If you don’t know what the Metaverse is, I’m sure you can figure it out from the headline of this blog post. The reason we are writing about it today, though, is that we’ve been thinking a lot about the Metaverse recently. How will it revolutionize education? How will it revolutionize gaming? How will it revolutionize commerce? But really, nobody cares about the Metaverse.
It’s a debate as old as time: is virtual reality better than real reality? Advocates for virtual reality – or VR – have long touted its many virtues, from its potential in education to its ability to help people cope with mental illnesses. Even so, VR hasn’t quite lived up to these lofty expectations. Despite being around for over two decades, virtual reality has failed to garner much attention outside of niche circles. By now you may be wondering why nobody cares about virtual reality.
Nothing. There is literally no difference between Second Life and a true metaverse. Some are calling it social VR, some are calling it a virtual world, but it’s all kind of meaningless distinctions that don’t really matter when we look at what these technologies actually do: allow us to be present with each other in an alternate environment.
The metaverse hasn’t yet caught on with the public because it’s still missing two main things: sound and graphics. These seem like small details, but they have a very large impact on your ability to make people feel like they are actually in another world.
The last 30 years have seen a massive change in technology, starting with personal computers and then smartphones. We also saw an explosion of internet usage and online services. All of these changes had some effect on our social lives, but they weren’t really technological revolutions. Virtual reality is different; it’s almost certainly going to be a social revolution.
The metaverse is a collective virtual world where people can freely interact with each other, where real-life rules do not apply.
Niantic is working on building a so-called “real-world metaverse” that overlays data, information, services, and interactive work in the physical world. Other companies such as Atari, Epic Games, and Nvidia are building versions that they believe will be the future of social technology. This leads to an important question. With only one metaverse, how does governance work?
However, there are concerns that a small number of tech giants may monopolize the Metaverse, as in Web 2.0, rather than realizing the utopian vision of an independent industry of decentralized ecosystems. Their business model is built around scaling and eliminating competitors while preserving user data, the strongest asset in a walled garden.
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