the metaverse is already here

This has been tried before. In 2003 a virtual space called “Second Life” was launched. You could buy digital assets and clothes with real money and hang out with other blocky avatars. It was the early days. Naysayers in Silicon Valley loved to say that “second life” was for those who didn’t have a first.

The metaverse marks another interface transition. The green and amber text monitors gave way to the graphical user interfaces of Apple and Windows, making computers much easier to use. Then slow modems connected us to the Internet and we used the barren search-page interfaces of Yahoo and Google. Graphics and photos eventually entered, especially as blogs and social networks boomed, and smartphones with cameras turned many photos into bugs. Then video was added, peaking this year with TikTok and multi-tile Zoom calls. Each interface iteration means that humans spend less time navigating computers and more time using their power.

Think of the metaverse as another change in perspective. Videogames already have 3D worlds, a huge leap forward from 2D Tetris. Epic Games, the creator of “Fortnite,” has over 350 million registered users. Roblox for young gamers has over 160 million active users. There are thousands of 3D games on smartphones. An estimated 2.5 billion people play videogames every day, a $150 billion market. My guess is that Facebook will go shopping here—when it asks permission from the Federal Trade Commission.

Nobody reads videogame instruction manuals; Players learn by doing. Entire generations have learned to interact with computers by playing videogames, even if they are mostly literally killing each other.

Facebook paid $3 billion for virtual-reality headset maker Oculus in 2014 and has probably poured in billions. Facebook is rolling out Horizon Worlds, a virtual-reality social platform on which people can meet and interact and perhaps eventually do commerce. Fitness and education are huge potential metaverse markets.

I’ve played with virtual-reality prototyping since dreadlock technologist Jaron Lanier pioneered them in the late 1980s. I bought a developer kit for the original Oculus Rift in 2012 and Google Glass in 2013. In 2019 I tried Magic Leap’s artificial-reality glasses, which beam photons directly onto your retina to display 3D objects in the real world—awesome indeed but limited and cumbersome. Now I have a $299 Oculus Quest 2, which looks like a pair of opaque ski goggles. It’s splendid. I have literally boxed and explored the International Space Station and Antarctica. In real life I can ride any roller coaster, but after using Oculus for an hour I started feeling nauseous. It takes some time to get used to staring at the screen an inch away from your eyeballs. And beware—a guy I know ended up in the hospital after falling on his living room furniture.

It’s an early shift, but never underestimate how fast technology advances once there’s a huge market for reducing costs. How will all this be paid for? “Advertising . . . will probably be a meaningful part of the metaverse as well,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.

Many real world problems will creep into this new world. An early tester from Facebook’s Horizon Worlds posted a few weeks ago that his avatar was groped by another avatar. I had to think for a while whether it was even possible. I am against all forms of sexual harassment, and this shows that the Metaverse has a lot of rules and limits to work with.

After all, will we see virtual artwork and irreplaceable tokens hanging on infinitely expandable walls? Virtual fitness fanatic? Are Real Estate Developers Buying Virtual Worlds? Virtual Cyber ​​Terminator Self-Replication? Maybe, but I guarantee that the metaverse, like all new technology, will be very different from what we can dream up today. But definitely keep one of those airline barf bags.

This story has been published without modification in text from a wire agency feed