As the buzz around Metaverse grips the World, we all are excited to enter a new World where experiences will be defined differently.
But, how much do we really need the Metaverse?
In his dark room with his Quest headset on, Rhean had a distinguishable contented smile on his face. He was logged in Decentraland where he wore an expensive suite as he stepped down from his Tesla Model Z. While feeling the rich soft fabric of his coat, he was admiring the shiny glaze of his brand new Tesla Model Z car which he had bought from Horizon marketplace yesterday. He had just dropped off his girlfriend after giving her a ride, showing off his new Tesla to her, when suddenly, a screen popped in front of him. It was a notification from his friend Alberto, who lived in Spain. Alberto was inviting him in SoccerlWorld where his friends from different parts of the World were waiting for him to complete their playing 22 on the field in a game of soccer. Rhean gestured his hands to switch his screens in the VR world. The VR headset switched him from Decentraland to SoccerWorld changing his gear to his team’ s football kit in a matter of few seconds. He was on the ground. He looked at his muscular Avatar in SoccerWorld. The top-right corner of his VR glasses showed his skill level which was higher than anyone on the field that day.As his game was about to begin, his screen splashed again with a call notification. This time it was his mother.
“Rhean, I had been telling you since a week to fix your bathroom. The taps need repair and for heavens sake also allow us to fix this broken door.” She was outside the locked door of his tiny room. She peeped through the small crack in the rusty old door.
“Mom, I am in a game right now. I will call you later.”
Rhean never understood why his mother would bother him about things in the physical world. When the game was over, he switched his headset to the physical world and could see the mess around him. His room was distorted and the water running from his bathroom tap had encroached his bed. After a real tight soccer game, he was looking for his favourite chair to relax, until he realized he had sold it out last week to buy some Soccer coins. He had used them to upgrade his Avatar in Soccerworld. He sat down and looked around. His VR screen flashed him a notification showing the approximate second hand price for his old table.
“100$ is not bad deal. I could get around 1200 ICP coins which I could use to buy a glazing new color for my Tesla in Decentraland or a virtual sofa set for my living room in Horizon Home.” — He thought. He wondered why his mother always insisted to buy some decent furniture for his room in the physical World. “If only my parents could spend more time in metaverse, they would come to know the riches I own there” — He wished.
A decade back, the story above might have sounded like a futuristic Sci-Fi script probably featuring the year 2100, but right now this does not seems a so distant future.
What is a Metaverse?
Metaverse, in simple terms refers to all the virtual spaces or virtual worlds. For those who already know the gaming space, the concept of virtual world is not new. Games like Minecraft, SecondLife etc were created in the last decade where users could enter with their own Avatar (digital version of self) explore a world, build structures, interact socially, complete tasks or play games . In some of those games, users were not only able to develop their land or assets, but also advertise and monetize them by selling them in a marketplace.
With the advent of blockchain technology, some games like Decentraland, Sandbox allowed users to make those purchases over a blockchain. With immense advancement in AR/VR technology, a lot of projects have started complementing these games with immense real world-like experiences.
The worlds in those games could be considered as virtual spaces. All these worlds combined make up the Metaverse.
The term is coined from a sci-fi book named “Snow Crash” published in 1992 and now, is used to create a hype around the projects currently being developed around in this space.
What can you do in a Metaverse?
As many companies have jumped into this space, the possibilities explored are endless. Just putting an AR/VR set, sitting at home, a person can teleport anywhere virtually. He can not only visit, but also experience beautiful places, concerts around the World, or have some exotic experiences like skiing in the Alps or Skydiving in Dubai or simply have a delicious breakfast on a beachfront resort somewhere in Miami. All this while sitting in their home in any part of the World.
By entering their office virtual space right from the comforts of their homes, one can be at office and home at the same time. One can experience climbing Everest or being chased by Dinosaurs while staying safely in their rooms. For the real estate lovers, it provides the possibility of buying and experience living in a virtual house on a beautiful Spanish beach with ample sunlight throughout. You can also develop or build your own structures, houses over open land and sell and monetize it.
All those capabilities makes a very strong proposition for this technology and ensures that users are bound to spend time and money in these virtual worlds or Metaverse. This would also mean that people will start buying a lot of digital goods here. In order to ensure a secure decentralized experience, mostly the transactions in this space are planned to be based on the emerging blockchain technology. This also explains why NFT’s ( Non Fungible Tokens ) or virtual digital assets transacted on blockchains are gaining value recently.
