Imagine this. You are sitting in one cozy corner of your room, and you see your friend has put up a story where she is thoroughly enjoying a concert by your favourite band. You have that immense sinking feeling, and the fear of missing out hits you hard in the cold, dull evening. But you know that there is a solution to this problem. You take out your headset, set the location, and voila! Here you are amongst the ten thousand other people in the concert, and you can’t believe your eyes when you see them performing right in front of you.
This is the Metaverse. This is what people are calling the future. However, the term’s rising popularity creates a feeling of impending dread as if our natural lives will get swamped incorporating pixels and paywalled exchanges at any moment.
So, what does the Metaverse entail?
The metaverse is simple yet complicated. When you step outside, you’ll be wearing smart glasses that provide augmented reality and record everything you see and hear. Metaverse is a technology hybrid that combines virtual reality, augmented reality, and video to allow users to “live” within a digital realm. Supporters of the metaverse envisage its users working, playing, and remaining connected with friends through activities ranging from concerts and conferences to virtual globe travel. It is where you will play, eat, drink, have fun, shop, and work as well.
What are the positives of Metaverse?
Throughout history, we have moved towards more and more engaging mediums. The metaverse is next. The metaverse gives humans an Internet in which we can live. Starting from shopping, chatting, listening to music, playing games, you will not do it alone anymore. This virtual universe will allow people to be present in a setting. Let us look at some undeniable positives:
- Will allow one to live one’s fantasies: Yes, this is undeniably true. The Metaverse will enable you to explore your fantasies in ways that you couldn’t have imagined. Whether you want to fight the villains inside the video game, you play every day, or if you wish to have that perfect body of your dreams, Meta can make it happen.
- Comfort and expression will become easier: The metaverse is getting built to make you highly comfortable right from the corner of your room. The metaverse will be able to create a living depiction of what you want to be. You will have a real-life avatar of your own, where you can be of any gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, or even species! The avatar will not be cartoonish, but instead, it will look lifelike. Metaverse will get equipped with such technology, which will be fully rendered.
- Teleportation: This might be one of the most outstanding achievements of technology that we will be able to witness. After the pandemic, traveling from one place to another has become a hectic task. We have to think about our health and the environment we are constantly living in. But with Metaverse? Forget getting out of your room. The metaverse will allow you to teleport your avatar to any place you like. For example, you meet with your colleagues at a round table, but you are still home. You can, therefore, invite people to join in your home space inside the metaverse. You can also work from home, but it can be placed inside an optimum environment as you like, maybe a jungle or the mountains even!
- Improved and fast learning: What do we do when we do not know something today? We use Google to find all our answers. But well, once the metaverse is here, it will make googling solutions look trivial and tedious. The metaverse will allow learning things by touching them or viewing them up close. If you are fond of classical history, then in the metaverse, you can just go back to the past to check out whatever it has in store. Learning will, therefore, not only be fast but also immensely improved.
- Input will become faster: Gone are those days where we used to communicate with letters and posts. Now we directly chat with someone whom we are missing or need to be in touch with. But with the introduction of the metaverse, input will now become more accessible. With the help of EMG or electromyographic technology, you can just think of what you want to write, and it will type it out for you without even moving your fingers. It will use voice gestures and movement of your fingers to trace what you want to express.
- New economy: Believe it or not, the metaverse will also feature a new economy where people can buy stuff in and from the digital space. If things go right, transactions will occur using cryptocurrency or digital currency, and a whole new economy will form.
- Good for the environment: As understood, once you have a digital space, people will learn to live inside it and use digital items. This will lead to a cut on the usage of available things in real life and the wealth of the environment.
The metaverse is not far away as it seems. People at Meta (Parent company of Facebook) have already started working on the new headset, which is named Project Cambria. It will be two things: Comfortable on your head where one cannot feel it sitting on your face, and secondly, it will track facial expressions that can enable one to interact with people inside the metaverse.
- We all know that Facebook has had a rocky relationship with data collection and security of privacy. The introduction of metaverse will lead to invasion of privacy on a grand scale and lead to a breach of data.
- The level of invasion that we are allowing is on a large scale. The metaverse will know your complete data information, and every action will monitor every effort to ensure that chaos does not occur in the digital space.
- Humans can completely lose touch with what is real. If people came to live a life that will fulfill their desires and fantasies, one might not ever want to come back to their authentic selves anymore. This can lead to a potential danger for society and thus the human species.
Conclusion
There are several “edge situations” that have yet to occur. NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) will exist in this universe, allowing us to purchase, own, license, and safeguard digital assets. Because the 3D data acquired here is more extensive than ever, there will be a strong emphasis on privacy, security, and data protection. And, as glasses and headsets become more affordable (keep an eye on Apple in this arena), you can guarantee these applications will have an influence on our lives at work, at home, and on the weekends. Let us see what the Metaverse has in store for us!
