What Is the Metaverse? Examples and Definition

And to the extent a proto-metaverse has a mainstream use, the massive audiences that flock — albeit not synchronously — to the likes of Roblox, Epic Games and Decentraland suggest that playing games, building virtual worlds and investing in real estate might be it. At the moment, the term metaverse is a bit of a catch-all, explains Chris Madsen, senior engineer for Engage, a professional virtual reality and augmented reality (AR) platform used by many Fortune 500 companies. “Loosely speaking, you can think of the metaverse as the ‘universe’ of the virtual world,” he says. The metaverse is founded on the internet but is much more expansive than that technology. True to its word, Meta has since rolled out Meta Horizon, a platform that allows users to create avatars and explore virtual worlds and use co-working spaces in 3D virtual reality.

And 10 percent of the population has already tried AR or metaverse dating, and a majority enjoyed it more than the real-life alternative. Others think it has the potential to be a commercial space for companies and customers. Roblox users don’t just show up on the platform, sell something, take their money and leave. Most of them put that money back into the platform’s economy, by spending it on games or avatar customizations that other users create. OpenXR, Khronos Group’s royalty-free standard VR and AR developers use to create cross-platform experiences, has already gained widespread industry support and demonstrated the benefits of interoperability.

Playing nicely with other platforms, the logic goes, would mean giving up some amount of control. But for a fully realized metaverse to come about, such cooperation will be necessary. Such a thing requires enormous amounts of computer processing and advancements made in smartphone, gaming device and VR and AR headset technology. https://www.xcritical.in/ The next frontier of the internet may very well be shaped by companies and projects related to blockchain, Web3 and the metaverse. As stated previously, these concepts are not at odds with one another. In fact, they may support and complement each other as we build toward a more equitable, inclusive, open and secure internet.

Rather, the metaverse will likely emerge with a constellation of companies, collectives and independent developers operating under some agreed-upon policies and protocols. How the future will shake out is far from known, but it may involve all of the previously mentioned platforms connected together in some larger metaverse. These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word ‘metaverse.’ Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster https://www.xcritical.in/blog/what-is-the-metaverse-and-why-is-it-the-future-of-the-internet/ or its editors. For those whose lives are already being lived partly in the metaverse—despite its pitfalls and risks—that building has begun. Immersed VR has already netted millions in investment dollars and partnered with Facebook, Microsoft and Samsung in various roles. And for companies developing headsets, the COVID-19 work shake up provides an opportunity to do just as Renji Bijoy, Immersed VR’s founder and CEO suggests, making the case that VR is less of a novelty and more of a quality-of-life tool.

In September 2021, the company announced a $50 million investment in global research and program partners to ensure that metaverse technology would be developed responsibly. Microsoft is working with professional services firm Accenture to create Mesh-enabled immersive spaces. Accenture hires more than 100,000 people every year and uses Microsoft Mesh to help onboard new employees. New hires meet on Teams to receive instructions on how to create a digital avatar and access One Accenture Park, a shared virtual space that’s part of the onboarding process. The futuristic amusement park-like space includes a central conference room, a virtual boardroom and digital monorails that new hires use to travel to different exhibits.

Selling real-world goods virtually

Another indication of status was the ability to access certain restricted environments — a precursor to the paywalls and registration requirements some websites use today. Blockchain technology is built to be a far more secure and private way to share information, but every tech has its flaws. In addition, laws regarding digital privacy rights are in flux, and there are many questions about the legality of data privacy in the metaverse. VR has come a long way in recent years, with high-end headsets which can trick the human eye into seeing in 3D as the player moves around a virtual world.

• If you’ve tried Pokémon Go on your smartphone or the IKEA furniture placement app, you’ve experienced AR.
• This is known as the metaverse and, hype notwithstanding, it does not exist today.
• Instead of currency, an NFT can represent a piece of art, a song or digital real estate.
• Matthew Ball conceives of the metaverse not as something wholly separate from the internet, but an evolution of it — an embodied internet you are within, rather than have access to.

