ChatGPT is all the rage. But what is happening with metaverse?

In light of recent developments in generative AI and large language models, the idea of the metaverse has largely ceased to be heard of.

And exactly a year ago...it was the metaverse and not ChatGPT that was all over the technology media headlines. In the autumn of 2021, when Facebook was changing its name to Meta (as a company) with great pomp, ChatGPT 3 was of interest only to the ML/AI community, or rather a narrower rather than a broader part of it. No one imagined the speed at which the GPT model would develop and what its achievements would be. In contrast, less than six months later from Facebook's rebranding, Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard, a gaming company, one of the global leaders from 3D building. Combined with owning a product such as Xbox and its associated community, this gives Microsoft a huge firepower in the metaverse area.

Today, the media is reporting that Meta/Facebook is quietly pulling out of its billion-dollar investment in building the metaverse and setting up a race for the most powerful generative AI model. Is this true? I don't quite want to believe it. But let's start at the beginning.

What is the metaverse? Many of us associate it with the virtual, alternative world from the game 'Second Life', which, nomen omen, turns 20 this year. And the great uproar over the subject last year many of us treated as just another marketing trick by big tech where it still makes money. I admit that I had this attitude myself. But in exploring the topic I started to look at the metaverse differently.

Let's try to somehow describe what the metaverse is. In the original idea described in 1992 by Neal Stephenson in his sci-fi book 'Snow Crash', the metaverse is a virtually existing giant street where people can take on a different identity than in the real world.

Today, the metaverse is, in concept, much more than a virtual street. It is the new incarnation of the Internet. A decentralised system of interconnected 3D virtual worlds that allows for a new experience of navigating the web. And not only does it allow us to see the major tourist attractions in 3D, as is often shown in describing metaverse videos, but more importantly it allows us to have a different, closer experience of interacting with other people. The metaverse is not just a play space for generation Z (various studies show that generation Z already actually lives in the metaverse). As an expert on the topice MrMetaverse/ Aragorn Meulendijks puts it: Metaverse is the place where our real and digital lives melt.

Metaverse is also no longer just a potential new digital economy. It is not only new markets such as virtual clothing from well-known brands, the avatar design industry and?not even the problem of integrating virtual worlds with cryptocurrencies and blockchain in general, which would make the metaverse independent of the hegemony of the main platforms.

Not coincidentally, the idea of the metaverse was reheated by the big tech at the end of the pandemic. At the beginning of the lock downs, a group of Japanese employees used the platform of one of the computer games for virtual team meetings. Clearly, the on-camera meetings did not satisfy the need for real interaction.

So is the metaverse also the new Internet 'for real world, serious solutions’. What 'serious use cases’ does the metaverse offer and revolutionise?

In my opinion, education above all.

The physical aspect of education is extremely important. People apply to well-known schools to learn together in an environment of equally ambitious and creative people. Mere online meetings do not provide this. What is different, however, is if we imagine a virtual group at a common table having a discussion. Imagine that - a seemingly tiny detail from checkered Zoom screen, but the difference in the feeling of interaction is gigantic. In particular, if avatars could show emotions....

Now imagine our group working together in 3D on a scientific experiment. In one of the books on the metaverse that I reviewed in preparing this article, an example was given where, in a virtual history lesson, students not only look at ancient Rome, but can build a virtual aqueduct. Not to mention how immersive such an experience seems, how much longer the knowledge gained in a directly experiential way will remain.

With the gigantic global inequalities in the field of education, the metaverse seems like a huge opportunity to redress them. We can imagine multiplying avatars of top professors or famous speakers and assisting them with artificial intelligence. How many people who do not have the opportunity to study at well-known universities can we include in this way in the global exchange of ideas? How many of these people could become the next Nobel laureate? There are 8 billion of us, after all.

Another application of the metaverse is in the industrial field. Already today, robots in warehouses, for example, are trained on 3D models replicating their working environment. They learn how to interact with humans as well as other robots so that accidents do not occur. Will the metaverse be able to bring about the full automation of warehouses and perhaps even factories within a few years?

Here we touch on another important issue - digital twins. Digital twins are digital models of objects so that we can collect data about their condition, predict maintenance, fix faults. Tesla creates a digital twin for every car it sells. Data is collected from sensors and transferred to an app in the cloud. AI algorithms then assess the wear and tear of the components in the context of possible faults and possibly direct the car for service. Impressive. More impressive are the digital twins of infrastructure such as airports (such a model has been developed in China) or the digital twins of the aircraft cockpit with which airlines like KLM train pilots. What is more, the training does not take place on super expensive and difficult to update desktop simulators, but on VR goggles. Such training can be done by pilots in their own homes.?

But even more impressive is the use of digital twins in medicine. They can assist surgeons in operations and can also play a gigantic role in so-called in silico research. Will we see a digital twin of the entire human body in the future? Letting our imagination run wild, in a few decades we may witness a digital twin model of the human brain, although given how little we know about how it works today, this seems personally unlikely.

It is worth looking at the emergence of the metaverse as a process, which is different to the way the metaverse marketing of large companies such as the aforementioned Meta shows. Gradually, solutions will emerge that combine our real and virtual experiences into one. We should not expect one big 'big bang' that will spawn a network of interconnected virtual worlds.

Are we technologically ready for such a broad metaverse? Renowned expert and author of a book on the metaverse Matthew Ball argues that we are not ready for it, both in terms of bandwidth and sufficiently low letency. The letency achieved in even the most advanced games is at all times much higher than the letency that allows a smooth journey through the virtual world.

And here we come to the dichotomy in technological development Western World vs China. As is well known, the Chinese internet is fenced off from the world with a huge firewall and remains closed to Western big tech. At the same time, China is arguably much more advanced in building high-bandwidth infrastructure as well as in implementing 5G technology making it much more ready to adopt metaverse solutions. This can already be seen in the construction of digital twins of critical infrastructure like an airport.?

The Chinese idea of the metaverse differs from the West in that it is geared towards mapping the existing world rather than creating a new virtual world. The metaverse is supposed to enhance and supervise the real-time operation of an airport or support the presentation of Chinese products. But what if almost a third of the world's population starts to function in a closed virtual world that is based on a much more powerful technical infrastructure, yet lacks exchange of ideas with the rest of the world? What kind of civilisation will such a metaverse create?

And where is ChatGPT and AI in all this? First of all, the creation of code by an algorithm should accelerate the very construction of large virtual spaces. Digital twins are based on AI algorithms that optimise their performance. Finally, AI is able to significantly optimise the performance of the infrastructure and can result in ultra-low letency.

One thing seems certain-we will hear about the metaverse again despite the temporary silence.

If you want to learn more on metaverse in business:

MrMetaverse (we'll have a podcast episode published soon):

Books I used for this article:

https://www.amazon.com/Metaverse-Buying-Virtual-Preparing-Thing-ebook/dp/B09BR7LVL2/ref=sr_1_18?crid=2KAJ1UZ9QSXLU&keywords=metaverse&qid=1682000446&sprefix=metavers%2Caps%2C413&sr=8-18

https://www.amazon.com/Augmented-Workforce-Artificial-Intelligence-Reality-ebook/dp/B094LL26BD/ref=sr_1_25?crid=2KAJ1UZ9QSXLU&keywords=metaverse&qid=1682000446&sprefix=metavers%2Caps%2C413&sr=8-25