The Metaverse: A Brave Virtual Reality

What Is A Metaverse?

Metaverse, a term first coined in science fiction, combines the prefix "meta," meaning beyond, and "universe." The Metaverse is an open, virtual world where virtual avatars represent the users. People can play games, own real estate, communicate with each other, and participate in a virtual economy. Movies like the Matrix or Ready Player One are good examples of a metaverse. However, Metaverse was limited to centralized applications like video games until now. People could join up in online games like Second Life or World of Warcraft, but the virtual world is gone forever once the corporate decides to drag the plug.

That is where blockchain technology comes into play. The decentralized ledger is distributed among millions of computers worldwide. This allows the Metaverse to run on a supercomputer that cannot be turned off or controlled by one entity. Furthermore, the technology allows us to form NFTs, which will hold real value within the Metaverse. For instance, properties are often tokenized and used to exchange value. Video game characters and items become unique and retain value outside the game.

Referring Metaverse:

Metaverse refers to a group of shared online worlds in which physical, augmented, and virtual reality converge. People can hang around with friends, work, visit places, buy goods and services, and attend events. While many virtual worlds exist online, users can't move between them while retaining their identities and assets. The eventual Metaverse could solve this problem, turning disparate online worlds into a single, seamless entity. It has even been dubbed the subsequent evolution of the web.

It refers to shared virtual worlds where land, buildings, avatars, and even names can be bought and sold. Many such virtual worlds are powered by an equivalent blockchain technology that underpins cryptocurrency and NFTs and thus allows users to trade these virtual assets. People can wander around with friends in these environments, visit facilities, purchase goods and services, and attend events. During the pandemic, the concept has surged in popularity as lockdown measures and work-from-home policies pushed more people online for business and pleasure. The term covers various virtual realities, from workplace tools to games and community platforms. Many new platforms are blockchain-powered, using cryptocurrency and NFTs, allowing a new form of decentralized digital assets to be built, owned, and monetized.

Buying Into And Making Money In The Metaverse

While many metaverse platforms provide free accounts for people to join, people buying or trading virtual assets on blockchain-based media need to use cryptocurrencies. Several blockchain-based platforms require Ethereum-based crypto tokens, such as MANA for Decentraland and SAND for The Sandbox, to get and trade virtual assets. In Decentraland, users can trade NFT artworks or charge entry to a virtual exhibition or concert. They can also make money by selling land, which has surged over the past few years. On Roblox, users can make money by charging other users to access games they create.

Why Is The Metaverse So Important?

Almost every industry must start looking into the Metaverse because it is becoming the next frontier for online interaction. Today, many are willing to participate in the internet economy using Metaverse. Nearly every industry can be represented in the virtual world – entertainment, finance, real estate, gaming, and education.

People will meet up, buy tickets for their favorite movie and watch it with their friends in a virtual theatre. A good example of the beginning of a real metaverse is The Sandbox's video game. Here, content creators can sell their game items to users using the in-game economy based on cryptocurrencies. These cryptocurrencies can then be traded for others or used to pay for goods and services in the real world, bridging the virtual economy with the real one.

The architecture of the Metaverse is often fragmented into several attributes that ought to be checked by those aspiring candidates:

Ubiquity: The Metaverse will have to encompass different types of human experience, from leisure to education, political expression, finances, etc. Adult clubs have a spectacular role in Second Life.

Synchronicity: The events happening in real-time or on a shared time scale.

Inter-connection: They are allowing the transition between several virtual worlds (the portability of digital assets from one world to another and if they will remain functional consistently). Persistent, implying that action will occur at its pace no matter whether the person remains; and that they can't be reset or modified.

Virtual/ immersive reality:

Collective and shared, as in virtual worlds, are populated by other beings. It is a digital representation that sets the Metaverse aside from augmented reality interfaces that add extra meanings and content to the physical world. Necessarily, it should provide a personal representation construct (in the form of skins, avatars, or any digital manifestation able to interact with the virtual world) and, arguably, build tools that enable creative outlets to expand those worlds through a creator-centric approach.

The main idea behind the Metaverse proposition is to make an immersive technology digital place that duplicates reality without physical constraints unless that doesn't necessarily imply that real-world rules don't apply within the Metaverse. Paraphrasing an iconic quote from The Matrix,

"some patterns can be bent, others can be broken," and when the laws of physics may not apply, that certainly won't be the case for property rules and other regulatory frameworks. Digital well-being and the effects of virtual realization representations are considered carefully. Governance challenges arise similar to those existing around the web, only to be increased by the invasive and intimate infrastructure of this interactive with sensors and devices interconnected near the body and extracting sensitive biometric data -like eye-tracking devices ripe for abuse.

The Future Of The Metaverse

It is unclear to what extent a real metaverse, which fully replicates the real world, is feasible or how long it would take to develop. Many platforms within the blockchain-based Metaverse are still developing Augmented Reality (AR) and computer game (VR) technology, allowing users to interact within the space completely. Some of its key characteristics are essential to its role in creating a sustainable metaverse, including:

Decentralization – There's no central authority that controls the blockchain. Due to smart contracts and fast and secure transactions, anything of value can digitally represent the blockchain. As such, it can be used to create a virtual economy. 

Be persistent – which is to mention, it never "resets" or "pauses" or "ends"; it just continues indefinitely.

Be synchronous and live –

The Metaverse will be a living phenomenon that keeps going consistently for everyone and in real-time. Pre-scheduled and self-contained events will happen, even as they are in "real life." with no cap to concurrent users while also providing each user with a unique sense of "presence," everyone is often a neighborhood of the Metaverse and participates in a specific event/place/activity together at an equivalent time and with individual agency.

Be a functioning economy –

Individuals and businesses will be ready to create, own, invest, sell, and be rewarded for an incredibly wide selection of "work." Experience the difference between the physical and digital worlds, public and private networks, and open and closed platforms. Be populated by "network" and "experiences" created and operated by an incredibly wide range of contributors. Several are independent individuals, while others could informally organize groups or commercially focused enterprises. Some other ideas will be core to the Metaverse but aren't widely prescribed. One of these concerns is whether participants will have one consistent digital identity (or "avatar").

Concluding Thoughts:

The pandemic has pushed people to embrace online interaction, not just for work or communication. The Metaverse can be considered because of the next iteration of the Internet. It will allow people to communicate, share data, and participate in a decentralized economy fueled by blockchain technology.