The metaverse is the future of the internet. It's been nearly six months since Facebook announced that it was rebranding as Meta and focusing its future on the upcoming "metaverse." Since then, what this term means has not been clarified. Meta is building a social VR platform, Roblox is facilitating user-generated video games, and some companies offer little more than broken game worlds that happen to have NFTs attached to them.
Proponents from niche startups to tech giants have argued that this lack of coherence is because the met aversion is still being built and is too new to define what it means. For example, the Internet existed in the 1970s, but not every idea of what it would eventually look like was true.
On the other hand, there is a lot of marketing hype (and money) wrapped up in selling the idea of a "metaverse". Facebook, in particular, is in a particularly vulnerable spot after Apple's move to limit ad tracking hurt the company's bottom line. It's impossible to separate Facebook's vision of a future in which everyone has a digital wardrobe to sift through from the fact that Facebook actually wants to make money selling virtual clothes. However, Facebook is not the only company that can benefit financially from met aversion.
To help you get an idea of how vague and complex the term "meta space" can be, here's an exercise: Mentally replace the phrase "meta space" in a sentence with the term "cyberspace." Ninety percent of the time, the meaning will not change significantly. That's because the term doesn't really refer to any specific type of technology, but rather to a broad (and often speculative) shift in how we interact with technology. And it's entirely possible that the term itself will eventually become just as obsolete, even as the particular technology it once described becomes commonplace.
Broadly speaking, the technologies that companies refer to when they talk about the "metaverse" can include virtual reality—characterized by persistent virtual worlds that continue to exist even when you're not playing—as well as augmented reality, which combines aspects of the digital and physical worlds. However, it does not require these spaces to be exclusively accessible via VR or AR. Virtual worlds – such as the aspects of Fortnite that can be accessed via computers, gaming consoles and even phones – have come to be referred to as the "metaverse".
Many companies that have jumped on the metaverse bandwagon also envision some kind of new digital economy where users can create, buy, and sell goods. In more idealistic visions, the met aversion is interoperable, allowing you to transfer virtual items like clothes or cars from one platform to another, although that's harder than it sounds. While some proponents claim that new technologies such as NFTs can enable portable digital assets, this is simply not true, and transferring items from one video game or virtual world to another is an extremely complex task that no company can solve.
Saying that Fortnite is the "metaverse" would be a bit like saying that Google is the "internet". Even though you spend a large amount of time in Fortnite, socializing, buying stuff, learning, and playing games, it doesn't necessarily encompass the full range of what people and companies mean when they say "metaverse." Just as Google creates parts of the Internet—from physical data centers to security layers—it is not the whole Internet.
Tech giants like Microsoft and Meta are working on building technologies related to interacting with virtual worlds, but they're not the only ones. Many other big companies, including Nvidia, Unity, Roblox, and even Snap—as well as a number of smaller companies and startups—are building the infrastructure to create better virtual worlds that more closely mimic our physical lives.
For example, Epic has acquired a number of companies that help create or distribute digital assets, in part to bolster its powerful Unreal Engine 5 platform. And while Unreal may be a platform for video games, it's also used in the film industry and could make it easier for anyone to create virtual experiences.
There are tangible and exciting developments in digital world building.
Despite this, the idea of a single unified place similar to Ready Player One called the "metaverse" is still largely impossible. Partly because such a world requires companies to work together in a way that simply isn't profitable or desirable - Fortnite doesn't have much of an incentive to give players a portal through which to get directly into World of Warcraft, even if it would be easy, for example - and partly because, that the raw computing power required for such a concept could be much further than we think.
This inconvenient fact has given rise to slightly different terminology. Now, many companies or advocates instead refer to any single game or platform as a "metaverse". By this definition, anything from a VR concert app to a video game would be considered a "metaverse". Some go further and call a collection of different met aversions a "multiverse of met aversions". Or maybe we live in a "hybrid verse".
The paradox of defining a met aversion is that in order for it to be the future, you have to define the present. We already have MMOs, which are basically entire virtual worlds, digital concerts, video chats with people from all over the world, online avatars, and trading platforms. So in order to sell these things as a new vision of the world, there has to be some element of it that is new.
Spend enough time discussing the met averse and someone will inevitably (and exhaustively) refer to fictional stories like Snow Crash – the 1992 novel that coined the term “metaverse” – or Ready Player One, which depicts a VR world where everyone works, plays SI, and shops. Combined with the general pop culture idea of holograms and heads-up displays (basically anything Iron Man has used in his last 10 movies), these stories serve as an imaginative reference point for what a met averse—a met aversion that tech companies could actually sell as something. New - may look.
It's important to keep all of these connections in mind, because while it's tempting to compare the ideas we have today to the early Internet and assume that everything will improve and progress linearly, it's not a given. There's no guarantee that people will even want to dangle their feet in a virtual office or play poker with DreamWorks' Mark Zuckerberg, much less that VR and AR technologies will ever be seamless enough to be as commonplace as smartphones and computers are today.
In the months since Facebook's rebranding, the concept of the "met averse" has served as a powerful tool for repackaging old technologies, reselling the benefits of new technologies, and capturing the imagination of speculative investors. But the influx of money into the space doesn't necessarily mean a massive paradigm shift is just around the corner, as everything from 3D TVs to Amazon's delivery drones and Google Glass can attest.
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