a multitude of platforms such as computer, Virtual Reality(VR) or Augmented Reality(AR).”

You can think of it as the Internet in 3D and sometimes it’s more than 3 dimensional; multi-dimensional. Instead of connecting to the Internet, we’ll manage to ‘live’ inside it with virtual identities known as avatars. The metaverse is often described as a parallel virtual world in which we’ll be able to work, learn, socialize, play, shop and own assets.

WHY METAVERSE? WHY NOW?

The concept of a metaverse is not a new one. In many ways this is a linear and obvious progression towards a virtual second world around the physical world we live in. Online, multi-player, role-playing worlds like The Sims or Second Life have been around for nearly 20 years, with players spending an average of 20 hours per week in these worlds. Modern equivalents like Minecraft, World of Warcraft and Fortnite have millions of users, and huge supporting economies. We are now at a point, where big brands across different industries showing their interest towards having presence in metaverse and bring an entirely different way to shape the business future. A number of technological advancements, enabled this vision of the metaverse. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) spearheading the journey for improving the user experience and furthermore, shifting from user ‘experience’ to user ‘participation’. Blockchain has enabled digital currencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The new methods to transact and own digital goods are allowing creators to monetize their activities through tokens. In addition to monetization, and as a means to exchange value, token-holders can also participate in the platform’s governance (e.g. vote on decisions). This democratic ownership economy coupled with the possibility of interoperability, could unlock huge economic opportunities, whereby digital goods and services are no longer captive to a singular gaming platform or brand. From a social perspective, the development of more immersive virtual experiences is helping people to build communities based on shared ideals, and to express themselves in more authentic ways.

Adding to this, COVID-19 accelerated the digitization of our lives and normalized more persistent and multi-purpose online engagement and communication. It is this amalgamation of technological, social and economic drivers that is resulting in the increasing interest in the metaverse.

Jon Radoff is an entrepreneur, author and game designer. For the past few years, he has been writing extensively about the topics surrounding Web 3.0 in his Medium page “Building the Metaverse”, explores the 9 mega trends shaping the future of the metaverse.

As Zuckerberg said “the metaverse will not be created by one company,” rather by “creators and developers making new experiences and digital items that are interoperable and unlock a massively larger creative economy than the one constrained by today’s platforms and their policies.”

Yes, if metaverse evolves like the way it is perceived today, it will be another human life changing experience after Internet.

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