In recent months you may have heard about something called the metaverse. Maybe you’ve read that the metaverse is going to replace the internet? Maybe we’re all supposed to live there? Maybe Facebook (or Epic, or Roblox, or dozens of smaller companies) are trying to take it over? And maybe it has something to do with cryptocurrency and NFTs?
The metaverse is tough to explain for one reason: it doesn’t necessarily exist. It’s partly a dream for the future of internet interface and partly a creative way to encapsulate some current trends in online infrastructure, including the growth of real-time 3D worlds. A virtual world is a computer-based online community environment that is designed and shared by individuals to interact in a custom-built, simulated world. Users interact with each other in this world using text-based, two-dimensional or three-dimensional graphical models called avatars.
Welcome to the metaverse, alternate digital realities where people work, play, and socialize. You can call it the world hopping multiverse, the mirror world, the AR Cloud, the Magicverse, the Spatial internet, or Live Maps, but one thing is for certain, it’s coming and it’s a big deal. Will you start checking your Facebook feed in Fortnite with a pair of augmented reality glasses? Will your friends invite you to cyber-brunch instead of normal brunch? To the outsider, it may look like an elevated version of Virtual Reality (VR) - but some people think the metaverse could be the future of internet interface.
In fact, the belief is that it could be to VR what the modern smartphone is to the first clunky mobile phones of the 1980s. Instead of being on a computer, in the metaverse you might use a headset to enter a virtual world connecting all sorts of digital environments. Unlike current VR, which is mostly used for gaming, this virtual world could be used for practically anything - work, play, dating, concerts, cinema trips - or just hanging out. Envision a world where a car manufacturer trying to advertise a new model drops their car into a virtual world in real time where you can drive it a thousand miles an hour up PCH1. Perhaps when you go online shopping, you'll stroll down the esplanade of a virtual Worth Avenue or Rue Saint-Honoré admiring visual storefronts and trying on digital clothes first, before ordering them to arrive in the real world.
Neal Stephenson famously coined the term "metaverse" in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, where it referred to a 3D virtual world inhabited by Avatars of real people.
There’s no universally accepted definition of a real “metaverse,” except maybe that it’s an interactive successor to the internet. This is how I describe it.
"A persistent live digital universe that affords individuals a sense of spatial awareness along with the ability to participate in an extensive virtual economy with profound societal impact."
If you want something a little snarkier and more impressionistic, you can cite digital scholar Janet Murray— who has described the modern metaverse ideal as “a magical Zoom meeting that has all the playful release of a video game.”
Right now, tech industry figures who talk about “the metaverse” are usually excited about digital platforms that include some of the following:
Feature sets that overlap with older web services or real-world activities
Real-time 3D computer graphics and personalized avatars
A variety of person-to-person social interactions that are less competitive and goal-oriented than stereotypical games
Support for users creating their own virtual items and environments
Links with outside economic systems so people can profit from virtual goods
Designs that seem well-suited to virtual and augmented reality headsets, even if they usually support other hardware as well
But in most current discourse, the metaverse arguably isn’t a fixed set of attributes. It’s an aspirational term for a future digital world that feels more tangibly connected to our real lives and bodies.
This is where the genesis of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) gain traction. NFTs are a way of recording who owns a specific virtual good, creating and transferring virtual goods is a big part of the metaverse, thus NFTs are a potentially useful financial architecture for the metaverse. Or in more practical terms: if you buy a virtual shirt in Metaverse Platform A, NFTs can create a permanent receipt and let you redeem the same shirt in Metaverse Platforms B to Z.
Lots of NFT designers are selling collectible avatars like CryptoPunks, Cool Cats, and Bored Apes, sometimes for an astronomical sum. Right now these are mostly 2D art used as social media profile pictures. But we’re already seeing some crossover with metaverse style services. The company Polygonal Mind, for instance, is building a system called CryptoAvatars that lets people buy 3D avatars as NFTs and then use them across multiple virtual worlds.
People like Tim Sweeney (CEO of Fortnite publisher Epic) and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg often say they’re just building one piece of a larger interconnected metaverse, similar to an individual social network on the present-day internet. The metaverse isn’t a single product one company can build alone. Just like the internet, the metaverse exists whether Facebook is there or not.
Zuckerberg has said he thinks it makes sense to invest deeply to shape what he suggests will be the next computing platform.
"I believe the 'metaverse' will be the successor to the mobile internet, and creating this product group is the next step in our journey to help build it. If we do this well, I think over the next five years or so ... we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a 'metaverse' company".
Most people think "the metaverse" is a virtual place. A virtual world, like Minecraft, Roblox, or like Zuck showed in the recent Facebook demo. But what if it's not a place? But a time? What if the metaverse is the moment in time when our digital life is worth more to us than our phsyical life. This is not an overnight change, or an invention by some Steve Jobs type, but is happening gradually.
Every important part of life is going digital.
Banking: From bank tellers to apps, from check deposits as photo uploads.
Shopping: From malls to online shopping, from bags to home delivery.
Work: From offices and factories to remote laptops. Boardrooms to Zoom calls.
Friends: From neighbors to followers. Where do you find like minded people? Twitter. Reddit. etc.
Dating: From singles hot spots to profiles, and one liners to swiping left or right.
Games: More kids play fortnite than basketball & football combined.
Healthcare: Waiting rooms to telehealth doctors visits, and Apple health diagnostics.
Identity: Filters are the new makeup. Stories are your personal billboard to broadcast who you are. What matters more. What you look like in real life? Or what you look like on instagram?
Everything is going digital. Your friends, your job, your identity. And now with crypto, & NFT’s your assets are online too.
Bored Apes are the new Patek Philippe.
Fortnite skins are the new skinny jeans.
So if you play this forward another 10-20 years - we will cross into the metaverse. The moment in time where digital matters more to us than physical.
Our attention used to be 99% on our physical environment.
TVs dropped that to 85%
Computers down to 70%
Phones… 50%
Is this a good or a bad thing? Like anything, it's neither good nor bad. It's just a thing. A very different thing.
Our attention has been gradually transitioned from physical to digital. And guess what that’s not where the trend ends. We will go from 50% attention on screens to ~90%+
That's the moment in time when the metaverse starts. Because at that moment, our virtual life will become more important than our real life. And where attention goes, energy flows.
If 50% of our attention is on our digital screen, then 50% of our energy and resources will go to our digital experiences.
Today it takes some effort to take our phone out of our pocket and look at it. Soon we won't even have to do that to reside in the digital world. However nobody will call it the "metaverse" in a few years. That's like in 1997 people used to call the internet the "information superhighway" and "cyberspace."
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