Development technologists say they're building metaversms. Gamers may already be living in the metaverse. The art world is profiting from this. But what exactly is the metaverse?
The most important ideas in technology often pop up in the dictionary before they are truly coherent. Jargon came out of nowhere, wasn't fully explained, and was overused: the Internet of Things, the sharing economy, cloud computing.
In some rare cases, the term is still popular. A lot of people talk about a lot of loose things, and then those things merge into a single, semi-understandable thing. Then we live in that thing forever. Remember hearing about the "Internet"? Let's take a look at the "virtual world".
The term "the internet" comes from the digital age: writer Neil S. Neal Stephenson coined the term in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, and then ernest S. Thompson. Ernest Cline rewrote it as "Oasis" in his novel Ready Player One. It refers to a completely real digital world that exists outside the simulated world in which we live.
In fiction, a utopian metacosm may be portrayed as a new frontier where social norms and value systems can be rewritten, liberated from cultural and economic rigidity. But more often, meta-poetry has a dystopian flavor – it's a virtual refuge from the fallen world.
As a buzzword, metaverse refers to a wide variety of virtual experiences, environments, and assets that gain momentum during the online transfer of an epidemic. Taken together, these new technologies herald the future of the Internet.
Video games like Roblox and Fortnite and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, where players can build their own worlds, like most social media, have metaverse tendencies. If you have an irreplaceable token, or even just some encryption, then you are part of the meta-traversal experience. The virtual universe and the amplified reality universe are at least adjacent. If you've used your electronic avatar to attend a work meeting or party, you've stepped into the realm of "meta-interaction."
Founders, investors, futurists, and executives have all sought to justify their claims in the metaverse, articulating the metacosm's potential for social connections, experimentation, entertainment, and key profits.
Venture capitalist and well-written essayist Matthew Ball describes the metacosm as "some kind of successor to the mobile Internet"—a framework for highly connected life, not a virtual world or a space. He wrote: "There are no words 'before the yuan' and 'after the yuan.'" Instead, it will slowly emerge over time as different products, services, and capabilities are integrated and converged. ”
In May of this year, Mark Mark Zuckerberg shared his Facebook-centric perspective in an interview with CNET: "We want as many people as possible to experience virtual reality, to be able to jump into the metaverse, and have those social experiences in it," he said. He was referring to the company's experimental virtual reality environment Horizon, which he hopes people will be able to explore with Facebook's Oculus headsets.
In an interview with VentureBeat in June, Jensen Huang, CEO of computer chip maker Nvidia, shared more of an atmosphere than a vision: "We're going to be able to almost feel together."
If all of this sounds too hot-headed, this might be enough now: the metaverse is the Internet, but it's much more than that. While it may still be in the future, if it does, it seems closer than ever.
Roblox, an indie developer's platform for developing children's games, is described as a metaverse.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > blockchain-based world</h1>
MANA is the currency of a virtual world platform called Decentraland, where digital land was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in March. (After a two-year rally of around 10 cents, MANA briefly broke through $1.60 in April, bringing the total value of all tokens to more than $2.4 billion.) )
In terms of scale, Decentraland is more of a commune — as of July, only a few hundred people logged in at a time, down from a low thousands peak in March — made up of user-generated NFTs. Its creators describe the platform as the infrastructure of the place where it is built, not the place. (Decentraland's currency and land contracts run on the Ethereum blockchain.) ）
The residents of Decentraland are constantly creating scenes and experiences for other users, such as concerts and art exhibitions. Dispersion is a sense of work in progress pervades semi-developed plots and theme areas in the sparsely populated power grid. Between events, users spend most of their time wandering and thinking: What now?
Decentraland differs from its predecessors like Second Life, a virtual world owned and operated by a private company called Linden Labs, that it is indeed quite decentralized. According to the founders of Decentraland, the program has always been about letting users take ownership of the world, build and do what they love to do.
Ethereum-based virtual world platform Decentraland interface
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > create a social future in the virtual world</h1>
When it comes to Epic Games, apart from Unreal Engine, many people will definitely think of the hottest multiplayer battle royale game, Fortnite. Last June, the company announced that Fortnite had reached 125 million players in less than a year of launch.
It's not easy to attract so many players, and it's all multiplayer battle royale games, what's so different about Fortnite? It's not just a game, it's become a cultural phenomenon, a social network. Not only does Fortnite give players a virtual place to meet, offering a variety of additional challenges, but it also gives them a lot of autonomy: such as tapping the "Dance" button to pay tribute to the Airbus driver, and the funny dance moves in the game are one of the reasons for its popularity.
Earlier this month, Epic Games held an interesting event on Fortnite, where they brought in the mysterious American EDM DJ and music producer Marshmello (Marshmallow) to hold a 10-minute electronic concert in the game's Fun Park.
It is reported that the number of global players participating at the same time exceeds 10 million. The Guinness Book of World Records' largest concert had only 4.2 million spectators, and the Internet allowed us to achieve more than twice as many large-scale rallies as the world record, which is a model for the future of VR social networking.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > first strand of the metaverse concept</h1>
As the leader of the metaverse concept, Roblox has been highly sought after since its listing, and it is also worth our attention and research.
Roblox was inspired by Interactive Physics, a software platform for simulating physics experiments written by two founders, David Baszucki and Erik Cassel. Later, the founders wanted to replicate the imagination and creativity of their students on a larger scale, and in 2004 they founded Roblox, whose original intention was to create a 3D virtual platform on which players could interact, play games, learn, communicate, explore and connect together, similar to the metaverse in the movie Ready Player One.
On March 10, 2021, Roblox adopted a direct listing model (DPO) to list on the New York Stock Exchange. On the day, Roblox shares opened at $64.50, up 43.33% from $45 per share in the company's January offline funding deals, and by the close, Roblox shares had risen to $69.6. In the company's prospectus, Roblox mentioned that the company's business areas are referred to by some as metacosmities. Roblox believes that the metacosm is used to describe the concept of a persistent, shared, three-dimensional virtual space in the virtual universe, and although it was proposed 30 years ago, the concept of the metacosm is becoming a reality with the advent of increasingly powerful technologies such as chips, clouds, communications, and so on.
At present, the standard of the metaverse mostly refers to the definition of Roblox. According to the definition of Roblox, a listed company on the concept of metacosm, the metacosm should have eight major elements, including identity, friends, immersion, low latency, diversification, anywhere, economic system, and civilization. Most of the manifestations of the metaverse take games as the starting point, and gradually integrate functions such as the Internet, digital entertainment, and social networks, and in the long run, even integrate social and economic and commercial activities.
On this platform, players can create their own virtual worlds or write a wide variety of games, with imagination being the only limit.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > but are they metaverse? </h1>
While there are many businesses interested in the metacosm, skeptics abound. Still others wonder whether the tech industry's interest is pure opportunism or a complete lack of focus.
Strauss Zelnick, ceo of game publisher Take-Two, said on an earnings call in May that he was "allergic" to the buzzword and suggested that the metaverse could be hype. Still others suspect that the interest in the tech industry is pure opportunism.
Evo Heyning has been working on the metaverse for 20 years. The U.S. State Department even hired her to help establish her presence at Second Life.
In the early virtual world, Ms. Hayning said, "it was always seen as a new type of public space in which people engage." "The vision of tech executives is good, but a private platform is a private platform." Now, I can create an avatar, but I can't jump from one world to the next," said Henin, who describes a concept known as "interoperability." In her view, the metacosm is not the product or space of a single company or organization, or even all of them, but the way they are connected.
Seeking this connection, Ms. Haining, 45, joined a number of volunteer activities to form the Open Metaversity Interoperability Group, which aims to establish technical standards for "connecting virtual worlds" that metaversary players will adopt.
Robert Long, who is also part of the group, compares his hopes for the metaverse to the early Web. "There's no single owner for the whole thing, it's decentralized, like a network, with many different people hosting it. We are looking for HTML for the metaverse. “
Kayvon Tehranian, founder and CEO of NFT Marketplace Foundation, also sees building a metacosm as an opportunity to correct what he believes was a mistake made by former internet administrators and users, with the key being blockchain technology.
In fact, many people see the metaverse as a financial opportunity. Mike Winkelman Bippel sold the NFT of his artwork for $69 million. He's working at a startup called Wenew that will sell time-related NFTs that, in the company's words, create a "memory palace of the metacosm" (whose early products include moments from the career of tennis star Andy Murray). ）
While Winkelman is positive about the crypto-oriented vision of the metaverse, his feelings about what it might be, or what it already is, are still widespread. Whatever the metaverse is, it's not just virtual reality, augmented reality, blockchain and NFTs, virtual worlds, and games.
Driven by technological evolution and human needs, the realization of the metaverse scene and the maturity of the metacosmic industry are only a matter of time. As an extension and expansion of the real world, the great opportunities and revolutionary roles brought by the metaverse are worth looking forward to, but because of this, we need to rationally look at the current metacosm boom and promote the healthy development of the metacosmic industry.