Mentally replace the phrase "the metaverse" in a sentence with "cyberspace." Ninety percent of the time, the meaning won’t substantially change. The flashiness of VR and AR also obscure the more mundane ways that our existing, interconnected digital world could be improved right now. It would be trivial for tech companies to invent, say, an open digital avatar standard, a type of file that includes characteristics you might enter into a character creator--like eye color, hairstyle, or clothing options--and let you take that data everywhere, to be interpreted by a game engine however it chooses. This stands in relatively grounded contrast with other companies’ visions of the future, which range from optimistic to outright fan fiction. At one point during Meta’s original presentation on the metaverse, the company showed a scenario in which a young woman is sitting on her couch scrolling through Instagram when she sees a video a friend has posted of a concert that’s happening halfway across the world. For those of us who have been in the metaverse industry for more than a decade, it’s very clear that the overwhelming majority of crypto "metaverse" projects are social engineering scams built to take advantage of the naïve using FOMO and promises of massive profits.

The paradox of defining the metaverse is that in order for it to be the future, you have to define away the present. We already have MMOs that are essentially entire virtual worlds, digital concerts, video calls with people from all over the world, online avatars, and commerce platforms. So in order to sell these things as a new vision of the world, there has to be some element of it that’s new. When tech companies like Microsoft or Meta show fictionalized videos of their visions of the future, they frequently tend to gloss over just how people will interact with the metaverse.

1. It’s totally fine if you post the whole article in Reddit or let people know you are promoting an article you wrote but that must be clear.
2. The Windmill Factory, the New York production company which began developing the platform more than a year ago, has done projects for Lady Gaga and Nine Inch Nails.
3. While some advocates claim new technologies like NFTs can enable portable digital assets, this simply isn’t true, and bringing items from one video game or virtual world to another is an enormously complex task that no one company can solve.
4. There is absolutely no reason for land in the Metaverse to be scarce.
5. Supporters of the metaverse envision its users working, playing and staying connected with friends through everything from concerts and conferences to virtual trips around to the world.

Microsoft seems to think it could involve virtual meeting rooms to train new hires or chat with your remote coworkers. Coca-Cola launched a "flavor born in the metaverse" alongside a Fortnite tie-in mini-game. Some of these companies are creating the technology while others are creating the software. If anyone wants to do a breakdown of each company's involvement I will include it in this article.

No Crypto or NFTs

And at points, a person grabs virtual items but then holds those objects in what seems to be their physical hands. Augmented reality glasses face a similar problem, on top of the not-insignificant issue of figuring out how people can wear them around in public https://www.dowjonesanalysis.com/ without looking like huge dorks. And then there are the accessibility challenges of VR that many companies are shrugging off for now. Meanwhile, Apple’s Vision Pro "solves" the problem of users who have to wear glasses by ... selling prescription lens add-ons.

For example, Epic has acquired a number of companies that help create or distribute digital assets, in part to bolster its powerful Unreal Engine 5 platform. And while Unreal may be a video game platform, it’s also being used in the film industry and could make it easier for anyone to create virtual experiences. There are tangible and exciting developments in the realm of building digital worlds. VR headsets https://www.investorynews.com/ like the Quest 2 are cheaper than ever, and Apple’s Vision Pro could be really cool if there’s ever a version that costs less than a laptop, tablet, and phone combined. Video games and other virtual worlds are getting easier to build and design. And I think the advances in photogrammetry--the process of creating digital 3D objects out of photos or video--make it an incredibly cool tool for digital artists.

There have been many virtual worlds for many years now, most notably Second Life 18 years ago. The Metaverse is a hypothesized 3D version of the internet in which people use 3D avatars to interact with a 3D virtual world. Unlike motion-tracked digital avatars, which are kind of janky right now but could be better someday, there’s no janky version of making a three-dimensional picture appear in midair without tightly controlled circumstances. They are not necessarily, however, enthusiasts declare the Blockchain may be an efficient consensus mechanism to identify ownership of property and create persistent avatars and reputation systems. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, EPIC Games, Roblox, Unity technologies, Autodesk, Nvidia are all involved in the creation of the Metaverse. Start learning how to develop games in a game engine such as Unity3D.

This is to prevent people posting their own news articles as if it was something for the community for the sole reason of empowering/educating people. It’s totally fine if you post the whole article in Reddit or let people know you are promoting an article you wrote but that must be clear.

Can someone explain what the Metaverse is and why it's a big deal?

Advocates from niche startups to tech giants have argued that this lack of coherence is because the metaverse is still being built, and it’s too new to define what it means. The internet existed in the 1970s, for example, but not every idea of what that would eventually look like was true. Another virtual universe beloved by kids, the Microsoft-owned Minecraft is essentially the digital equivalent of Legos, where players can create their own digital character and build whatever they desire. As of August, Minecraft boasts more than 140 million monthly active users. During the pandemic, it has exploded in popularity among kids who had to rely more heavily on virtual connections. Inklings of the metaverse already exist in online game universes such as Fortnite, Minecraft and Roblox.