What is happening in this area
While the World is moving towards VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality) adoption as part of the metaverse boom, businesses around the World are scripting their strategies around this space.
It was not much surprising for a company like Facebook, now ‘Meta’(whose business strategy always aimed at having maximum users spending maximum amount of time on their platform )to turn its head towards this undenyingly addictive market. Rebranding themselves to “Meta” or Meta Platforms in 2021 was corollary after they acquired Oculus (Virtual reality headset manufacturer) back in 2014.
Meta currently has numerous ongoing projects which include Horizon Home — where users can buy and decorate homes. Horizon World — which allows users to build their own virtual worlds. Horizon Marketplace — a shopping place. While some companies, in order to improve productivity at workplaces had banned social media sites like Facebook, Meta is planning to integrate 3D VR/AR work environment through their Horizon Works project.Here is a short video where Zuckerberg explains about his future project plans in this space –
Its no doubt that Zuckerberg is planning to enter in all those areas which were restricted for him due to the limitations Facebook as a social media platform had.
But its not only Meta, Microsoft introduced Mesh, its VR bet designed to be used in Teams application. Its alluring marketing video promises a lot of stuff. They also plan for virtual work experience through their “holoportation” technology. They introduced Hololens, their VR/AR set back in 2019.
Chinese giant Alibaba has trademarked their metaverse and many giant companies have started working on projects around this. Adidas buying land in Sandbox to create adiVerse and Nike buying land to create Nikeland in Roblox, shows how retail giants dont want to miss out in this race. Virtual influencers are created by major brands like Prada — Candy or Yoox’s- Daisy to try out new marketing techniques.
Advantages
Undoubtedly there are numerous advantages — The convenience of being anywhere, anytime within a matter of seconds is special. Having a disabled person experience some exotic experiences would be a remarkable achievement. Since you could almost teleport to any place, it would reduce actual travel and hence could as well bring down carbon footprint over the years. It might open doors to new technological advents, new types of jobs and new ways to earn money and a lot of scope for creative ideas.
But…
But the question is what are we giving away with it?
Today, as mobile devices have consumed us, we cannot let go ourselves from our mobile phones. How healthy would it be for our next generations to be addicted to 3D VR/AR sets. They would eventually become an integral part of us or a necessity. For someone in the 1970’s, it would had been a funny thought to have imagined humans occupied in a small handheld device for a considerable percent of their time. Yet, here we are. Similarly, today no matter how far fetched the idea of VR sets integrating with our body seems, we might not even know when we embrace this. No matter how sleeky or stylish they would look, integrating a digital product with our body sounds scary.
While its always exicting to embrace new technology, it sends shiver through our spines when we know that our data in the form of minute details will be available to those technology companies like Meta, which already have a shady past on their ways of using this data. Each movement of ours, likes-dislikes will be tracked with AI softwares on the context of providing a better user experience. Now if that did not threw privacy out of the window – Meta is also planning to capture electric motor nerve signals using electromyography, which means we would be relying on these tech giants with our thinking pattern data.
Virtual Worlds sound cool. But with huge number of people with different interests and opinions, we ought to have radical groups, crimes, thefts , hate speeches here which makes it extremely necessary for moderation. The question is how much can we trust these technological companies on a fair and unbiased moderation of their humoungous userbase. Someone could suggest of providing an opensource codebase for these metaverses as an option, but companies in this space would seldom agree with this, especially in this compeptitive world. Governments intervening to bring in regulations could might end up as good as those jokes like those recent trials some technological companies went through.
Finally these worlds would still be controlled by some central entity and having vast number of users managing their businesses and finances in these worlds would rest tremendous power in the hands of the creators of these worlds.
In my opinion the biggest fear would be of loosing the hold of reality in our physical world. As we would start focussing more on these virtual worlds, there is a huge risk of neglecting our health, life, relationships in the actual world.
Do we really need a Metaverse?
May be yes. May be no.
Metaverse opens up numerous doors for mankind to move further.Also provides us numerous options.
Like the story narrated at the start of this article, we might be able to virtually play whatever we want, anytime, anyplace and with anyone. Although, being a millenial, I always cherished those evening hours I spent under the sun playing with actual people on real grounds. When you dint had to log in from a dark room, but had to just get out in sun on a ground and start playing while your friends join in.
With the rate the disruption is taking place in this area, we might see an all different world in 2 decades. I just hope we dont have to explain what basking in the real sun or sweating profusely on a ground mean to our next generations.