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According to tech CEOs such as Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella, the metaverse is the future of the internet. It might also be a video game. Or is it a more painful, worse form of Zoom? It's difficult to say.

It's been over six months since Facebook announced a rebranding to Meta and an emphasis on the incoming "metaverse." What that term signifies hasn't been any clearer in the intervening years. Meta is developing a virtual reality social platform, Roblox is allowing user-generated video games, and some companies are providing little more than broken gaming worlds with NFTs attached.

Advocates ranging from minor businesses to tech behemoths have stated that the lack of coherence is due to the fact that the metaverse is still in the works, and it is too new to define what it means. The internet, for example, existed in the 1970s, but not every expectation of what it would eventually look like was realized.

On the other side, there is a lot of marketing hype (and money) surrounding the concept of "the metaverse." Facebook, in particular, is in an unusually vulnerable position as a result of Apple's decision to limit ad tracking, which has hurt the company's financial line. It's impossible to separate Facebook's vision of a future in which everyone has a digital wardrobe to browse from the fact that Facebook intends to earn money selling virtual garments. But Facebook isn't the only corporation that hopes to profit financially from the buzz around the metaverse.

So, with that in mind...

What Exactly Does "Metaverse" Mean?

Here's an experiment to help you understand how ambiguous and convoluted the word "the metaverse" may be: In a statement, mentally replace the words "the metaverse" with "cyberspace." Ninety percent of the time, the meaning will not vary significantly. That's because the phrase refers to a wide (and frequently speculative) shift in how humans engage with technology, rather than a specific form of technology. And it's certainly feasible that the phrase itself may become obsolete as the technology it previously defined becomes more widespread.

In general, the technologies that firms allude to when they talk about "the metaverse" can include virtual reality (defined by persistent virtual environments that exist even when you're not playing) and augmented reality (which blends features of the digital and physical worlds). It does not, however, necessitate that those areas be accessed solely through VR or AR. Virtual worlds, such as Fortnite elements that can be accessed via PCs, game consoles, and even phones, have begun to refer to themselves as "the metaverse."

Many organizations that have jumped on the metaverse bandwagon foresee a new digital economy in which users may produce, purchase, and sell items. In more idealistic metaverse ideas, it's interoperable, allowing you to move virtual objects like clothes or vehicles from one platform to another, however this is more difficult than it seems. While some proponents say that emerging technologies such as NFTs can enable movable digital assets, this simply isn't true, and moving goods from one video game or virtual world to another is a massively complex operation that no single firm can handle.

It's tough to understand what all of this implies because, when you hear descriptions like those above, it's natural to wonder, "Wait, doesn't that already exist?" For example, Environment of Warcraft is a permanent virtual world where people can purchase and sell goods. Fortnite offers virtual experiences like as concerts and an exhibit where Rick Sanchez may learn about Martin Luther King Jr. You may put on an Oculus headset and enter your own virtual home. Is that what "the metaverse" really means? Just new kind of video games?

In a nutshell, yes and no. To argue Fortnite is "the metaverse" is like to saying Google is "the internet." Even if you spend a lot of time in Fortnite networking, purchasing stuff, learning, and playing games, that doesn't mean it covers the complete extent of what people and businesses mean when they term "the metaverse." Similarly, Google, which constructs elements of the internet—from physical data centers to security layers—does not constitute the entire internet.

Tech behemoths such as Microsoft and Meta are developing technology for engaging with virtual worlds, but they are not alone. Many more huge corporations, including Nvidia, Unity, Roblox, and even Snap—along with a slew of smaller firms and startups—are laying the groundwork for improved virtual worlds that more closely resemble our physical lives.

Epic, for example, has purchased a number of companies that assist in the creation or distribution of digital assets, in part to strengthen its formidable Unreal Engine 5 platform. While Unreal is primarily a video game platform, it is also utilized in the film industry and has the potential to make it easier for anybody to create virtual experiences. In the domain of creating digital worlds, there are practical and fascinating breakthroughs.

Despite this, the concept of a Ready Player One-style single unified place known as "the metaverse" remains entirely implausible. That's partly because such a world necessitates companies cooperating in ways that aren't profitable or desirable—for example, Fortnite doesn't have much incentive to provide players with a portal to jump straight over to World of Warcraft, even if it were simple to do so—and partly because the raw computing power required for such a concept could be much further away than we think.

