These contracts enabled the creation of decentralized applications and digital tokens, including non-fungible tokens. The Ethereum platform can support autonomous systems in the metaverse, such as virtual economies and governance mechanisms. Jaron Lanier, another American computer scientist, began his pioneering work in virtual reality in the mid-1980s, developing some of the earliest commercial VR headsets and data gloves. In November 2021, Facebook renamed itself Meta and announced a $10 billion investment in developing virtual experiences, prompting enthusiasts to anoint the metaverse as the world’s new computing interface. Bill Gates jumped on the bandwagon, predicting that meetings would move from screens to the metaverse in two or three years.
This version of the metaverse arguably already exists in the form of video games. But there’s another definition of the metaverse that goes beyond the virtual worlds we know. This definition doesn’t actually describe the metaverse at all, but does explain why everyone thinks it’s so important.
Bitcoin, blockchain and NFTs
Companies, too, are getting involved in the fight for the most prime real estate, driving prices even higher. Last year, Sotheby’s broke (digital) ground on a replica of its London auction house in Decentraland’s Voltaire Art District, and Samsung just opened a virtual version of its 837 flagship store in Decentraland for a limited time. The integration of cryptocurrencies — and all the good ol’ market speculation that accompanies these highly volatile and risky assets — is basically what sets a “metaverse” apart from the virtual gaming worlds that have been around for decades. The subreddit covers various game development aspects, including programming, design, writing, art, game jams, postmortems, and marketing.
The reality, of course, is probably closer to the messy, sometimes grubby Second Life. Give humans a chance to build a world without restrictions, and they’ll either come up with a branding opportunity or a fetish dungeon. That should serve as either a warning for the future architects of the metaverse, or an opportunity. People with coding or 3D modeling skills can be hired to develop NFTs or build properties on digital land. Tech-inclined players can build play-to-earn games, which may system life cycle offer additional purchases in the game’s native currency. And like real life, metaverse landowners can also earn passive income by renting their property out.
These kinds of avatars have been common in all sorts of online gaming and social spaces since the ’90s (anyone remember Habbo Hotel?). Recent advances in virtual reality have enabled users to truly embody their fantastical avatars, seeing through their virtual eyes and using hand-tracking controllers to gesture and interact with virtual items. In healthcare, VR could reform surgical training by letting surgeons practice a specific, on-demand procedure as many times as they wish, leading to a shorter learning curve. Medical researchers are also exploring the use of virtual reality in healthcare in fields such as pain management and pediatrics.
Technologists can use the VR extension of a digital twin to simulate various issues, according to Johna Till Johnson, CEO and founder of Nemertes Research. The degree of interoperability among virtual worlds, data portability, governance and user interfaces will depend on what the metaverse eventually becomes. In 2015, Russian-Canadian programmer Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood, a British computer scientist, launched Ethereum, a blockchain platform that introduced smart contracts.
NFTs, which have become an obsession for crypto enthusiasts, snake-oil salesmen, suggestible executives, and (bizarrely) some parts of the art world over the last year or so, could enable the ownership of virtual items and real estate within the metaverse. In an idealized metaverse, every single user shares a single ninjatrader broker review virtual world, where items and property persist for everyone between online sessions. For technical reasons, though, many modern metaverse-like spaces end up splitting users into sharded servers where a small subset of users can interact.
Isn’t the metaverse just… video games?
It serves as a hub for game creators to discuss and share their insights, experiences, and expertise in the industry. Advances in virtual reality technology in the 2010s led by the likes of Palmer Luckey of Oculus VR — now part of Meta’s Reality Labs — and developers at Sony, Google, Unity, Epic Games and other independent studios popularized VR use. In late 2022, about the time ChatGPT captured the world’s attention, the metaverse bubble popped. Financial losses ensued, notably Meta’s $13.7 billion 10 great ways to learn stock trading operational loss in its Reality Labs division for 2022 as a whole.
