What does the name mean? Facebook’s recent transformation into Meta might lead one to believe there is a whole metaverse. The truth of the matter is that there is more to the company’s new name than meets the eye; there is a whistleblower case, as well as previous disputes that have tarnished the brand’s image, and there are also competing brands that are more popular among young people.
While sceptics dismiss Facebook’s rebranding as a PR stunt, this is not the case for the Metaverse, because theirs is more to its registration than a public announcement. Aside from Facebook’s $10 billion investment in metaverse projects this year, Microsoft is setting up its metaverse that would feature 3D avatars for teams.
Epic Games, another gaming company that created everyone’s favourite Fortnite, accumulated $1 billion this April through its metaverse efforts. Many big players are getting set to join the race for the Metaverse, and if you have capital, things tend to happen smoothly. At present, nobody knows what money can exactly achieve in this situation since we do not yet know how the Metaverse will look.
Several commentators envisioned it to be an AR/VR interface that would allow users to interact with each other and perform online services, while some see it as a sleek future technology used in movies such as Ready Player One, where users wore and used 3D avatars to navigate the online world. In creating a virtual universe where can do anything, Facebook and Microsoft must have tested their innovation using 3D-rendered business meetings, right?
Now imagine, for the sake of argument, that this will be something useful: a man and machine interface that consists of a different technology that will change how we relate with the world of connected devices.
With augmented reality glasses, our environment transforms into a sunny tropical place where we can chill with friends worldwide, have access to not just websites but the whole metaverse, and work with tools enabled by artificial intelligence. Our virtual avatar can also cross to the real world, using projections on the glasses of our preferred user based on any location. As a result, we can enjoy live feeds from available cameras or have more or less accurate viewpoint projections. Away from this, the need to trade crypto with the right app, including BitQT, cannot be ignored.
The Endgame for Metaverse Technology
Is all of this akin to a revolution in technology? It is difficult to tell with our imaginations going haywire. Because we can never know the end game of this technology. We can only hope with as little as our imagination can carry. We may never know, ten years from now, the metaverse might be as ubiquitous as mobile phones currently.
However, the work involved in bringing this into being will be immense. Future Metaverse users will need AR and VR solutions to go in and new protocols and platforms will need to emerge to bring the fragmented Metaverse pieces together seamlessly. And unless we want the Metaverse to be surveillance-ridden and bottlenecked as today’s internet, the Metaverse must be decentralized.
This is where blockchain comes in. Like the internet, blockchain is a database and databases are not magnificent by themselves, what is interesting about them is what you can do with them. Blockchain is a good example. Blockchain provides an opportunity to incorporate digital art, gaming, entrepreneurship, finance and other sectors of life into one system. There is no governing body as governance is driven by the community and there is no surveillance. It is important to use the same principle to lay the foundation of the metaverse. In the absence of that, it opens up a whole new arena for the same questionable business practices in today’s world.
Bottom Line
If the Metaverse ever existed as an interface for us to interact with machines, centralization would leave it in the hands of one company who will act as the gatekeeper between the users. All the good things that the technology could bring could be curtailed by a gatekeeper who can dictate policies and standards to everyone. The Metaverse must centre on blockchain and decentralization since they are antithetical to such plights.
