The Metaverse explained: the next internet revolution ?????

Everyone is starting to talk about the Metaverse, even though the term has been around since 1992 introduced by the science fiction novel: Snow Crash.

The term just exploded recently, in April 2021, as the technological and social advancements required for this "techno-utopia" are moving fast, at least fast enough to start building the metaverse this decade. You will find lots of debates about this topic, but one thing that everyone agrees on is that the virtual reality headsets being more affordable than ever, and the social distancing effect caused by the pandemic, are two of the most impactful factors pushing the Metaverse forward.

As it is common with all new megatrends, the Metaverse goes by many names: spatial internet, the omniverse, live maps, etc. As of now, it is a broad umbrella term; I recommend you to check Cathy Hackl's interesting article: "Defining the Metaverse today", where she asked 20 different industry leaders to define the Metaverse.

Today I'll describe the Metaverse in an easy and visual way, but if you want to have a more technical read, then check out Jon Radoff's insightful article: The Metaverse Value-Chain

What is the Metaverse?

My favorite description comes from Matthew Ball:

"The metaverse is a quasi-successor internet where everyone and every company can exist, work, socialize, trade and create"

This implies that we will consume a lot of time on a daily basis doing our core "human activities" inside this metaverse. This still doesn't explain how it looks like today or how it could look like in the future!

To help your imagination, here is a picture of how interacting inside RecRoom's virtual reality platform looked like back in 2018, when I led a project to introduce hundreds of Lufthansa managers to VR technology. This was a single room where we played basketball, did some drawings and other fun activities.

Nowadays, you can interact with the different virtual objects and environments as a VR or depending on the platform, also as an AR user. An alternative is to enter as a "screener", this is term I use to describe anyone accessing a virtual reality through a PC, tablet or smartphone. In the future, we will be able to access the Metaverse from most devices, they will just need internet and some sort of visualization tech, such as a screen.

To visualize the metaverse we should not think about the single room from the example above, we need to imagine that together with our community we built a little world, a new "reality" you could say. This reality exists with a purpose: it could be to collaborate on advancing a noble cause, a place to relax or talk about mindfulness, or even a land full of adventures that you can enjoy with your friends and others. This is just a single reality.

And once we checked this single reality, we zoom out and see that there are more of them, just like the one we saw before: full of details, with a living community, and with different purposes. In fact, there are thousands of these little rich-in-content worlds, all of them existing at the same time, always live, continuing to form an ever-growing Metaverse.

There are many core technologies which have a huge impact on how the Metaverse is formed, some of them are cloud-computing, AI, VR, AR, Crypto/distributed ledgers. Together, I believe that the Metaverse and all of the mentioned technologies it conjoins, will radically change the internet and revolutionize our way of living.

In a nutshell, I define the metaverse as:

"The aggregate of multiple connected virtual worlds accessible through tech devices, where we learn, work, socialize, recreate and exist."

Thanks a lot for your lovely attention! ??

???? Happy innovation! ????

About the author:

Nelson Javier Mejia, is a serial entrepreneur and #innovation enthusiast in his early-30s, who is committed to making the world a better place to live and work.

More about the author: www.wespark.io/nelson

More about his innovation agency: www.wespark.io/story

#innovation #creativity #futureofwork #virtualreality #metaverse #education #wespark

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