Combined with the general pop culture idea of holograms and heads-up displays (basically anything Iron Man has used in his last 10 movies) these stories serve as an imaginative reference point for what the metaverse--a metaverse that tech companies might actually sell as something new--could look like. The platform, founded in 2004, houses scores of user-generated games, including role-playing offerings like Bloxburg and Brookhaven, where users can build homes, work and play out scenarios. Roblox is now valued at more than $45 billion after going public this year. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of the newly named Meta (formerly Facebook), estimates it could take five to 10 years before the key features of the metaverse become mainstream.

What is the Metaverse, and why do people seem to not like it or be interested in it?

In the time since Facebook’s rebrand, the concept of "the metaverse" has served as a powerful vehicle for repackaging old tech, overselling the benefits of new tech, and capturing the imagination of speculative investors. Meta itself lost $13.7 billion in 2022, and then spent the first half of 2023 laying off https://www.topforexnews.org/ over 10,000 employees. Spend enough time having discussions about the metaverse and someone will inevitably (and exhaustingly) reference fictional stories like Snow Crash--the 1992 novel that coined the term "metaverse"--or Ready Player One, which depicts a VR world where everyone works, plays, and shops.

And as Apple’s demo showed, it’s not easy to reconstruct a 3D image of someone in another place without edging close to nightmare fuel. It’s at this point that most discussions of what the metaverse entails start to stall. We have a vague sense of what things currently exist that we could kind of call the metaverse if we massage the definition of words the right way. And we know which companies are investing in the idea, but there’s nothing approaching agreement on what it is. Meta thinks it will include fake houses you can invite all your friends to hang out in.

�" What is the Metaverse?

As a rule of thumb, if you plan to resell your NFT or coin at a profit, you are likely being suckered into a pyramid scheme. There is absolutely no reason for land in the Metaverse to be scarce. If you are posting articles from the same news source to 3 or more different Reddits on a weekly basis, this applies to you.

This kind of wishful-thinking-as-tech-demo leaves us in a place where it’s hard to pinpoint which aspects of the various visions of the metaverse (if any) will actually be real one day. If VR and AR headsets become comfortable and cheap enough for people to wear on a daily basis--a substantial "if"--then perhaps a virtual poker game with your friends as robots and holograms and floating in space could be somewhat close to reality. If not, well you could always play Tabletop Simulator on a Discord video call.

And the companies behind those games have ambitions to be part of the evolution of the metaverse. The Sensorium Galaxy earlier this year opened the first two of its planned galaxy of various connected online “worlds” to explore with VR headsets or desktop computers. Prism, the first to open, involves music - virtual DJs and bands play, for instance - in futuristic landscapes. The subreddit covers various game development aspects, including programming, design, writing, art, game jams, postmortems, and marketing. It serves as a hub for game creators to discuss and share their insights, experiences, and expertise in the industry. Perhaps these are meant to be interpreted as images projected via glasses--both women in the demo video are wearing similar glasses, after all--but even that assumes a lot about the physical capabilities of compact glasses, which Snap can tell you isn’t a simple problem to solve.

Your opinions on Metaverse?

Many other large companies, including Nvidia, Unity, Roblox, and even Snap--as well as a variety of smaller companies and startups--are building the infrastructure to create better virtual worlds that more closely mimic our physical life. Author Neal Stephenson is credited with coining the term “metaverse” in his 1992 science fiction novel “Snow Crash,” in which he envisioned lifelike avatars who met in realistic 3D buildings and other virtual reality environments. This kind of glossing over reality occurs frequently in video demos of how the metaverse could work. Another of Meta’s demos showed characters floating in space--is this person strapped to an immersive aerial rig or are they just sitting at a desk? A person represented by a hologram--do they have a headset on, and if so how is their face being scanned?

There’s no guarantee people will even want to hang out sans legs in a virtual office or play poker with Dreamworks Mark Zuckerberg, much less that VR and AR tech will ever become seamless enough to be as common as smartphones and computers are today. Microsoft, Meta, and every other company that shows wild demos like this are trying to give an artistic impression of what the future could be, not necessarily account for every technical question. It’s a time-honored tradition going back to AT&T’s demo of a voice-controlled foldable phone that could magically erase people from images and generate 3D models, all of which might’ve seemed similarly impossible at the time. Even Apple’s Vision Pro has some breakthrough tech that is genuinely exciting, like controller-free interfaces or pass-through screens that can be very exciting and feel futuristic.