Is there exact definition of Metaverse?

There is no exact definition of what a metaverse is. According to one theory, the metaverse is the possible future development level of the Internet, in which social interactions, education, work, and entertainment will increasingly take place in the 3D environment, in which users' virtual property will play an important role, protected by blockchain technology and for which you can pay for real money with tokens that can be purchased.

A virtual world, or real-time simulation, in which users live, work, and play like the physical world. Connected to the metaverse are technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR), which exists when we are not there, and Augmented Reality (AR), which combines aspects of the digital and physical worlds. However, the metaversion can be accessed not only on VR or AR, but also on a PC, game console, or even a phone.

Ideally, an important feature of a metaverse is interoperability, meaning that coexisting metaverns are compatible and interoperable in some ways, allowing, for example, the transfer of virtual objects, say, clothes, or cars, from one platform to another. Currently, on most platforms, virtual identities, avatars, and properties are only tied to a specific platform, but an idealistic metaverse can allow us to create a personality that we can easily take with us everywhere.

The metaverse puts users in a virtual or 3D version of the Internet. So we will be constantly "inside the internet" instead of just accessing it.

However, "being inside" does not necessarily mean using virtual or augmented reality, hundreds of millions of people worldwide already participate in virtual worlds every day and spend tens of billions of hours a month without VR / AR / MR / XR devices. So VR headsets, smartphones or mobile internet are not the metaverse.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees the metaverse as the successor to the mobile Internet, where many physical objects such as TVs or computers will simply be holograms in the future. Zuckerberg believes the metaverse will materialize within the next 10 years, but expects that in the near future, consumers will experience it for the first time through 2D applications, such as in commerce (buying physical or digital products) or in the entertainment industry. He hopes to reach one billion people in the next decade, host hundreds of billions of dollars worth of digital commerce, and provide jobs for millions of creators and developers. In the metaversion, we will be able to teleport as a hologram to be there in the office without a trip, at a concert with our friends, or in our parents ’living room. We will be able to spend more time on what is important, spend less time in transport and reduce CO2 emissions.

Roblox CEO David Baszucki sees the metaverse as a virtual universe that is durable and shared, where platforms connect people from different walks of life and allow them to communicate with each other in a new way with a combination of technology and high-realistic communication. Baszucki often refers to Roblox as a human co-experience. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney interprets the metaverse as an extensive community and virtual world where people can interact through shared experiences. Like others, Sweeney believes users will build the metaverse through the content they generate. According to Sweeney, a free and fair economy must be created in which all users can participate, earn money and be rewarded, and where all participants (individuals, companies, developers) participate on an equal footing. Creating interoperability and industry standards will be key.

Nensia CEO Jensen Huang has defined the metaverse as a 3D extension of the internet and expects the virtual economy to be much larger than the real world economy. To build the metaverse, Huang at Nvidia will focus on Omniverse, a platform focused on collaboration and simulation that improves existing workflows by creating virtual worlds.

Metaverses or metaverse?

This is not the first major attempt to create an all-encompassing virtual world, countless digital worlds have been created in recent decades that have partially met one of the metaverse definitions already described above. Second Life has existed since 2003, probably ahead of its time, and it was already a metaverse-like experience when neither big tech companies nor big financiers nor companies willing to advertise, and ultimately users, were prepared for it. Second Life, unlike video game-based platforms, has no goals or objectives, instead users create a digital avatar to explore the digital world freely, meet other users, create their own digital content, and even trade a currency, the Linden Dollar. goods and services. Second Life was in its heyday in the late 2000s, and is probably the oldest running experiment among platforms offering metaverse-like experiences.

Currently, Fortnite, Decentraland, Sandbox and Roblox are the closest analogies to the metaverse, used by tens of millions of them every day to compete, get to know and create together, important meeting places for many, especially the younger age group. Although most of them started as video games, today more and more of these platforms can be bought with virtual currency purchased for real money, they are built around user-managed NFTs, several of them can be decentralized and interoperable, virtual real estate, land, buildings to shop in them, and for a long time they are not just used for games, they are venues for various events, fashion shows, concerts, film shows, exhibitions.

As we have seen countless examples in the tech world that the winner takes it all (Google browser, Youtube, Facebook, etc.), there has been fierce competition among big technology companies to see which one can create a metaverse-like platform with hundreds of millions of users. can channel. His plans in this regard have already been presented by Meta (Horizon Worlds), Samsung (My House), Baidu (Xi Rang) and Microsoft, among others. Hundreds of development teams around the world are working tirelessly to create their own metaverse, many looking to share an estimated $ 1,000 billion market in a few years. That’s why a myriad of platforms have been created, from the very beginners to professional solutions to simple pump and dump scams.

Metaverse = everything is beautiful and good?

Not quite. Based on these thoughts, we may have already realized that existing metaverse-like platforms only exist at the design level, or have already been demonstrated, but are still struggling, or have been around for years, but are far from being called true metaverse. And unfortunately, this is also evident in their execution. Anyone who has seen a professional video game or simulator lately, played with the latest installment of Microsoft Flight Simulator, Far Cry, or Forza Horizon knows that many times our mouths are left open, the graphics are so realistic. But Decentraland, Sandbox or Roblox are not like that. They’re more like seeing a video game a decade ago, often buggy, with appearing and prominent objects, and that’s not just true for smaller company platforms. Just watch the video from the demo of the Baidu meta version, it’s all but a flawless user experience. Obviously, not everyone demands realistic graphics, but anyone who chooses one of the metaverses for that reason will be very disappointed for now. We still seem a long way from being able to create shared, durable simulations that are used by millions of users in real time with realistic rendering. Another important criticism of meta-versions is that most of them, especially the existing or planned projects of large technology companies, are not interoperable. Evangelists of the metaverse, such as Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, say the metaverse will only be fruitful for society if “multiverses” are built on interoperable, decentralized, and open standards. A metaverse is a term like the Internet that no company can own, Sweeney said. For now, it’s hard to imagine Meta, Alphabet, or Apple willing to work together to make their own metaverse compatible. It is much more likely that we will see stand-alone solutions that can be used with their own AR-VR widgets.

And there are issues that are already with us in the web2 era, and I will only be even more powerful with us with the metaverse. According to Matthew Ball, (author of the book: The Metaverse), there are five really important issues that we haven’t solved yet: data rights, data security, radicalization, misinformation, and the power of platforms. If the basic assumption of the metaverse is that we will spend most of our time, work, leisure, wealth, existence in virtual worlds, then by definition all five of these problems are exacerbated. The amount and importance of recorded data is increasing, and the risk of data loss is increasing.

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