Because of this unfortunate truth, significantly distinct nomenclature has emerged. Many businesses and activists now refer to any single game or platform as "a metaverse." A "metaverse" could be anything from a virtual reality concert app to a video game, according to this definition. Some go so far as to term the collection of several metaverses a "multiverse of metaverses." Or perhaps we live in a "hybrid-verse."

These words could also imply anything. Coca-Cola introduced a "flavor born in the metaverse," as well as a Fortnite tie-in mini-game. There are no guidelines.

Most debates of what the metaverse entails begin to stagnate at this point. We have a hazy idea of what things now exist, which we could name the metaverse if we massage the definitions of words correctly. And we know which corporations are investing in the concept, but there hasn't been any agreement on what it is after months. Meta believes it will include false houses to which you may invite all of your pals to hang out. Microsoft appears to believe that virtual conference rooms may be used to teach new hires or converse with faraway coworkers.

The suggestions for these futuristic concepts range from optimistic to pure fan fiction. During Meta's original presentation on the metaverse, the business portrayed a scenario in which a young woman is sitting on her couch scrolling through Instagram when she comes across a video posted by a friend of a concert taking place halfway around the world.

The film then shifts to the show, when the woman emerges as a hologram in the style of the Avengers. She can make eye contact with her physically present companion, they can both hear the concert, and they can both see floating writing hovering above the stage. This appears to be cool, but it isn't really advertising a genuine product, or even a potential future one. In reality, it gets us to the crux of the "metaverse" dilemma.

Why Are Holograms Used in the Metaverse?

When the internet originally appeared, it was preceded by a succession of technological advancements, such as the ability to allow computers to communicate over long distances or the ability to hyperlink from one web page to another. These technical qualities served as the foundation for the abstract structures we know as the internet: websites, apps, social networks, and everything else that relies on those essential elements. Not to mention the convergence of interface advancements that aren't exactly part of the internet but are nevertheless required for it to function, such as displays, keyboards, mouse, and touchscreens.

There are some new building blocks in place with the metaverse, such as the ability to host hundreds of people in a single instance of a server (idealistic metaverse predictions assume this will grow to thousands or even millions of people at once, but this could be overly optimistic), or motion-tracking tools that can distinguish where a person is looking or where their hands are. These emerging technologies have the potential to be highly fascinating and futuristic.

However, there are several constraints that may be insurmountable. When technology corporations like Microsoft or Meta broadcast fictitious videos of their future visions, they usually skirt over how people will interact with the metaverse. VR headsets are still clumsy, and most individuals endure motion sickness or physical pain if they wear them for an extended period of time. Augmented reality glasses have a similar dilemma, in addition to the not-insignificant issue of finding out how to wear them in public without appearing like enormous dorks. Then there are the accessibility issues with VR, which many companies are ignoring for the time being.

So, how do tech businesses demonstrate the concept of their technology without displaying the reality of cumbersome headgear and dorky glasses? So far, their primary response appears to be to just create technology from scratch. Meta's presentation's holographic woman? I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but it's simply not conceivable with even the most advanced versions of existing technology.

Unlike motion-tracked digital avatars, which are now janky but could be improved in the future, there is no janky form of creating a three-dimensional image appear in midair without precisely controlled settings. Regardless of what Iron Man says. Perhaps these are intended to be read as images projected through glasses—after all, both women in the demo video are wearing similar spectacles—but even that presupposes a lot about the physical capabilities of small glasses, which Snap can tell you isn't an easy problem to solve.

This kind of obfuscation of reality is common in film demonstrations of how the metaverse might work. Another of Meta's demos had characters hovering in space—is this person attached to an immersive aerial apparatus or simply sitting at a desk? Is the person depicted by a hologram wearing a headset, and if so, how is their face being scanned? At times, a person snatches virtual goods but subsequently appears to hold those objects in their physical hands.

This demonstration raises far more questions than it answers.

To a point, this is OK. Microsoft, Meta, and every other company that shows wild demos like this are attempting to give an artistic impression of what the future could be, rather than answering every technical question. It's a time-honored practice dating back to AT&T's demonstration of a voice-controlled folding phone capable of magically erasing individuals from photographs and generating 3D models, all of which may have seemed similarly impossible at the time.

