The logic behind the metaverse explosion

Image source @ Visual China

Text | Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, Author | Li Yang

It was as if overnight, "everything can meta-universe".

The strange concept of the metacosm is wrapped in a huge force, which has broken people's previous knowledge and experience of the Internet, and then mixed with a bunch of newer terms and technologies, showing us a new virtual world.

So, what exactly is the metacosm? What is the logic behind the rise of the metaverse? How should we rationally view the metacosm?

01 What is the metacosm?

The term metaverse has received widespread attention around the world, but the concept is just emerging, and we need to look at new hot terms dialectically and rationally.

Metaverse Metavalse is made up of two words: META and VERSE. META as a prefix has the meaning of "beyond", "after", such as Metaphysics is translated as "metaphysics", so Metaverse can also be translated as supercold or post-universe.

So what exactly is the metaverse? What is not a metaverse? It's a topic that's hard to distinguish.

1. Must I wear VR glasses to be metaverse? Meta's main business is metaverse?

2. Is reading Jin Yong's martial arts novels a metacosm? Is playing protosthetic games a metaverse?

3. Is Brush TikTok a metacosm? Is buying and selling Bitcoin and NFT a metacosm?

The metaverse depicts a future that may be years from now, when virtual numbers dominate real life.

For example, when the image of a person's digital avatar is more important than what clothes to wear and what makeup to wear in the real world.

That may be the beginning of the metaverse, and we are far from that step now, so we must look at this problem objectively and rationally.

02 Why is the metaverse hot?

Why was the metacosm widely spread at this time?

The driving forces behind this are both social and technological.

As early as the 1990s, the famous scientist Mr. Qian Xuesen had already paid attention to virtual reality, and proposed the concept of "spirit realm", which is similar to the metaverse, and he felt that "spirit" can better express the meaning of touching virtual reality than immersive "presence".

In a sense, the metacosm already has some prototypes, such as Tencent's QQ show.

Years ago, Tencent upgraded its business model from a simple social network model to a way to create a virtual ecosystem by selling virtual items, and since then, Tencent's business model and financial model have undergone fundamental changes.

We can see the shadow of the metaverse from the QQ show, QQ show is a virtual, spiritual world thing, purely based on the Internet, giving people the freedom to create space and performance, but also has its own payment method Q coin, forming a small meta-universe closed-loop ecology, and young people are keen on this.

When you think of the metaverse, you immediately think of Ready Player One, and I think of "Inception", the male protagonist comes to the place where the poor live, finds that they gather together, drink the potion and dream what they want to do, the poor dream of the rich, and the disabled without legs dream of being able to walk.

For those who are dissatisfied with reality, dreams become the truest reality.

This is also the most attractive place in the metaverse, in addition to the high-tech star sea, it gives some people who are dissatisfied with reality a controllable dream that can transcend reality.

The pandemic is also a catalyst for the virtual economy.

Yuval Harari, author of A Brief History of Mankind, once said:

In a few decades, when people look back on history, if they remember COVID-19, they don't remember the outbreak itself, but "Oh, it was then that the world was completely digital."

Due to the spread of the first wave of the epidemic in Europe and the United States, people generally work from home to a higher degree, and have a deeper feeling about the virtual economy and online culture, and large Internet companies such as Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook even allow employees to work from home permanently.

When it comes to these big companies, monopoly is a problem that cannot be bypassed.

Whether in China or the United States, digital technology has always been controlled by several large Internet companies, and the industry has named it "Walled Garden".

In fact, walled gardens are not a problem, too few walled gardens are the problem.

When large companies develop to a certain stage through various advantages of technology, capital, and scale, they will naturally touch the red line of anti-monopoly, and public opinion will naturally resent monopoly organizations that hold huge resources.

In this context, the metacosm came into being, becoming a new opportunity for large companies to make transformations and divert public attention.

03 How far away is the metacosm?

In order to create a "sense of reality" comparable to the real world, the metaverse needs to focus not only on the "five senses" of the human body (sight, hearing, taste, touch, and sensation), but also on the realism of the environment and the realism of social experience.