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games
Add that together and you can see why people think there might be a lot of money to be made here. Creating successful metaverse work environments will require far more than grafting existing office spaces and protocols onto virtual spaces. Indeed, early research suggests that simply translating existing offices into a 3D virtual equivalent can reduce productivity and even cause nausea and motion sickness. VR motion sickness can happen when an end user’s brain receives conflicting signals about self-movement in a digital environment. Businesses eager to apply virtual reality to their marketing and products should be hiring and training people who “can think in 3D,” said Andrew Cornwall, a senior analyst at Forrester. Today, companies use the term metaverse to refer to many different types of enhanced online environments.
VR contributes to the industrial metaverse
- But the clean, blandly stylized, utopian futurism of its art style clearly prefigures Zuckerberg’s recent metaverse demo.
- There’s no question that some of the people who are tossing money into the multiverse will lose out.
- The concern is that XR software can tap into the subconscious thought processes of a person by monitoring eye movements and other involuntary reactions, revealing inner thoughts that can influence decisions.
- VR and digital twinning provide some of the basic building blocks for the emerging industrial metaverse.
Microsoft seems to think it could involve virtual meeting rooms to train new hires or chat with your remote coworkers. 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. In fact, he predicted that in the next two or three years, most virtual meetings will take place with digital avatars within the metaverse. These days it seems like everybody and their corporate parent company is talking about “the metaverse” as the next big thing that’s going to revolutionize our online lives.
Such applications represent the first vestiges of what might become a healthcare metaverse, in which VR could operate alongside other technologies such as blockchain and digital twins. While the internet is used primarily for browsing, the metaverse offers a more immersive experience where people can “live” to a degree in virtual spaces. The growth of the internet has spawned many services that are shaping the metaverse. It should be noted that it is possible to “own” and even trade virtual items in plenty of games and virtual spaces, Second Life included, without using the blockchain — but that ownership is pretty flimsy and usually subject to a license agreement.
A host of developers and designers, including Richard Garriott, Raph Koster and Mark Jacobs, introduced MMORPGs in the late 1990s and early 2000s, demonstrating the commercial viability of large-scale virtual games. The mechanical device simulated the experience of riding a motorcycle through New York City by using a 3D movie, vibrating chair, a fan and piped-in smells, providing one of the earliest immersive multimedia experiences. Coca-Cola launched a “flavor born in the metaverse” alongside a Fortnite tie-in mini-game. “A lot of the metaverse experience is going to be around being able to teleport from one experience to another,” Zuckerberg says.
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. Tech companies still have to figure out how to connect their online platforms to each other. Making it work will require competing technology platforms to agree on a set of standards, so there aren’t “people in the Facebook metaverse and other people in the Microsoft metaverse,” Petrock said. The term “metaverse” is the latest buzzword to capture the tech industry’s imagination — so much so that one of the best-known internet platforms is rebranding to signal its embrace of the futuristic idea.
Another novel that popularized the metaverse was Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, published in 2011 and later made into a movie by Steven Spielberg. It depicted a future where people escape real-world problems by entering The Oasis, a virtual world accessed using a VR headset and haptic gloves that provide tactile sensations. It’s important to keep all this context in mind because while it’s tempting to compare the proto-metaverse ideas we have today to the early internet and assume everything will get better and progress in a linear fashion, that’s not a given. 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.
Several metaverse initiatives are in the works, including Project Starline, a 3D immersive video chat technology. Apple’s vision of the metaverse currently revolves around its Apple Vision Pro headset. The virtual reality goggles — or spatial computer, as Apple describes Vision Pro — became available in February 2024, priced at $3,500 a pair and designed to bring the digital and real worlds closer together by enabling users to immerse themselves in both VR and AR experiences. Early reviews used words like mind-blowing, magic and messy to describe its capabilities. In reality, it may be the case that any real “metaverse” would be little more than some cool VR games and digital avatars in Zoom calls, but mostly just something we still think of as the internet.