However, in recent months, metaverse pitches from both IT titans and startups have relied primarily on aspirational concepts that deviate from reality. Chipotle's "metaverse" was an advertisement masquerading as a Roblox video game. Stories regarding scarce "real estate" in "the metaverse" usually allude to a malfunctioning video game with virtual land tokens (which also glosses over the very real security and privacy issues with most popular NFTs right now).

The uncertainty and disappointment surrounding most "metaverse" ventures is so ubiquitous that when a 2017 video of a Walmart VR shopping demo began trending again in January 2022, people assumed it was yet another metaverse demo. It also demonstrated how much of the present metaverse debate is based solely on hype. Walmart's virtual reality shopping demonstration was plainly a flop (and for good reason). So why should anyone think it's the future if Chipotle does it?

This kind of wishful-thinking-as-tech-demo leaves us in a position where it's difficult to predict which portions of the numerous metaverse ideas (if any) will become reality one day. If VR and AR headsets become comfortable and affordable enough for individuals to use on a daily basis—a big "if"—then a virtual poker game with your friends as robots and holograms floating in space would be a possibility. If not, you may always play Tabletop Simulator via a Discord video call.

The glitz and glam of VR and AR also obscures the more ordinary ways in which our existing, interconnected digital environment may be improved right now. It would be trivial for tech companies to create, say, an open digital avatar standard, a type of file that includes characteristics you might enter into a character creator—like eye color, hairstyle, or clothing options—and allow you to take that data anywhere, to be interpreted however a game engine chooses. There's no reason to create a more comfortable VR headset for that.

But that's not as entertaining to imagine.

What is the current state of the Metaverse?

The dilemma of defining the metaverse is that in order for it to be the future, the present must be defined away. MMOs, which are essentially entire virtual worlds, digital concerts, video conversations with individuals from all over the world, online avatars, and commerce platforms are already available. So, in order to sell these items as a new view of the world, there must be something fresh about them.

Spend enough time discussing the metaverse, and someone will inevitably (and exhaustingly) bring up fictional stories like Snow Crash, the 1992 novel that coined the term "metaverse," or Ready Player One, which depicts a virtual reality world where everyone works, plays, and shops. When combined with the general pop culture concept of holograms and heads-up displays (basically anything Iron Man has used in his last ten movies), these stories serve as a creative reference point for what the metaverse—a metaverse that tech companies might actually sell as something new—could look like.

"In a sentence, mentally substitute the words "the metaverse" with "cyberspace." Ninety percent of the time, the meaning will not vary significantly."

That kind of buzz is arguably more important to the metaverse concept than any specific technology. It's no surprise, however, that proponents of NFTs—cryptographic tokens that can function as certificates of ownership of a digital property, sort of—are also embracing the concept of the metaverse. Sure, NFTs are awful for the environment, and most public blockchains on which they are constructed have enormous privacy and security issues, but if a tech company can argue that they will be the digital key to your virtual mansion in Roblox, then boom. You've just turned your pastime of buying memes into a critical piece of internet infrastructure (and perhaps increased the worth of all that cryptocurrency you're holding).

It's critical to remember all of this context because, while it's easy to compare today's proto-metaverse concepts to the early internet and believe things will improve and grow in a linear fashion, that's not a given. There's no guarantee that people will want to hang around without legs in a virtual office or play poker with Dreamworks CEO Mark Zuckerberg, let alone that VR and AR technology will ever become as ubiquitous as smartphones and computers are now.

The concept of "the metaverse" has functioned as a potent vehicle for repackaging old tech, overselling the benefits of new tech, and capturing the imagination of speculative investors in the months since Facebook's relaunch. However, money pouring into an area does not always imply a big paradigm shift is on the horizon, as evidenced by anything from 3D TVs to Amazon's delivery drones and Google Glass. The skeletons of failed investments litter the history of technology.

That isn't to say there isn't anything exciting on the horizon. VR headsets like the Quest 2 are now more affordable than ever, allowing users to transition away from pricey desktop or console systems. Building and designing video games and other virtual worlds is becoming easier. And, in my opinion, improvements in photogrammetry—the process of producing digital 3D things from images or video—are a fantastic tool for digital artists.

However, the tech industry as a whole is dependent on futurism to some level. It's fine to sell a phone, but selling the future is more profitable. In truth, any true "metaverse" would be little more than some great VR games and digital avatars in Zoom calls, but primarily just something we still refer to as the internet.

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