5 minutes of your life to be smarter in the world of tech! As we're going to discuss what exactly is metaverse? Is it too ahead of its time? Let’s find out!
Things You Shouldn’t Be Ignorant About!
“Like we’re right there with people, no matter how far apart we actually are, we’ll be able to express ourselves in new joyful, completely immersive ways.”- Zuckerberg (Oct, 2021)
“Metaverse” a recent trend all over the social media, after the debut of Facebook on October 28, 2021, is nothing new. What exactly is it? Are we going to use it? Is it the next generation's way of living?
MIGHT BE!
Metaverse is a 3D digital world or maybe a whole universe, where we can be present as an avatar and can interact with our friends, colleagues, and anyone using various sensors and a VR/AR headset, that too in real-time.
It’s like we are jumping into the digital world using Virtual Reality or bringing things into reality using Augmented Reality and living a second life.
Thereby performing trades, meetings, having our yoga classes, buying digital plots, seeing sites, social gatherings, and much more, even without leaving our comfy homes.
Will our friends be able to see what we do in our world? Of course! Metaverse is a shared digital world which means whatever things we do will be visible to all the players living in the same world (unless there is a hiding feature).
But why the metaverse isn’t out yet?
We will be seeing that shortly!
Let’s Catch Up A Bit
The concept is not new. The term metaverse was coined in the novel of 1992 “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson, right after the birth of the internet in 1991.
In this novel, humans interact with each other as digital characters on a digital planet of circumference 2¹⁶km. Unlike Earth, it isn’t flat. HAHA!
The world in “Snow Crash” is a metaphor to the real world, with wide streets, estates, rails and much more.
Later in 2003, Philip Rosedale and his team in Linden lab, build an online virtual world named as “Second Life”.
It might be a predecessor to metaverse. People across the world play and interact with each other in digital worlds. Though it has poor performance, much below optimal, the user still finds it fun.
Later, development like Roblox (2006), Bitcoin (2009), Blockchain (2009), Proof of Work, NFTs (2012), and many more are the next few steps towards metaverse.
Ready player one (2011) is yet another novel explaining and exploring the virtual reality world.
Can’t picture what exactly will metaverse look like? Play games like Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, Pokémon Go, and Battle Royale. These games are very much akin to the metaverse.
Tech Talk And The Limitations
So why does metaverse isn’t out yet?
The answer to this is simply because of technology. The technology we have isn’t evolved as to support and run metaverse. And according to various tech experts, it will still take one to two decades to bring metaverse into working.
The hardware metaverse will be using are consumer-facing hardware such as VR headsets, haptic gloves, and mobiles and also enterprise hardware to create and run virtual reality and augmented reality example industrial cameras, sensors, projection, etc.
Another technical issue is carrying millions of users online, in sync with each other and keeping their activities in real-time with each other.
The internet as of now cannot take such a load!
Many tech giants are trying to solve this issue. Among them are companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Nvidia, etc.
It's all about immersive experience and for that companies are using AI, Blockchain, Internet of Things, AR, VR, 3D reconstruction, data science, and much more things in the future.
What Tech Gurus have to say.
“I’m not suggesting web3 is real – seems more marketing buzzword than reality right now – just wondering what the future will be like in 10, 20 or 30 years. 2051 sounds crazy futuristic!”- Elon Musk (Dec, 2021)
“We’ve gone from desktop to web to mobile; from text to photos to video. But this isn’t the end of the line. The next platform will be even more immersive — an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it. We call this the metaverse.”- Mark Zuckerberg
“Metaverse also has the potential to offer more social experiences than lonely phone scrolling”- Ivan Nikitin, product director of Sensorium Galaxy.
Many tech experts are very excited to see metaverse as it will avail so many things which we reduce human efforts, such as traveling!
Other experts are very much concerned as things like security and privacy are at stake. Yet developers are doing their best to clear every concerning part and planning to expand the metaverse to accommodate all kinds of benefits it can bring.
Let's interact a bit (common FAQs)!
1. Is metaverse out yet?
Ans. Not yet, as the technology is not yet on a sufficient level. But part of it has been tested and used successfully. For eg. Decentraland(2017), Microsoft mesh for teams, Sandbox, Second life, etc.
2. Will it cost a lot?
Ans. Yes in the initial period after the launch it will be expensive as to keep money invested in projects but later on, it will reduce with time.
3. How many worlds will there be?
Ans. According to Parisi’s rule, there will be only one metaverse, and it will be for everyone.
I hope this blog helped you understand the basic things of Metaverse and how it would be. The main aim of the blog was to keep it as simple to understand as it could be. Do share it with your friends, family, and colleagues to excite them too for the future.
About Article:
This blog has been written by Prathamesh Zingade and published here as he was the winner of the "Blogathon 2022 Event" organized by HackClub SIGCE and powered by TechCrack.
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