Given the pressure on Mark Zuckerberg from governments, courts, privacy advocates and users of his world-dominated social network, it’s no surprise that he wants to escape into a parallel world—less messy, cleaner, and more better order. The world they chose to create is becoming the next most talked-about word in technology: the metaverse. In the firm’s last earnings call, Zuckerberg emphasized this: “It’s a virtual environment where you can be present with people in a digital space. You can think of it as an embedded Internet that you can only watch.” instead of in. We believe it’s going to be the successor to the mobile Internet.” He then declared Facebook not a social network, but “a metaverse company”.
Zuckerberg is not alone. Microsoft chief Satya Nadella used the company’s earnings call to talk his own commercial version of this alternate reality: “As the digital and physical worlds converge, we’re looking to build a new layer of infrastructure stacks, Enterprises are leaders in the metaverse.” Graphics-chip maker Nvidia has big investments in this space. Epic Games took time off from battling with Apple to announce a $1 billion investment in its gaming-led metaverse.
So, what is this Metaverse thing about? It was Isaac Asimov who famously said that “the science fiction of today is the science fact of tomorrow.” Laser guns, robots, even the Internet, were arguably predicted by science-fiction writers. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the term ‘metaverse’ was born in Neil Stephenson’s dystopian novel Snow Crash, where people appear in digital avatars in a virtual world complete with companies, homes and factories. The 2013 Japanese series Sword Art Online, based on a science-fiction novel by Rei Kawahara, took it to another level. In the game, set in 2022, the technology is so advanced that if players die in the virtual reality world they will die in real life too!
Is the Metaverse just a fantasy, a future created by wealthy tech titans, or will it even have some practical use? Skeptics argue that this is just a new name for existing technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, massive multi-player video games, and digital twins, all rolled into one. Even the concept, as it’s defined, is nothing new: the second life of Lyndon Lab in 2003, which created a virtual world in which you could buy land and live, for some time. Captured people’s imagination. However, the current version envisages multiple use cases, some of which have been made more real by the pandemic. People can meet online as their avatar to watch movies, play games or indulge in user-generated content together. Education metaverse will involve learning science with chemistry or biology simulators sitting in virtual immersive classes on a university campus like life. Company headquarters can be rebuilt, and employees can meet there, while actually working remotely, making work-anywhere permanent. It can bring ‘live’ events back to a secure virtual environment, in which thousands of people can watch a concert simultaneously. You can not only work or watch together in the metaverse, but create together, whether it’s fashion, architecture or anything else.
Even Zuckerberg admits that there is a lot of work to be done before all this becomes a reality. Virtual reality headsets need to be lighter and better; Current experience usually involves a swimming head and sometimes a retreat. New technical infrastructure needs to be created and protocols written. Today’s internet will need to be re-imagined for the metaverse as a file-sharing protocol. In fact, the metaverse may be Internet 2.0. Even as the tech giants design their own versions of it—Microsoft with its enterprise metaverse and Facebook with its ubiquitous social version—a major threat ultimately looms in what form. As Richard Waters writes in the Financial Times, “The end product could be the ultimate ‘walled garden’, a space where a company benefits from the total immersion of users. manufactures—and especially if they sell their own proprietary hardware to access these areas—the result could be a collection of different worlds, forcing digital citizens to choose where they Where do they spend the majority of their time. can carry data, digital goods and preferred services with them as they move from place to place.”
The latter version doesn’t sound bad, though the alternative that Zuckerberg is embodying is clearly the former.
Jaspreet Bindra is the author of ‘The Tech Whisperer’ and the founder of Digital Matters
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