By now, if you are not trading cryptocurrencies, you probably are finding out about it or even just an enthusiast. Whichever category you fall into, the point is, the word crypto is not strange to you in any way.
Okay, can we take it up a notch higher? Yes, I heard you say! So, do you know about NFTs? I fancy another ”yes” from you, because, like crypto, talks about NFT (Non-fungible Tokens) have dominated conversations over the Social Media space in Nigeria in the past few weeks.
What you should, however, know is, NFTs transcend just the images of those apes you’ve been seeing making rounds in recent days. over the next few days, the GNB News will be committed to educating you on the latest transformative technologies changing our world rapidly. We don’t want you to be left out, this is why we have selected this fascinating topic, the Metaverse.
What exactly is the Metaverse?
A couple of weeks ago, news broke that MTN bought 144 plots of digital land, becoming the first African company to enter the Metaverse. Does this still sound like a mystery? Yeah! I know! Now, let us get some clarity.
A metaverse is a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection. In futurism and science fiction, it is often described as a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual and augmented reality headsets.
The term “metaverse” has its origins in the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash as a portmanteau of “meta” and “universe.” Various metaverses have been developed for popular use such as virtual world platforms like Second Life. The term metaverse can be traced back to Neal Stephenson and his dystopian cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. The novel was released in 1992, and it’s considered a canon of the genre, along with William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which describes a virtual reality dataspace called the matrix.
Some metaverse iterations involve integration between virtual and physical spaces and virtual economies, often including a significant interest in advancing virtual reality technology.
The term has seen considerable use as a buzzword for public relations purposes to exaggerate development progress for various related technologies and projects. Information privacy, user addiction, and user safety are some of the concerns within metaverses, stemming from challenges facing the social media and video game industries as a whole
The metaverse in Snow Crash is a 3D virtual reality(VR) space accessed through personal terminals and virtual reality goggles that have a lot in common with the Oculus Quest and other VR headsets. This 3D space appears to its users as an urban environment created along a single hundred-meter-wide road, the Street. Stephenson writes:
Like any place, in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows, special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored, and free-combat zones where people can go to kill each other.
If Stephenson’s vision of the metaverse seems familiar, it’s because massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs, or more commonly, MMOs) share many of its properties. In Second Life (released in 2003), for example, users can customize realistic avatars, meet with other players, create virtual items, own virtual property, and exchange goods and services.
Virtual experiences like Second Life can be described as protometaverses. Why the prefix? Because they exist in isolation, each being a digital island whose inhabitants and their virtual assets never leave it. The metaverse Mark Zuckerberg wants to create isn’t some grand virtual experience—it’s the next version of the internet.
“We’ve gone from desktop to web to mobile; from text to photos to video. But this isn’t the end of the line,” writes Zuckerberg in a recent letter to his employees.
“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, and it will touch every product we build.”
Thus, If you were part of those who thought the entire internet idea was too good to be real in its early days(1999 to be precise), don’t ”sleep on” the Metaverse idea. Don’t be left out once again
Does the Metaverse already exist?
If the metaverse is to become an embodied internet, then it must have certain properties that separate it from isolated virtual reality experiences like Second Life.
The metaverse is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds which can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.
Let’s list the properties of the metaverse for better clarity:
- Massively scaled
- Interoperable
- Real-time rendered
- 3D virtual worlds
- Synchronous
- Persistent
- Unlimited number of users
- The individual sense of presence
- Continuity of data
.
