What Is the Metaverse? Is It Just Virtual Reality, or Something More?

It hosts communities that are steeped in bitterness and misapprehension and cruelty. And it has run afoul of everything from hoaxes to misidentifying criminals in amateur sleuth operations to licensed gun sales (for real) to really inappropriate pornography. (Yes, it is also one of the few platforms, along with Twitter, that displays real pornography.) But at least Reddit’s vision of a connected community doesn’t make you feel like a rat running a maze in a virtual conference room. You can think about it as the successor to the mobile internet…you can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it. And you feel present with other people as if you were in other places, having different experiences that you couldn’t necessarily do on a 2D app or webpage, like dancing, for example… Tech CEOs keep talking about “the metaverse.” Mark Zuckerberg insists that Facebook will be seen as a “metaverse company” instead of a social media company—so much so that he renamed the company “Meta.” Satya Nadella proclaims Microsoft is creating a “metaverse stack” for the enterprise.

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Use cases in its spatial computing unit include immersive computing — AR/VR — for collaboration, commerce, training and the industrial metaverse; digital asset management; and real-world simulation. It’s a combination of multiple elements of technology, including virtual reality, augmented reality and video where users “live” within a digital universe. 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. Many companies that have hopped on board the metaverse bandwagon also envision some sort of new digital economy, where users can create, buy, and sell goods. In the more idealistic visions of the metaverse, it’s interoperable, allowing you to take virtual items like clothes or cars from one platform to another, though this is harder than it sounds.

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It also will incorporate other aspects of online life such as shopping and social media, according review dual momentum investing to Victoria Petrock, an analyst who follows emerging technologies. Creating clothing and housing in a creator system within a particular virtual world limits your impact to that virtual world. Oftentimes the creators of these worlds have a very strong incentive to take a very large cut of your sales, many take as much as 74%. It’s worth looking into how you can provide value in the space using your skills to someone willing to pay upfront for them rather than being a solo/independent creator. In past virtual worlds when people moved away from that particular world virtual world clothing designers went out of business.

What is the Metaverse concept – Explained in 3 minutes

It’s been around since 2013, but a series of (often probably fake) text message screenshots of people standing up to abusive employers has brought tens of thousands of people into the community. WallStreetBets, a nearly ten-year-old community on Reddit, exposed the scam of the stock market when its members nearly took out a segment of the darkest sectors of the economy by hyping GameStop opencv introduction stock. Along the way, they also revealed the protectionist schemes of the economy built to support major players. Organizations can employ VR to consider the effects of different product design decisions. They can also build simulated prototypes to avoid the cost of creating physical ones.

One thing many people have pointed out about the Metaverse is that the concept of a virtual world that the user spends long periods immersed in is nothing new, at least to anyone who’s gotten into an extremely addictive video game before. Redditor mas901 points out that there’s an issue people might be overlooking here. 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.

Science-fiction author Neal Stephenson coined the term metaverse in his novel Snow Crash (1992), in which characters enjoy themselves as digital avatars in the “Metaverse” as an escape from the grim reality of the 21st century. The concept of an immersive digital world became popular in late 20th- and early 21st-century science fiction, such as Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s film The Matrix (1999) and its sequels and Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One (2011; film 2018). Virtual reality (VR), on the other hand, doesn’t include a physical-world component (besides the handset or other equipment such as a helmet or sensor-laden gloves). In VR, users enter a computer-generated simulation but can interact with it in a way that seems real. You might be familiar with videogames that use VR, but the technology is used in a variety of other ways that go beyond recreation.

• And at points, a person grabs virtual items but then holds those objects in what seems to be their physical hands.
• The social network company Facebook is particularly active in building metaverse technology.
• Why, as it happens, Facebook — the company that knows all about how its users progress from “harmless” local clusters toward “gateway groups” and then right into QAnon anti-vaxx birtherist cesspools.

IS FACEBOOK GOING ALL IN ON THE METAVERSE?

Proponents believe that the metaverse will be used for a wide array of things, from socializing to events, gaming, shopping, and even work. The metaverse won’t be one site or platform, but rather an array of online destinations that will support customizable avatars and assets that you can move from one virtual place to another. As metaverse prospects have waxed and waned amid a fluctuating economy and the rise of generative AI, so have corporate strategies. The degree of interoperability among virtual worlds, data portability, governance and user interfaces will depend on what the metaverse eventually becomes.

Coca-Cola and Clinique have sold digital tokens pitched as a stepping stone to the metaverse. Zuckerberg has acknowledged that “no one company” Best index funds 2024 will build the metaverse by itself. Critics wonder if the potential pivot could be an effort to distract from the company’s crises, including antitrust crackdowns, testimony by whistleblowing former employees and concerns about its handling of misinformation. 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 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.

The internet is a network of billions of computers, millions of servers and other electronic devices. Once online, internet users can communicate with each other, view and interact with websites, and buy and sell goods and services. 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 over 10,000 employees.