The metaverse is a sci-fi concept that many people in the tech industry envision as the successor to the Internet today. It's just a vision at this point, but tech companies like Facebook aim to make it a place for many online activities, including work, play, study and shopping.
In this new decade, people will socialize in virtual worlds that have evolved from games rather than traditional social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. Building things with friends in virtual worlds will become commonplace, major events in virtual worlds will become more popular, and words like metaverse will dominate people's conversations.
"Metaverse" is a virtual space where humans connected to the physical world can work with avatars that operate in virtual and augmented reality and exist in both places, so that they lose touch with what is real and what is not, as the real and virtual worlds blend to the point of merging.
Mark Zuckerberg has described the “Metaverse” as the “internet embodied,” which is essentially an evolved version of the internet where people can have “different experiences that wouldn’t necessarily be done on a 2D app or web page.” The most notable difference between the internet and Metaverse is “being there,” the feeling that you are physically interacting with places and people rather than just looking at them from a window. This could apply to gathering your co-workers around a virtual table on a service like Facebook Horizon, rather than on Zoom as is the case now.
The “Metaverse” is supposed to increase human interactions via the Internet by liberating them from physical restrictions, thanks to the technologies of virtual reality and augmented reality in particular. It could provide, for example, the possibility to dance with people thousands of kilometers away, and to buy or sell digital goods or services, many of which have not yet been invented.
In cosmology, the term "metaverse" is sometimes used as an abbreviation of "meta-universe", meaning a universe of universes, which may be an infinite number. However, the technological meaning derives from the 1992 novel “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson, who defined the metaverse as a gigantic shared virtual space made up of all virtual realities, augmented reality and the Internet. As Mark Zuckerberg recently said, "Our overarching goal is to help bring life back overseas."
A group of seven advisors from various industries, including journalism and gaming, launched an NYSE exchange-traded fund that is a basket of securities that trade like stocks, pooling companies that might be best positioned to build the Metaverse. Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, is vocal about his intention for Fortnite to become a big part of Metaverse. Meanwhile, it introduced the gaming platform Roblox that allowed a generation of gamers to create their own virtual worlds and experiences. In China, Tencent, the tech conglomerate with large stakes in movie companies and game studios, has a diversified portfolio that includes investments in Epic Games. Originally described as a "two-dimensional metaverse", WeChat is a place where customers can do practically anything. Users can socialize, shop, create, pay for things in the real world, and communicate for work, states Nasdaq. And on Decentraland, an online platform considered one of the pioneers of Metaverse, it is now possible to get a job as a game manager in A virtual casino Many, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, have shown great interest in Metaverse, and their intention to spend and invest in this field.
Metaverse fans are starting to buy virtual land, much like the old scramble for domain names in the early days of the Internet. There are currently a few thousand landowners on major blockchain-based platforms. Their theory is that as more people congregate in these environments, plots of land in centralized locations will be in high demand due to the volume of traffic. These places will attract more attention and can be monetized in many different ways, experts say. So far, there are relatively few people paying for land in these worlds, but they are on the rise. Decentralized games operate on what's called "play-to-win," where games are rewarded with in-game assets. Players also have control and ownership over their assets, as the value of these assets increases the more they play the game. This is the heart of the Metaverse idea. The “play-to-win” idea of games like Axie Infinity has generated nearly $250 million in revenue in three years. Star Atlas, MOBOX, and Illuvium are other examples of decentralized projects created for Metaverse, as well as other platforms for lottery, shopping, and more.
NFT (non-fungible tokens) is an encryption method through non-fungible tokens, which can grant a certificate proving the authenticity of any digital product, whether it is a photo, expressive drawing, video, music piece, newspaper article, or something else And NFT is a way to record who owns a particular virtual good, and creating and transferring virtual goods is a big part of Metaverse. Thus NFT is a potentially beneficial financial architecture for Metaverse. In more practical terms: If you buy a virtual shirt from a store in Metaverse, NFT can create a permanent receipt and allow the same shirt to be refunded to the store.
For Metaverse, it intends to employ 10,000 people from European Union countries in the next five years, to work on developing the parallel digital world that the founder and president of the giant American social network, Mark Zuckerberg, aspires to achieve.
