What is this Metaverse that everyone is talking about? | Newbies, read here

"Metaverse" must be a hot topic this year. 2021 is called the "Year of the Metaverse" by everyone, and all walks of life are paying attention to the development of the Metaverse.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg announced some time ago that the company was renamed Meta. Meta means "meta", the meta of the metaverse.

So, what exactly is the Metaverse? Why has it suddenly become so popular that so many tech giants have joined the race, and Zuckerberg is willing to take advantage of this hot topic despite the pressure of public opinion and the risk of losing Facebook users? In other words, what changes can the Metaverse, which has attracted so many big players to join the race, bring to us?

What exactly is the metaverse that is being hotly discussed all over the world?

The term Metaverse was first proposed by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his book Snow Crash in 1992. The word "Metaverse" itself is composed of two words: Meta (meaning "transcendence" or "meta") and verse (meaning "universe").

The world described in this novel is that everyone has a tube inserted into the back of their brain, connected to a network covering all of humanity. In this online world, people have their own avatars, and everyone can control their avatars through their brains to live in a virtual world. No one cares about real life, and everyone is immersed in that virtual world.

Simply put, Metaverse is a virtual world that is derived from the real world, parallel to the real world, interacts with the real world, and is always online. Some people also understand the Metaverse as a game world, and regard the two as the same concept.

In fact, there is no standard definition of the metaverse. If we use the simplest novice thinking, its basic characteristics are only three characteristics:

• First, there needs to be a virtual world.

• Secondly, people in this world are able to socialize.

• Again, this virtual world will in turn affect the real world.

After reading this, you, the smart one, should be able to understand the meaning of metaverse: metaverse is a virtual world connected to the real world.

If you still don’t understand, today I will take you to create a metaverse.

Version 1.0

Imagine you are in a room with a hole in the wall, and your friend sticks a hand out of the hole and communicates with you through gestures. A basic metaverse is ready.

In this metaverse, you and your beings can socialize, and the results of the socializing can affect you in the real world.

Version 2.0

The room was virtualized using a computer. However, in those days when technology was not very advanced, the resolution of the hand was very low.

With the continuous upgrading of technology, the resolution of this hand is so high that even the hairs can be seen clearly. It has also changed from two-dimensional to three-dimensional, and it is becoming more and more like the real thing.

This is your metaverse progressing, improving the visual simulation.

Version 3.0

With the continuous advancement of technology, this hand is not only used for gesture communication, but also allows you to shake hands with it, even smell the odor of the skin on the hand (commonly known as sweat), and hear the owner of the hand speak.

At this point, your metaverse expands the range of sensory simulation from vision to touch, smell, hearing, etc.

Version 4.0

After you interacted with this hand, which was hard to tell whether it was real or fake and whether it was androgynous, for a long time, the hole in the wall suddenly expanded and the owner of the hand came through the wall to you.

Then you find out, oh my god, it's a man, and a handsome one at that.

So, this handsome guy from the metaverse will pay you for meals, let you watch the stars, and decorate the room into the cozy love nest of your imagination.

This is the Metaverse maturing and becoming intertwined with the real world.

Version 5.0

Later, as technology matures, your metaverse will expand larger and larger, there will be more and more holes in the wall, the hands reaching out will increase exponentially, and there will even be little paws of cats and dogs.

In your metaverse, in addition to love, you also have family and friendship waiting for you.

If your metaverse continues to expand its influence and everyone on Earth participates in it, it will then develop into the top level and become an integral part of the human world. You, as the creator of this metaverse you own, will go down in history and leave your name in history.

Gimmick or disruptive revolution?

There is no doubt that the popularity of the "Metaverse" will inevitably attract the attention of the bigwigs in the technology and capital circles. Tencent, Baidu, NetEase, ByteDance and others have entered the relevant field, and foreign technology companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, and Nvidia have also made layouts.

First, Facebook said it wanted to transform into a metaverse company.

Later, Nvidia, which makes graphics cards, also got involved and created a Metaverse platform.

In China, Tencent has also started to develop the Metaverse and registered a number of trademarks.

Even the game maker Zhongyou Mobile Games wants to turn "The Legend of Sword and Fairy" into a metaverse.

Roblox, a massively multiplayer online game creation platform, plans that a true metaverse company should have eight elements: identity, friends, immersion, low latency, diversity, anywhere, economic system, and civilization.

The metaverse is essentially a process of virtualization and digitization of the real world, which requires a lot of changes to content production, economic systems, user experience, and content in the physical world.

Through the construction of the metaverse, the information of the real world will be greatly supplemented by the virtual world, and the way humans interact with the virtual world will be completely enhanced. On this basis, a business model full of imagination will be born, and games, social networking, entertainment, consumption, etc. will undergo qualitative changes.

This process sounds simple, but it is not easy to implement in reality. On the one hand, the maturity of science and technology and the overall metaverse industry are still in the early stages. Many practitioners in the industry said that judging from the current status of computing power, network technology, and extended reality, the industry still needs 10 to 20 years of development.

On the other hand, if you want to make your Metaverse work, you need to attract a lot of people to join. The current resistance is not at the software level, but at the hardware level. An indispensable hardware for users to access the Metaverse is VR/AR devices. Only head-mounted/glasses VR/AR devices can bring users the greatest sense of immersion.

If there is a platform that can include most users in human society, and then make people feel a sense of reality through the popularization of hardware such as VR glasses and execution simulators, it will be possible to create a metaverse covering the entire world.

The Metaverse is coming, are we ready?

If the metaverse becomes possible, humanity’s desire to experience a broader life will have the ultimate way - immersively experiencing another world with a new identity.

Of course, everything has two sides.

Some friends also believe that the purpose of the metaverse should be to better transform the world, rather than to recreate a virtual world covering all of humanity. The metaverse without the support of the real world is nothing but a castle in the air, and it will collapse instantly when there are no resources invested in the real world.

Let's make a bold guess. Maybe the world we live in now is a metaverse created by some advanced civilization? Maybe our current world is like the movie "The Matrix", one is a virtual world controlled by humans, and the other is a virtual world controlled by AI.

A Brief History of the Future raises the following question:

"If we can create millions of false worlds, and there is only one real world in this world, how can we be sure that the world we live in now is the one in ten million that is real?"

So if the metaverse really comes one day, what will our real world be like?