What is the metaverse?
I am a huge nerd. For as long as I’ve breathed, I have been excited about advances in technology, and been an early adopter for even the worst tech trends (don’t ask me about my Palm Pilot please, those were dark days.)
So you’d think that I would be the kind of person who would get super excited about the metaverse, and breathlessly explain to you why it’s the new frontier in our digital lives.
Sadly, I can’t do that. While the metaverse is truly exciting, it’s also suffering from a lot of hype right now, leading to misunderstandings of what it is and isn’t.
That doesn’t mean I don’t think there’s potential in the metaverse! But in order to really understand the potential, we have to deflate the hype.
The metaverse is not a new concept
"'Avatar-Based Marketing'" by John 'Pathfinder' Lester
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the term “metaverse” was invented in 2021 by Mark Zuckerberg, when he rebranded his company to Meta. In fact, the word has been used since the 1990s to describe a virtual persistent world where people can interact with each other the way they do in real life.
Neal Stephenson was the first to use the term in his 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash. In the novel, people access a virtual universe through virtual reality goggles, as a sort of successor to the internet.
Back then, virtual reality was just starting to take off in the consumer space. Video game companies like Sega and Nintendo were developing headsets that could display 3D images, though they were either incredibly basic, or expensive, or both.
Still, people started fantasising about the possibility of one day diving into fully immersive worlds.
Recently, the idea of the Metaverse has gained traction again, for two big reasons: VR has become more popular again, and online games have started becoming places for people to hang out.
This article by Gene Park from the Washington Post was one of the first to bring the word “metaverse” back into the public consciousness in 2020. Back then, people were looking at games like Fortnite to potentially evolve from simple arena games to public venues that can hold concerts or other kinds of events.
Then, on Oct. 28, 2021, