Source: Academic Headlines
Since the second half of 2021, the concept of a 'metaverse' has continued to heat up.
While the public is still understanding this new concept, some domestic and foreign technology giants have already laid out in the metaverse field. In October last year, Facebook officially changed its name to Meta and entered the field of 'meta-universe', which attracted widespread attention from all walks of life. Some commentators see this as an ironic reinvention of a product that has become bleak.
Is the 'metacosmity' of the hot financial circle and the technology circle just a gimmick in the capital market? Or a new blue ocean? Will the metacosm be the next generation of the Internet? Or is it a dream-making prophecy in the tech world? How far away is the virtual world created based on digital technology from our real life?
Recently, educator and geek Bobby Elliott published an article titled The metaverse is coming, exploring the concept of the metaverse, development vision, technical obstacles and future development.
(Source: Bobby Elliott)
'Metaverse' is a combination of the words 'meta' and 'verse'.
Verse is an abbreviation for universe, and the meaning of meta is similar to metaphysics, i.e. 'transcending' or 'transforming'. Combined, you get 'something that transcends and transforms the universe'. The term wasn't coined by Zuckerberg, it comes from a 1990s webpunk novel by Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash.
Semantics aside, what exactly does the metacosm mean?
Like today's Internet platforms, metaverse will become a platform in the future, providing services to users in 3D space. The metaverse will be a collection of new technologies connected together by billions of lines of code, including virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), augmented reality (AR), blockchain, and cryptocurrencies. The three technologies of augmented, mixed and virtual reality are collectively referred to as extended reality (XR).
AR: Doesn't change reality, just adds something. For example, Pokemon Go on smartphones;
MR: Combining the real world with the virtual world allows people to interact with the environment. For example, a virtual keyboard that lets you type (real words) using Microsoft's HoloLens;
VR: Completely virtual, everything is generated digitally, and the real world is excluded. While much of the hype revolves around VR, AR and MR will also play a role in the metaverse.
Zuckerberg has an ambitious plan to commit to 'investing tens of billions of dollars a year' over the next 5 to 10 years, and recently announced the creation of 10,000 new jobs in Europe dedicated to the development of the metaverse. Coincidentally, Microsoft and Disney have made similar commitments.
Imagine a day in 2030
At 8 a.m., you're woken up by the alarm sound of your smart speaker. You haven't worked in the office since the 2020 PANDEMIC, so you have a regular schedule. Since you went out for too much drink last night, it was a little harder to get up this morning than usual.
But the reality is that your body isn't out, just wearing a VR headset to a show that lasts until 2 a.m., and the alcohol is real and your hangover is real.
Before the first meeting at 10 a.m., you must finish bathing, dressing, and eating. The 'dressing' we're talking about here doesn't really require wearing clothes, and your digital double has plenty of clothing to choose from, but you still choose to wear a T-shirt and pants.
Just after 9 a.m., you put on your VR headset and there are 19 voicemails to process, no longer need a computer, and you can handle most of your voicemails with a flick of the wrist. You dictated replied to 3 and forwarded the 4th message with your voice comment to a colleague. The meeting is about to start...
Before 'reading' some of the documents you should have read last night, you chose a casual outfit from a multitude of outfits. Then, listen to the smart speaker play these files, you like to speed up the playback speed to save time. Your working avatar is different from the one you used last night, your commercial avatar is a very accurate three-dimensional reproduction of your true image.
The meeting went well and you've agreed to work on a prototype product with Janella, Felix, and Elisa. You work in the 'old economy' to produce real things for the real world. But you know that smart people work in the 'new economy' to design and create virtual products and services, which is why you learn to code (RapidScript VR).
For the rest of the day, you've also attended some meetings and work, prepared an important presentation, and attended the last virtual meeting at 2 p.m. and took off your helmet at 3 p.m. According to the manufacturer, the helmet has a 'comfortable all day' feel, but after 4 or 5 hours of wearing it, you feel tired.
Tonight, Colin is going to have a party of departures. He opted for a Gothic themed 'simulation' (emulation) party, so you had to check if you had the right clothes. You know there's a Gothic costume somewhere. You bought a set a few years ago while playing Vampyr, and it's a pretty decent set of gear that costs you 5 BitDollars (equivalent to $50 in cash). You express deeply, thank God for the blockchain and the ability to transfer things from one part of the metaverse to another.
At Colin's party, you're thinking about buying a new car later tonight. The car was a 2005 Maserati GTI and was priced at 5 BitDollars. You've been saving the cryptocurrency you earn from working as a virtual bartender to pay for it. Everyone has a real job and a virtual job, and rumor has it that Colin has a lucrative adult simulation game that explains why he 'retired' at the age of 45.
While you can exchange dollars for cryptocurrency, the more you earn within the virtual world, the less you spend real money. Becky told you that she's already making more money from her virtual job (selling virtual art) than her real job income, so she decided to quit next year. It is said that by 2035, half of the new work will be done in the metaverse; by 2050, the METAcosm is expected to generate MORE GDP than the real economy.
How to get there?
Technological change is coming like a tidal wave. The 1980s were the wave of personal computers, the '90s were the wave of the Internet, and the 2000s were the wave of mobile. The next wave will be the metacosm. These waves are mutually reinforcing, the internet needs personal computers, mobile communications need the internet, the metaverse will need the internet and mobile communications, and the future of personal computers looks less certain.
