Have you heard about Metaverse so far? How will Metaverse impact the future of business?
Discussing what the meaning of “Metaverse” is is the same as debating the meaning of “Internet” in the 1970s. it is a new technology and in summary, the future of the internet belongs to it.
The technologies that make up the Metaverse can include virtual reality. It features a permanent virtual world that will continue to exist even when you are not playing. Another meaning of Metaverse refers to a digital economy wherein users can design, buy, and sell products. It’s also interoperable, allowing you to move virtual items like clothes or cars from one platform to another, under the more idealized conceptions of the Metaverse. In the real world, you can go to the mall and buy a shirt, then wear it to the movies. Most platforms already feature virtual identities, avatars, and inventories that are bound to a single platform, but a Metaverse might allow you to establish a persona that you can take with you wherever you go as easily as copying your profile image from one social network to another.
There is an intrinsic part of Metaverse:
- Massively scaled
- Data consistency
- Synchronous
- Data consistency
- 3D virtual worlds
- Persistent
- Unlimited users
- Interoperable
- Real-time rendered
- Individual sense of presence
When the internet originally came out, it was supported by several technological breakthroughs, such as the ability to communicate computers across long distances and the ability to link one web page to another. These technical features were building blocks with an abstract structure known as the Internet. Websites, apps, social networks, and everything else based on these core elements. That’s not even taking into account the convergence of non-internet interface advancements like displays, keyboards, mouse, and touchscreens, which are still required to make the internetwork.
As you can see above, The Metaverse has several new components, such as the ability to host hundreds of people on a single instance of the server (ideally, future versions of the Metaverse will host thousands or millions of people at the same time. You will be able to do it). Or a motion tracking tool that can tell you where a person is looking or where your hand is. These new technologies will be very exciting and futuristic.
However, there are some limitations that cannot be overcome easily. When technology companies like Microsoft and Fa—Meta display fictitious videos of their vision for the future, they often tend to comment on how humans interact with the Metaverse. VR headsets are still very clunky, and most people experience motion sickness and physical pain for long periods of time. Augmented reality glasses face similar problems. On top of that, there is also a non-negligible issue of how people wear glasses in public without looking like a giant jerk.
The prominence of VR and AR also obscures the more mundane aspects of the Metaverse, which are likely to bear fruit. For example, it’s easy for a technology company to invent an open standard for digital avatars. It’s a type of file that contains characteristics that you can provide to your character creator, such as eye color, hairstyle, and clothing options, and you can take it with you wherever you go. For this, you don’t need to build a more comfortable VR headset. But imagining it is not so much fun.
It’s crucial to keep all of this in mind because, while it’s tempting to compare today’s proto-metaverse concepts to the early internet and believe that everything will improve and grow in a linear fashion, this isn’t a given. There’s no guarantee that consumers will want to sit in a virtual office without their legs or play poker with Dreamworks CEO Mark Zuckerberg, let alone that VR and AR technology will ever become as ubiquitous as smartphones and computers are now.
It’s crucial to keep all of this in mind because, while it’s tempting to compare today’s proto-metaverse concepts to the early internet and believe that everything will improve and grow in a linear fashion, this isn’t a given. There’s no guarantee that consumers will want to sit in a virtual office without their legs or play poker with Dreamworks Mark Zuckerberg, let alone that VR and AR technology will ever become as ubiquitous as smartphones and computers are now.
It may even be the case that any real “metaverse” would be little more than some cool VR games and digital avatars in Zoom calls, but mostly just something we still think of as the internet.