What is Metaverse and Where did the concept come from? | Tech Shady

Tech Shady
5 min readJan 21, 2022
What is Metaverse and Where did the concept come from? | Tech Shady

Neal Stephenson’s novel dystopian cyberpunk Snow Crash is credited with composing the word “metaverse.” The novel was published in 1992 and is regarded as a canon of this type, along with William Gibson’s Neuromancer, describing the matrix, the realm of virtual reality data.

In Snow Crash, metaverse is a 3D virtual reality space accessible through personal terminals and real mirrors such as Oculus Quest and other VR headsets. This 3D space is visible to users as an urban space built near a single 100-meter-wide road, Road. Stephenson states:

The road, like any other place in Reality, is being upgraded. Engineers can build their own narrow streets connecting the capital. They can build buildings, parks, and landmarks, as well as non-Reality objects, such as large overhead light displays, special areas where three-dimensional space laws can be ignored, and free battlefields where people can go. kill each other.

If Stephenson’s view of metaverse seems plausible, it is because many of its structures are shared with multiplayer online games (MMOGs, or more, MMOs). Users in Second Life (launched in 2003) can, for example, create real avatars, interact with other players, create virtual objects, manage tangible assets, exchange goods and services.

Second Life and other visible worlds are examples of proto metaverses. Why the beginning? Because they exist on their own, each as a visible island with its inhabitants and tangible property does not move. Mark Zuckerberg’s view of the metaverse is not a great experience; the next version of the internet.

“We’ve moved from desktop to web to mobile, from text to photos to video.” “However, this is not the end of the road,” Zuckerberg wrote in a recent letter to his staff. “The next forum will be more focused — an integrated internet where you focus on the experience rather than just looking at it.” This is known as metaverse, and it will have an impact on all the products we create. “

Does Metaverse Already Exist?

Metaverse, as described by business capital Matthew Ball, is a large-scale and interactive real-time network provided by 3D worlds that can be accessed seamlessly and consistently by an unlimited number of users with a sense of presence and continuity of data. , such as ownership, history, rights, items, communications, and payments.

To make it clearer, let’s write metaverse features:

Metaverse: A Future Sales Example

In fact, the metaverse will be there when the user can enter a large shopping mall that can accommodate as many people as the physical space allows, buy a different digital object, and then sell the same digital object a few weeks later within a completely different location. the visible world — or perhaps on Twitter, eBay, or OpenSea.

Some may object, saying, “Wait a minute, I saw this movie.”

The film Ready Player One, based on a novel by Ernest Cline, published by Random House in 2011, was directed by Steven Spielberg and may be the best visual example we have now of what a metaverse might look like.

The film, on the other hand, has significant differences in the professional views of the upcoming metaverse soon, as there is only one major arena in the movie, Oasis, making a revolution created by the fictional gaming company Gregarious Games. Another important difference is the main use of VR hardware to participate in the metaverse movie version, as some experts believe that VR will have fewer applications than AR platforms (not emphasized in the movie).

What Will Make a Metaverse?

Cloud infrastructure, software tools, platforms, applications, user-generated content, and computer hardware will all be powerful in this metaverse. In addition to technical requirements, the metaverse will include a variety of user experiences such as entertainment, games, commerce, social media, education, and research.

When Will the Metaverse Come?

The question then is, how long will it take us to progress from the various protometaverse to the grand metaverse? Mark Zuckerberg believes it will be the end of a decade, but it can happen very quickly because the basic elements are already there.

Today’s internet-enabled infrastructure enables large crowds to gather in the open, as more than 12.3 million Fortnite performers watch a VR concert featuring Travis Scott. Although the current infrastructure is impressive, it will probably need to be continuously upgraded to support the experts of the visual metaverse industry.

We also have computer hardware to provide 3D visual effects and real avatars. Oculus VR, a leading manufacturer of headphones for virtual reality, is owned by Meta. Since its first release in 2016, Microsoft’s smart HoloLens hybrid glasses have supported a wide range of business use cases. In addition, Apple is expected to release AR and VR headsets in 2022. HTC, Pico, MagicLeap, and other manufacturers are rapidly developing new hardware platforms, while cascade technology structures shift various computer loads from background server infrastructure to peripheral devices. Unity’s Furioos is a great example of live streaming of real-time 3D interactive environments, with their automated GPU server infrastructure that manages the heavy lifting of delivery locations.

Finally, the same cutting-edge technologies that have been reshaping the financial services industry since the Bitcoin network’s inception in January 2009 can be used to ensure data continuity in the metaverse. Non Fungible tokens, or NFTs, are a great example of how blockchain technology can be used to validate the ownership of digital assets, and there are already 3D virtual reality platforms that use them.

Marc Petit, EPIC Games’ vice president and general manager of Unreal Engine, recently stated in an interview that the metaverse will necessitate “shared virtual worlds that incorporate persistence.” This means that, for the best customer experience, a user should be able to move their digital belongings from universe to universe. For example, a user’s NFT shoes purchased from Nike in the future will be available for avatar use in Meta’s Horizon platform as well as other virtual worlds such as those found in Fortnite and Minecraft.

Originally published at https://www.techshady.com on January 21, 2022.

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