The metaverse, explained: what it is, and why tech companies love it

Michael Gord, the CEO and co-founder of Metaverse Group, recently told Insider that he receives “literally hundreds of people per day reaching out about renting.” A notable example is Metaverse Group, which manages assets in Decentraland and Sandbox, making it one of the world’s first virtual real estate companies. Tokens.com, which acquired 50% of Metaverse Group in October, recently paid $2.43 million for a piece of land in Decentraland’s fashion district to expand into a virtual commerce hub for luxury brands, the New York Times reported. But unlike physical real estate, metaverse land at its core is made up of 1s and 0s and, ironically, lives on a server in a farm somewhere in the “real” world. Like land in real life, all of these metaverses are similarly split into a finite number of land parcels available for purchase.

VR contributes to the industrial metaverse

Industry watchers shy away from codifying the technologies that will power the metaverse. This is in part because the metaverse is evolving and partly because many of the tools driving the metaverse are themselves made up of multiple technologies. The internet is a network of billions of computers, millions of servers and other electronic devices. Once online, internet users can communicate with each other, view and interact with websites, and buy and sell goods and services. “We will just think about one life. One reality, and it will be a combined world of the real and the virtual,” said Rosenberg, CEO and chief scientist at Unanimous AI.

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.

VR resurgence

1. Corporations are jumping on the bandwagon as well, hosting events like NFT drops, conferences, launch parties, and Justin Bieber concerts.
2. We’re still living with privacy and safety problems from earlier versions of the web and smartphone technology, and nobody thought social media companies like Facebook and Twitter could pose problems for democracy itself.
3. In late 2022, about the time ChatGPT captured the world’s attention, the metaverse bubble popped.
4. Tech-inclined players can build play-to-earn games, which may offer additional purchases in the game’s native currency.
5. “We will just think about one life. One reality, and it will be a combined world of the real and the virtual,” said Rosenberg, CEO and chief scientist at Unanimous AI.
6. The world’s largest provider of cloud services and technologies plays a significant role in the development of the metaverse by virtue of its compute, storage, database, networking, AI and blockchain services.

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.

“Mark Zuckerberg has decided that now is the time to build the metaverse, so enormous wheels are turning and resources are flowing and the effort is definitely going to be made.” Meta (formerly Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues mentioned the word “metaverse” 80+ times in under 90 minutes during last week’s Facebook Connect keynote presentation, where the company announced its new name. But Stephenson has made it abundantly clear that “there has been zero communication between me and FB & no biz relationship.” That means Facebook’s interpretation of “the metaverse” might end up being quite different from what Stephenson originally described. They are not necessarily, however, enthusiasts declare the Blockchain may be an efficient consensus mechanism to identify ownership of property and create persistent avatars and reputation systems. As a rule of thumb, if you plan to resell your NFT or coin at a profit, you are likely being suckered into a pyramid scheme.

Don’t sell land

Of course, some scientists believe that we’re already living in a simulation, and Elon Musk famously said “the odds that we’re in base reality is one in billions.” So maybe we’re already there. As for the rest of the metaverse, it’s certainly further away, although maybe not by that much. Mark Zuckerberg believes that the metaverse will become mainstream in the next five to ten years. And with everyone from Microsoft to Meta, Apple, and Zoom joining the frenzy, it certainly seems like an extremely likely possibility. Fear not — you’ve come to the right place to find the answers to your burning questions about the metaverse. If you are posting articles from the same news source to 3 or more different Reddits on a weekly basis, this applies to you.

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.

And while Unreal may be a video game platform, it’s also being used in the film industry and could make it easier for anyone to create virtual experiences. There are tangible and 5 hot penny stocks to buy under $1 in march 2021 exciting developments in the realm of building digital worlds. But Zuckerberg and his team are hardly the only tech visionaries with ideas on how the metaverse, which will employ a mix of virtual reality and other technologies, should take shape. In the area known as the industrial metaverse, epitomized by the Nvidia Omniverse platform, companies are building digital twins to design and monitor physical objects. Businesses are also using virtual reality (VR) to train employees and applying augmented reality (AR) to overlay information on real-world objects, helping their employees work better.

Done right, metaverse technologies in the workplace could increase teleworker camaraderie, improve collaboration, speed up training, reduce the need for office space and make work a happier place in general. However, the metaverse will also eliminate jobs, requiring companies to reskill workers, said Frank Diana, managing partner and principal futurist at Tata Consultancy Services. Web 3.0 aims to decentralize the internet by moving away from centralized servers and platforms controlled by a few large companies, giving users greater control over their digital assets and interactions.

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 futures and options trading tags 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.

But everyone seems to have their own idea of what “the metaverse” means—that is, if they have any real idea what it means at all. Some of these companies are creating the technology while others are creating the software. If anyone wants to do a breakdown of each company‘s involvement I will include it in this article.

“In gaming, you see Roblox, Minecraft and other immersive video games — and even Zoom — foreshadow what the metaverse is designed to offer,” said Ben Bajarin, CEO and principal analyst at Creative Strategies. The flashiness of VR and AR also obscure the more mundane ways that our existing, interconnected digital world could be improved right now. Zuckerberg is going big on what he sees as the next generation of the internet because he thinks it’s going to be a big part of the digital economy. He expects people to start seeing Facebook as a metaverse company in coming years rather than a social media company. The most expensive piece of virtual land ever sold — for $4.3 million in Sandbox — was acquired by Republic Realm, another virtual real estate investment company. According to the Wall Street Journal, Republic Realm often buys vacant metaverse property and waits for it to appreciate, or pays architects and developers to build homes and malls on its plots.

Isn’t the metaverse just… video games?

VR and digital twinning provide some of the basic building blocks for the emerging industrial metaverse. The industrial metaverse will link digital twins into a wider virtual environment that encompasses machines, factories, products and supply chains. Whether VR and AR experiences turn out to be the primary interfaces of the metaverse remains to be seen. At present, many of the metaverse-like experiences offered mostly by gaming platforms such as Roblox, Decentraland and Minecraft can be accessed through browsers or mobile devices and a fast internet connection. Fiction aside, the foundational technologies supporting an actual metaverse date back to the 1960s.

NFTs, convert swedish kronor to japanese yen 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 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.