"Metaverse" is an international hot word in 2021, and 2021 is called "Metacosm Year". As a new thing in the field of cutting-edge science and technology of mankind, the current metacosm is not only controversial in the definition of concepts, but also people have many different views on the development and key characteristics of its past and present lives.
Metacosmonic concept controversy
What is the metacosm? The Chinese word "metaverse" is literally translated from the English term metaverse. Its prefix "meta-" has the meaning of "meta" and "transcendent", and the root "verse" represents the universe, which is combined to form "beyond the universe", which means the metacosm. Some people also translate it as "super universe", "hyper-meta-domain", "virtual reality", "virtual world" and so on. The oxford English dictionary web version defines the metacosm as "a virtual reality space in which users can interact with computer-generated environments and others." Wikipedia defines it as "a 3D virtual space with connected perception and sharing characteristics based on the future Internet through the physical reality of virtual reality, presenting convergent and physical persistence characteristics."
The metacosm boom is rising from industry. In the global industrial world, there are different definitions of the metacosm. The meta-universe envisioned by Meta-Company founder Mark Zuckerberg is a social platform with a sense of immersion that incorporates virtual reality technology and is built with exclusive hardware equipment. Tencent believes that the metacosm is a virtual digital world independent of the real world, and users can enter this world and start a new "true" life with a new identity. Ma Jie, vice president of Baidu, believes that the metacosm is essentially a virtualized and digitized process of the real world, which requires a lot of transformation of content production, economic systems, user experience, and physical world content.
Academics also have different definitions of the metacosm. Chen Gang and Dong Haoyu of the School of Journalism and Communication of Peking University believe that "the metacosm is a virtual world that uses scientific and technological means to link and create, map and interact with the real world, and a digital living space with a new social system." Shenyang, School of Journalism, Tsinghua University, pointed out that the metacosm is an idea and concept; the metacosm is still a concept that continues to evolve and evolve, and different participants continue to enrich its meaning in their own ways. Shenyang's research team defines that "the metacosm is a new type of virtual reality integration of Internet applications and social forms produced by integrating a variety of new technologies, which provides immersive experiences based on extended reality technology, generates mirror images of the real world based on digital twin technology, builds an economic system based on blockchain technology, closely integrates the virtual world with the real world in economic systems, social systems, and identity systems, and allows each user to produce content and edit the world."
Some scholars have tried to define it through the "archaeology" of the metacosm conception and concept. Zuo Pengfei of the Institute of Quantitative And Technological Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences cross-defines the metacosm from four aspects: from the perspective of space-time, realism, independence, and connectivity: from the perspective of space-time, the metacosm is a virtual digital world in the spatial dimension and a real digital world in the temporal dimension; from the perspective of authenticity, there are both digital replicas of the real world and the creations of the virtual world in the metaverse; from the perspective of independence, the metacosm is a parallel space that is closely connected to the external real world and highly independent; from the perspective of connectivity, Metacosmity is a sustainable, wide-coverage virtual reality system that includes networks, hardware terminals, and users.
The author believes that the metacosm is an immersive, virtual, intangible, huge, permanent, evolving, 24-hour-a-year man-made electronic space. In essence, the metacosm is a virtually mapped version of the human real world in which people in the real world can break the boundaries of time and space, live in it in digital form and never go offline, thus obtaining a perfect immersive experience that transcends reality. We can define the metaverse as a man-made online virtual world that connects people through a variety of high-tech, Internet, mobile communications, specialized devices, etc., born out of, parallel to, and independent of the real world. In it, whether it is personal attributes such as identity, sense, ideology, or social attributes such as social systems, economic structures, and political organizations, they can be presented. People have their own virtual identities in it, socialize, interact, live, work, etc., and get and create what they want. Moreover, the virtual world of the metacosm is orderly—it has a whole set of operating rules (ethics, morality, norms, rules, laws, institutions, civilizations, etc.), not disorderly, still less degenerate, corrupt, dark, or even anti-human.
Metaverse transmutation
The ideas, concepts, concepts, technologies, etc. of the metacosm did not appear suddenly in 2021, but gradually emerged and developed with human imagination, research and development, and practice for more than 70 years.
Some researchers believe that the metacosm can be traced back to the 1948 book "Cybernetics: Or the Science of Control and Communication in Animals and Machines" published by the American mathematician and cybernetic founder Norbert Wiener. Other researchers argue that Dungeons & Dragons, published in the United States in 1974 and later adapted as a game, was the earliest beginning of what we call the metaverse today.
