Contents
What is the Metaverse?
Metaverse – how will it work?
A Step Into the Future, or "Who Needs It?"
How serious an undertaking this is for Facebook is evidenced by the fact that currently around 20% of all people employed in the company work on it, and another 10,000 jobs are to be created over the next 5 years.
What is the Metaverse?
Metaverse is the idea of a place where the physical becomes digital, and the virtual becomes reality – literally. Thanks to the technology that will be used to create this space, we will be able to perceive it as the one we all know – physical and real. Haptic gloves will allow us to "touch" virtual objects, and work is also underway to enable the sense of smell and even taste in augmented reality. This is a completely new form of the Internet, even more integrated and intertwined with the real world using various usa telemarketing data services and services. To enter this new world, we will need a VR/AR set, today such equipment is expensive and not very comfortable for several hours of use. However, rapid progress and high competition in this market will sooner or later result in miniaturization and more affordable prices for sets. Facebook itself is currently rapidly developing VR solutions that allow, for example, reading the user's facial expressions or wrist neural interfaces that will be responsible for reading our movements.
For obvious reasons (the coronavirus pandemic), Mark focused on the "infinite office" during his presentation and created the perfect place to work using a virtual reality headset - remotely, of course. For businesses accustomed to staying at home and videoconferencing due to the pandemic, this is a step towards even greater immersion through the experience of being in one office, and each meeting participant would be a virtual reflection of themselves. In the future, an automatic speech translator is to be implemented for such virtual meetings to reduce the discomfort of communicating in a foreign language. Facebook currently bases its Metaverse on the Horizon platform , which allows you to create your own virtual home and the aforementioned workplace. Okay, we have one of the applications, but going further, the functionalities of the metaverse will be visible in education , tools for learning in virtual reality are being created. In the future, games will also be an inseparable part of this world. Giants such as Rockstar and Epic Games have already started working on this branch of technology.
Metaverse using VR
Metaverse – how will it work?
An example situation to illustrate how Metaverse works. A person drinking coffee in a café has countless screens in front of their eyes, and instead of making a classic phone call, you can simply move, teleport your avatar to a more personal meeting with another person face to face in a set place in the world.
In Metaversa we can currently distinguish 4 categories:
MetaSocieties , a new and more developed type of social media. Here you will be able to meet your favorite influencers, or rather their virtual avatars. A person can literally scan their body in 3D, many companies are being created that deal with creating such scanners. In the future, these virtual models are to be correlated with the DNA code of a given person, to reflect the owner, their scars, birthmarks even more realistically.
MetaLives are virtual trends, virtual fashion. The ability to buy digitalized works of art or other goods. The simplest example of this is the cooperation of the Balenciaga brand with Epic Games. It allowed the purchase of clothes and accessories of this brand in the Fortnite game. NFT cryptographic tokens also fit in perfectly here - virtual goods based on blockchain technology, but this is a topic for a separate post
MetaSpaces , or the area of creating virtual spaces. Virtual life, concerts, exhibitions and fairs will take place in such spaces. There are already known cases of success of companies in this industry, e.g. Studio Dimension, which is responsible for virtual projects of the Balenciaga brand. In 2020-2021, the studio earned over 6.5 million dollars on this. In the aforementioned Fortnite game, a concert of rapper Travis Scott took place, and the entire event was watched by millions of people simultaneously in the game world. It is very likely that companies will no longer have to rent huge office spaces, because these will be transferred to the virtual world.
MetaBusiness – companies are already offering the beginning of an augmented reality experience , with in-store visits and browsing through the assortment in person. People are spending more and more of their free time playing games on their computers or consoles, and it is in games that companies will find new places to brand their products.
It's easy to get carried away with the Metaverse in your mind's eye, but it seems to me that nothing is impossible in the virtual world, and everything is just a matter of time. The project itself is in its early stages of development, but the visible commitment of Meta shows that it is very important to them. We will probably be able to see the final effects of the work in the next few, or maybe a dozen or so years.
A Step Into the Future, or "Who Needs It?"
Zuckerberg “initiated” work on the next step for humanity towards technology. But isn’t it too early? Zuckerberg himself, as a visionary, stated that they are working on a future that we cannot yet imagine. The conference itself did not enjoy large viewership, at its peak it was around 20 thousand people. Personally, I believe that such intertwining of virtual reality with the physical world is the inevitable future of humanity in one form or another. It is important to be aware of this, and not just find yourself in it one day not knowing what it is all about. The project itself can go in many different directions, it can solve many different problems, but also create new ones that we currently have no idea about. We all know what a bad influence social media can have on people. The vision of such a world seems very fascinating, but at the same time a bit terrifying. Facebook will certainly be joined by other global corporations such as Google and Microsoft with their products – and this is because this metaverse will be a completely new market for intangible goods, which gives a chance to go beyond the real world, already saturated with material goods.