Web 3.0：
The original Internet was Web 1.0, the Internet of the AOL and CompuServe eras, characterized by desktop computers, dial-up modems, Windows 95, long-page text, and bulletin boards. Today's Internet is Web 2.0, which is the Internet of Facebook, Netflix, and Reddit, characterized by laptops, Wi-Fi, 4G, multimedia, and user-generated content (like YouTube).
Web 3.0 is the metaverse. With the rollout of 5G and fiber optic broadband, infrastructure construction is underway, and much remains to be done. Current VR hardware is too slow to run, uncomfortable to wear, expensive, and relatively easy to solve because the computer industry has a long history of making things faster, better, and cheaper; but another, more difficult problem is software, not just the billions of lines of code needed to create the metaverse, but also the standards and protocols needed to ensure that the metaverse is 'fits together'. This includes ways to store digital assets using blockchain and exchanging value with cryptocurrencies.
With that in mind, Zuckerberg's '10,000 new jobs in Europe' is just the beginning.
Do we want to achieve this goal?
Don't be fooled by what you see in the metaverse.
Cartoon characters and ridiculous meetings in sci-fi environments are not what it will be. When Zuckerberg announced his vision of the metaverse, it seemed to be meant to make people feel stupid and non-threatening.
My description of 2030 shouldn't scare you, because today we already spend a lot of time in front of screens, such as watching TV, computers, Kindles, tablets, smartphones, etc. If nothing else, the metacosm will mean that you will see fewer screens.
Metaverses will solve real-world problems including:
Travel: When you can move anywhere, the need for physical travel will disappear;
Education: In the virtual world, you will learn more (better) than you would in the real world;
Romance: Your child will meet their future partner in the metaverse;
Consumption: Rampant consumerism will shift from the physical world to the virtual world and potentially save the planet, and your virtual goods (NFTs) inventory will be as important as your physical assets; your e-wallet (cryptocurrency) will be as important as your bank account.
You will experience things you can't imagine in the metaverse, where age, race, gender, disability, and physical appearance will become irrelevant.
The current technological challenges facing the metaverse will be overcome, but the challenges of sociology and psychology will become more difficult to solve. The metaverse must be regulated in a way that Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 have never had before, the common excuse of lack of regulation ('this is too difficult') will not be valid, and society will have to find ways to extract value from the metaverse through taxes and other means.
There is a danger that the metaverse may be dominated by some big tech companies, reducing us to virtual farmers in their metaphysical territory. Data ownership and personal privacy must be protected. Web 3.0 is even more likely to track and monitor us than Web 2.0. Addiction will also be a problem, and your real life will become tedious compared to virtual life. People will need to establish a meta/life balance, which is easier said than done.
None of these things are obstacles. But we need to take them more seriously than we have in the past. The prospect of us happily living in a virtual world and the real world decaying all around us is bleak. It doesn't have to be that way, and our current political representatives are unable or unwilling to protect our interests from big tech. None of them passed the Web 2.0 test, would they trust Web 3.0?
When will the metaverse be realized?
Zuckerberg's plan spans 'five to ten years'. I don't expect to see much change in the coming years, but by the middle of this century I would like to see cheaper, better hardware and some useful applications. Gaming, shopping, and adult entertainment are likely to be the first choices to draw us into the metaverse. By 2025, a $500 VR device could give you a pretty good virtual experience, making things like shopping much better. It goes without saying that the metaverse will have a huge impact on the game.
For the foreseeable future, your PC will be secure, but I can see it evolve into a hybrid 2D/3D system, such as using touch screens, motion-sensitive cameras, and so on. Your VR headset will make you want to use something similar on your desktop. Between 2025 and 2035, PCs, phones, and VR will coexist, allowing you to switch from one scenario to another. In the long run, PCs will be a relic.
Jobs don't change overnight. The real world is not gone, we still need plumbers and construction workers, nursing and other jobs will hardly change, other jobs will change significantly, teaching is one of them. Over the next decade, the pressure to modernize education will become irresistible and new jobs will emerge that we cannot imagine today. Technical skills, programming skills, and design skills are in high demand, but the metaverse will require a variety of creative skills.
We live in an exponential era, so forecasting is fraught with difficulties. If hardware and software evolve rapidly, PCs could become a relic even earlier than 2035. Let's say that 'pretty good experience' doesn't cost $500, but $250. Let's say you can buy a smartphone adapter for VR for $99, or it's free to come with your 2025 smartphone. It's not hard to imagine that if this happened, people would flock to the metaverse. Maybe it won't happen, maybe the cost will remain high and the user experience will be poor. Ultimately, the whole thing is nothing more than a PlayStation wrapped around your head.
I'm not so sure. I think the metaverse is coming, and the future is unlikely to be utopian or dystopian. We won't thrive in the metaverse without any consequences, and we won't enter a dark age of crime and surveillance. Over the next 10 years, there are some obvious scenarios that will benefit from VR. I have no doubt that Web 3.0 will be a part of our lives. But only part of it. We will still live in a chaotic real world. Unlike Web 2.0, we know the dangers and try to fix them.
Will the metacosm 'transcend and change the universe'?
No, but it will change the world.