This requires different cutting-edge technologies to be supported behind it, involving VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality) technology, as well as big data, transport technology, edge computing, cloud computing, graphics computing, AI (artificial intelligence) and so on.

It requires a high degree of convergence of cutting-edge related technologies to achieve this, but it seems that we are far from reaching this point.

The following technologies may become the underlying logic of the metaverse:

The low-code era

With the advent of the low-code era, we don't need to write code line by line, but can create by dragging and dropping modules.

Gartner, a consulting firm, estimates that half of the world's largest and medium-sized enterprises are already using low-code low-code, codeless, and serverless serverless platforms.

Machine intelligence

Promethean AI works with digital artists to help them build code-free virtual worlds, allowing artists to focus on ideation and problem solving, while machines take on a lot of mundane, repetitive, and uncreative work.

Digital twin

Digital twins were first called technical simulation, involving many basic disciplines.

For example, real-time ray tracing, real-time physical simulation, real-time Internet of Things data transmission, etc.

Taking real-time ray tracing as an example, the main reason why we see some pictures feel more real and some are unreal is light.

The light we see in reality comes not only from the sun and light, but also from the brightness formed by various light sources reflecting and refracting to the surface of the object.

Whether the refraction and reflection of light can be fully calculated is a very complex data problem, involving mathematics, physics and many other disciplines.

Blockchain boom

The arrival of blockchain seems to provide a possible solution to the problem of antitrust, especially in recent years, the development of smart contracts and non-homogeneous tokens has brought people something gratifying.

Smart contracts are ethereum-based decentralized, trustless, secure, and transparent applications, including record storage, digital asset rights confirmation, platform governance, insurance products, supply chain automation, and more.

Non-homogeneous currency (NTF) can realize decentralized, trustless, programmable digital asset confirmation and transaction, providing provable scarcity and verifiable traceability, including games, virtual assets, digital art and other aspects.

Distributed networks

The development of distributed networks is extremely needed in the metaverse and virtual reality, 4G, 5G networks are difficult to undertake the real-time transmission of a large amount of data, and the development of communication networks is the most basic technology for the metaverse to achieve breakthroughs.

04 "Wind Outlet" or "Tiger Mouth"?

While the concept of meta-universe is hot, it has also driven the rise of related concept stocks, as if it has become an important investment outlet overnight.

However, there are also voices that remind us to beware of the "wind outlet" becoming a "tiger mouth".

Almost every time a big concept or a global concept arises, there are similar capital market fluctuations, such as the blockchain bubble a few years ago and so on.

Specific to the investment link, institutions with professional investment experience will pay more attention to the evidence and details of investment support when making judgments, and will not be easily swayed by the concept of nothingness.

In addition, in the current epidemic environment, economic uncertainty is increasing, and investors need to look at the concept of bubbles more rationally and cautiously, and do not forget the basic logic of markets and economics.

Investors must clearly understand the hidden risks behind the betting on the concept of the meta-universe, which includes not only the risk of public opinion bubble, but also a series of issues such as economic risks, regulatory issues, and ethical constraints.

A few years ago, blockchain was also popular with the market and capital, but it proved that it still has many immature links that need to be improved.

In the same way, the relevant technologies behind the supporting metaversm are still in an immature stage of development, and they are also facing the test of "historical recurrence".

05 Everyone has their own "meta-universe" in their hearts

The purpose of technology and business is ultimately people-oriented.

China's Gen Z is experimenting with the metacosm. For them, online virtualization provides convenience and a better experience, as well as a tool they use to differentiate themselves from their predecessors.

The metacosm itself is not only technology, but also an avant-garde art, representing a utopian social organization in which you can immerse yourself in escaping from reality and learning pressures, which is very attractive to the young generation of flesh and blood, but whether what they like is correct can only be judged by history.

The metacosm is a very grand but also very vague concept, and everyone has their own definition of the metacosm.

In the future, the metacosm is a multi-"universe" oriented to users in the new era, led by a large number of content creators and technical elites, and based on the dispersion of high-speed networks.