Millions of people are spending hours a day in virtual social spaces like Roblox and Fortnite. Interest in purely digital ownership—and the technology that proponents believe can ensure the security of persistent virtual experiences—has spiked dramatically, with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrencies making headlines. Virtual productivity platforms are growing too, with Facebook and Microsoft announcing new ways to collaborate online. Hybrid offices, video-based education and online social communities are just a few of the ways in which more of our lives—for better or worse—is spent in digital spaces. The metaverse is coming to Microsoft Teams, the software giant’s online meetings competitor to Zoom.

For example, Epic has acquired a number of companies that help create or distribute digital assets, in part to bolster its powerful Unreal Engine 5 platform. And while Unreal may be a video game platform, it’s also being used in the film industry and could make it easier for anyone to create virtual experiences. There are tangible and exciting developments in the realm of building digital worlds. More-recent attempts to define metaverse may resonate with the spirit of “Snow Crash,” but they may yield to an organization’s goals and motivations as in the Meta and Microsoft examples.

At one point during Meta’s original presentation on the metaverse, the company showed a scenario in which a young woman is sitting on her couch scrolling through Instagram when she sees a video a friend has posted of a concert that’s happening halfway across the world. Advocates from niche startups to tech giants have argued that this lack of coherence is because the metaverse is still being built, and it’s too new to define what it means. The internet existed in the 1970s, for example, but not every idea of what that would eventually look like was true. Interest in the futuristic, immersive digital world is fading just as Apple plans to debut a virtual reality device. Krishnan advised that businesses should be proactive in creating a viable data privacy policy tailored to their organizations and to work with the major metaverse platform owners and standards organizations to establish security and privacy safeguards. Consumers will need to make an effort to understand the security and data privacy policies of both the businesses they frequent and the metaverse platforms on which those businesses reside.

Microsoft, Meta, and every other company that shows wild demos like this are trying to give an artistic impression of what the future could be, not necessarily account for every technical question. It’s a time-honored tradition going back to AT&T’s demo of a voice-controlled foldable phone that could magically erase people from images and generate 3D models, all of which might’ve seemed similarly impossible at the time. Nokia and EY study shows metaverse influence in supply chainA joint report from Nokia and EY shows that the areas in which organizations are seeing most benefit from metaverse technology are in capital expenditure reduction, sustainability and safety improvement. “It is clear that it is one of the most highly anticipated technology evolutions of the coming decade,” Dave Wright, chief innovation officer at IT provider ServiceNow, told TechTarget writer George Lawton in “History of the metaverse explained.” Throughout the guide, there are hyperlinks to in-depth explorations of these and other relevant topics, as well as to definitions of important concepts in the metaverse such as interoperability, digital twins, spatial computing and Web 3.0. Imagine a virtual world where billions of people live, work, shop, learn and interact with each other — all from the comfort of their couches in the physical world.

I hate to shatter the illusion, but it’s simply not possible with even very advanced versions of existing technology. Even Apple’s Vision Pro has some breakthrough tech that is genuinely exciting, like controller-free interfaces or pass-through screens that can be very exciting and feel futuristic. It’s at this point that most discussions of what the metaverse entails start to stall. We have a vague sense of what things currently exist that we could kind of call the metaverse if we massage the definition of words the right way. And we know which companies are investing in the idea, but there’s nothing approaching agreement on what it is. Meta thinks it will include fake houses you can invite all your friends to hang out in.

More Commonly Mispronounced Words

What are enterprise leaders to make of a fast-evolving, hyped-up concept could fundamentally change how humans live? TechTarget’s in-depth guide to the metaverse breaks down where this nascent technology revolution stands today and where it is headed. Topics include the technologies and platforms that support the metaverse, its benefits and challenges, how to invest in it, its history, why the metaverse is important and its impact on the future of work. For his part, Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously defined the metaverse as not a place at all, virtual or otherwise, but a time.

And then there are the accessibility challenges of VR that many companies are shrugging off for now. Meanwhile, Apple’s Vision Pro “solves” the problem of users who have to wear glasses by … selling prescription lens add-ons. This stands in relatively grounded contrast with other companies’ visions of the future, which range from optimistic to outright fan fiction.