A few weeks ago, my mother, a lovely woman who really loves cruise ships and social media, called and asked: “So, what is this metaverse thing?”
Is there a single media site that isn’t talking about the wonder, glory, and confusion that is the metaverse? Companies like Meta (aka, Facebook) are putting BILLIONS of dollars into their interpretation of it. Alphabet (parent company of Google) is, too. Across the board, there’s a lot of money floating into an idea that hasn’t truly been defined yet.
The best definition I have for you?
The metaverse is almost like a parallel dimension—it blurs the lines between the physical world that you and I know and the virtual world…like artificial reality and cryptocurrency.
Ultimately, the idea of the metaverse isn’t about a NEW technology or platform, though that might end up being part of it. It’s about how people interact with the digital world we already know.
The idea of blurring the boundaries between the virtual and the physical isn’t new. Second Life is a multimedia platform that has lived this idea since well before “metaverse” was used as a word outside of science fiction (it was first mentioned in the sci-fi novel Snow Crash in the early 90s!). The problem Second Life had when it started back in 2003, though, was that the technology wasn’t available to support the vision.
But, that was nearly 20 years ago. Twenty years ago, when Apple was just launching the iTunes store. Google hadn’t started trading on the stock market (that didn’t happen until 2004). Facebook wasn’t even a thing. AND, most critically for this conversation, the fastest broadband Internet speeds in 2003 were around 500 kilobits per second (kbs) for downloads, as compared to 1000 megabits per second (Mbps) today. (Just to throw in some math, 1 megabit equals 1000 kilobits. So, yeah, Internet speeds are sooooooooo much faster today!)
For people who have access to the Internet today (and remember, a third of the world does not fall in that category), this metaverse thing has a lot of potential. Some of that potential is fantastic: experience new cultures, see the world from new perspectives, try on jeans at home without having to wait for them to physically arrive, yay!
The metaverse is almost like a parallel dimension—it blurs the lines between the physical world that you and I know and the virtual world…like artificial reality and cryptocurrency.
But what about the fact that there will be greater difficulty in protecting personal privacy and more opportunities for cyberbullying, adding to the digital divide? Either way, the potential for both good and bad is there, and all it needs is people to take the idea and run with it, defining the details as they go.
If I were Queen of the Universe (which I’m not, but I’ve got my tiara ready), the big companies that are trying to win the race to BE the source of the metaverse would focus instead on HOW to make their metaverse ‘neighborhood’ interact with other metaverse hosts. Which may sound simple, but if you’ve ever played a computer game with online stores, imagine trying to use Game A’s credits in Game B’s store. At least today, that’s just not going to work. Could it in the future? Sure. It happened with the Internet. Email flows whether you’re using Outlook or Gmail or AOL. Websites can be viewed from completely unrelated browsers; with some exceptions, you can surf the web whether you’re using Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Opera. So, can new protocols be developed that would allow metaverse functionality to work across platforms? Absolutely. We’re just not there yet.
So, what is the metaverse? It’s an idea, currently being explored by lots of different people and organizations, to blend the digital world with the physical world. The idea as it stands today is pretty far ahead of what’s currently possible. We’re a lot closer, though, than we were twenty years ago.
Photo by julien Tromeur on Unsplash
