Metaverse .. Will Facebook's plan to create a complete virtual world succeed?

Real estate sales are booming, but not in the back street of your house or a new tourist village, but in a new world built by Facebook, or say in a new "universe", because it is called the universe of universes or "Metaverse". You can buy a plot of land, each "pixel" counts with a sum of money, and in this digital space you are allowed to place an advertisement, or rent the land to an artist for a concert on it, or perhaps to house it for a digital character. Isn't this a figment of the imagination? Who's crazy to buy pointless pixels? We advise you to slow down, this fantasy has apparently become a reality.

Fantasy becomes reality

Metaverse is a science fiction concept that many people in the tech industry envision as the successor to the internet today. It's just a vision at this point, but tech companies like Facebook aim to make it a place for many online activities, including work, play, study and shopping.

In cosmology, the term "metaverse" has sometimes been used as an abbreviation for "meta-universe", meaning a universe of universes, which may be an infinite number. However, the technological meaning derives from the 1992 novel "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson, who defined metaverses as a giant virtual common space made up of all virtual reality, augmented reality, and the Internet. As Mark Zuckerberg recently said, "Our overall goal is to help bring life back overseas." (1)

"Ariana Grande is sparkling in a starry night sky performing her most famous hit, in two sparkly clothes and her hair in a ponytail, and with neon pink present her star glows even more." Hey, this isn't a description of the superstar pop star's newest party, and she wasn't even physically present. Instead, Grande is seen here in all-digital form as part of The Rift Tour challenge, which the popular video game has released on Facebook. The Internet "Fortnite" in collaboration with the famous star, a unique partnership between two disparate cultural giants are music and video games. (2)

Ariana Grande's virtual parties, which were held recently within the world-famous game "Fortnite", have attracted enthusiastic tech enthusiasts who are once again talking about the approaching "Metaverse". But if we wanted to see the true incarnation of the metaverse, you might want to play Decentraland.

DeCenterland is a virtual world in which players, or let's say "citizens", decide how they want to develop it, and what its future looks like. There is no central entity that controls the fate of this game, and what makes it really special is the presence of 43,000 (digital) plots of land that are owned and leased to ordinary people just like you from all over the world. So property owners have the right to build whatever they want on these lands, and that's where the fun begins. (3) The price of lands in this virtual world starts at about 5 thousand dollars, and there are adjacent plots that form buildings within the game that sold for approximately 75 thousand dollars, and this was in only 48 hours (4), what is this madness? Are these people throwing their money in the air?

Now imagine that the famous businessman, Elon Musk, announced that he would give a lecture at a place in Decentreland, and the number of attendees was scheduled to be only five thousand people. Tickets are all booked and it's time for the meeting, the lecture went well, and when we left there were five thousand people's eyes fixed on a huge billboard in the building opposite the center where Elon Musk gave the lecture, five thousand people attended in one place, and the first thing they saw after they left It is an advertisement, and best of all, the advertisements in the game can be clicked.

new universe

Facebook wants to be a leader in metaverse, Epic Games (a huge game company) wants to be a metaverse company, and the world's biggest tech companies likewise want to be a part of the action. But before we can even think about life in a massive virtual world, we'll need a massive upgrade to the internet and protection against technology "cheating."

In 20 years or maybe less, you may go into action at Metaverse. Instead of driving to your nearest arena, you can attend a rock concert in a fantasy universe, and instead of swearing over coffee while watching a game, you can swear in a virtual stadium with thousands of other fans. You might walk into an Amazon store in the mall, put on a pair of augmented reality glasses, and be able to see any of the millions of different items in stock in a virtual store.

Big tech companies have already started building "proto-metaverse" projects. For example, Horizon Workrooms recently launched a virtual office on Facebook, where you can interact with colleagues, collaborate and see what your colleagues are doing on their screens. This isn't a futuristic concept, it's available today, if you and your team have the right VR headset. (5)

There are three main aspects to metaverse: presence, interoperability, and standardization. Presence is the feeling that you are actually in a virtual space, with virtual others. Decades of research (6) have shown that this sense of embodiment improves the quality of online interactions. This feeling of presence is achieved through virtual reality technologies such as virtual reality glasses.

Interoperability means the ability to seamlessly move between virtual spaces using the same virtual assets, such as avatars and digital objects. ReadyPlayerMe, a 3D character design program for use in metaverses, allows people to create an avatar that they can use in hundreds of different virtual worlds, including Zoom meetings. Meanwhile, blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies and non-changeable tokens (NFTs) are facilitating the movement of digital goods across virtual borders.

next development

Although metaverses may mean different things to different people, the common denominator is that it's the next big thing in our digital world. Some critics have suggested that the term is just a fancy way of rebranding virtual reality technology, which has consistently fallen behind the ambitions of enthusiasts. But metaphysical dreamers argue that it's much more than that, or as Zuckerberg puts it, "a more open, interconnected, continuum, a global alternative reality."

Currently, the Facebook founder adds, online communications are limited to two-dimensional interactions via "small glowing rectangles". But Facebook envisions Metaverse as a three-dimensional "embodied Internet" in which people can constantly "exist" and be teleported to different places. We can attend a comedy show with our guys and laugh at the same jokes.

A global metaverse would require decades of infrastructure development and billions of dollars of investment to become a reality. Facebook has big ambitions for its Oculus VR business, but even Facebook CEO Zuckerberg accepts that sterile virtual reality (VR) glasses limit entry into this new universe. Facebook will first have to shrink the supercomputer into 5mm-thick glasses to encourage mass adoption. Other obstacles to the full development of metaverses are outlined in a nine-volume primer by venture capitalist Matthew Ball. Not only will devices improve, but new ways of creating, exchanging and paying for digital goods and services will have to be developed. (7)

But besides all that, there is more cause for concern. In an interview with science fiction writer William Gibson, he said he was baffled when fans told him that he inspired them to pursue a career in technology, while they missed the idea that many of his novels are a kind of "dystopia", and said our generation will be the last to distinguish between the real and virtual worlds. , while future generations will consider them completely interchangeable. (8)

Here the concept of "the disappearance of reality", put forward by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, appears clearly in a new and modern form of slavery called "screen slavery". inside games). This phenomenon leads us to understand Baudrillard's dilemma about the "disappearance of reality", and what has been replaced by false and varied images of it that have the ability to repeat itself without stopping. It does not matter if you want to achieve your dream of becoming a digital champion or want to try something new, the reality does not go away. (9)

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Sources

1. MARK IN THE METAVERSE
2. Limits are non-existent in the metaverse!' Video game concerts become big business
3. Welcome to Decentraland, where NFTs meet a virtual world
4. Decentraland: $30,000,000 Virtual Real Estate Boom | Metaverse Millionaires
5. Facebook unveils virtual office app Horizon Workrooms
6. PRESENCE 2020
7. Matthew Ball: The metaverse primer
8. William Gibson — the prophet of cyberspace talks AI and climate collapse
9. The Artificial and the Artificial, Jean Baudrillard