The current globally recognized source of metaversic ideas is the American mathematician, computer expert and cyberpunk science fiction novelist Forno Vinci. In his novel "Real Name and Real Name", which was completed in 1979 and published in 1981, he creatively conceived of a virtual world that could be entered through a "brain-computer interface" and could obtain sensory experience. Therefore, he can be said to be the originator of the metaverse. At the time of the novel's publication, Internet technology was just beginning to emerge. Later, the American writer William Gibson's 1984 science fiction novel "Neuromancer" further advanced the conception of the metaverse. In his book, he created "cyberspace" (also translated as "cyberspace").
In 1991, Cyberspace gave birth to the technical concept of "mirror world", that is, every real scene in the real world can be projected into a manual computer program through computer software, and allows users to interact with the mirror world through computer monitors. That year, Yale University's David Gellert published Mirror World: Or the Day Software Puts the Universe into a Shoebox... How this will happen and what it will mean." The name of the book is actually the metacosm.
However, the term "metaverse" first appeared in Avalanche, a 1992 science fiction novel by American science fiction writer Neil Stephenson depicting a vast virtual reality world. Stephenson sublimated Vinci's brilliant idea to propose the prototype of the metacosm—a cyberspace parallel to the real world. "Put on the headset and eyepieces, find the connected terminal, and you can enter the virtual space simulated by the computer and parallel to the real world through the virtual doppelganger."
There is also a debate in academic circles about the staging of the development of the metacosm. A collaborative study by the University of Science and Technology of China, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, the University College London in the United Kingdom, and the University of Helsinki in Finland believes that as of now, the development of the metacosmology is roughly divided into five stages: the literary stage (1984 and before), the text-based interactive game stage (1985-1992), the virtual world and mass multiplayer online games (1993-2011), the immersive virtual environment on smartphones and wearable devices (2012-2017), and the immersive virtual environment on smartphones and wearable devices. A New Era of Meta-Universe (2017–present). Shenyang divides the development of the metaverse into five stages: pseudo-metaverse, quasi-metacosm, low-grade metacosm, high-spec metacosm, and ultimate metacosm.
Metacosmic feature identification
What are the key features of the metaverse? Scholars at home and abroad have different cognitions and propositions.
Matthew Bauer, an american metaversmic analyst, believes that the metaverse should have six characteristics: perpetuality, real-time, no access restrictions, economic function, connectivity, and inventiveness. Zuo Pengfei believes that the basic characteristics of the metaverse include immersive experience (low latency and sense of authenticity allow users to have an immersive sensory experience), virtualized twins (users in the real world will have one or more ID identities in the digital world), open creation (users enter the digital world through terminals, and can use massive resources to carry out creative activities), strong social attributes (real social relationship chains will be transferred and reorganized in the digital world), and stable systems (with a safe, stable and orderly virtual economic and social system). Chen Gang and Dong Haoyu sorted out and defined the five characteristics and attributes of the metaverse (START): social and spatial attributes, the transcendent extension of scientific and technological empowerment, the co-creation of man, machine and artificial intelligence, the mapping of realism and reality, and trading and circulation.
In addition, some research reports have pointed out that the basic components of the metaverse include user identity and relationship, immersion, real-time and full-time, diversification and economic system, etc., and the ultimate form of the metaverse needs to fully meet five characteristics - virtual identity (each real-world person will have one or more metaverse IDs and be responsible for it), social relationships (the metaverse IDs will produce a realistic social relationship between the metaverse IDs), the ultimate sense of presence (low latency and immersion to ensure that people in the real world can have a sufficient sense of presence), Extreme openness (real-world people can enter at any place and any time, and after entering, they can enjoy a large amount of content), a complete economic legal system (the guarantee of the safety and stability of the entire metaverse, and the continuation of the civilization derived from the metaverse).
I believe that the metaverse that Robles founder David Baszucci said is more accurate for at least eight key features and elements of the metaverse. We can merge them into two broad categories – technological immersion, low latency, anytime, anywhere, rich diversity, and social virtual identities, virtual friends, virtual economies, and virtual civilizations.
Metaverses are built on high-tech technologies including augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, extended reality, user interaction (human-computer interaction), computer vision, artificial intelligence, 3D, cloud, big data, blockchain, digital twins, edge and cloud computing, 5G/6G, and more. Moreover, there are many infrastructures and devices corresponding to these high-tech technologies, including the internet, high-speed optical fiber and mobile communication devices, giant servers, and cheap wearable devices. Therefore, the metacosm is inseparable from the strong support of high technology.
At present, there are various controversies in the metacosm. These controversies provide an important ideological basis for us to further recognize, understand, accept, think, and study the metaverse. Through debate, we will eventually form a general consensus on the concept, transmutation, and characteristics of the metacosm.
(Author Affilications:School of Marxism, Xidian University)
Source: China Social Science Network - China Social Science Daily Author: Hu Lele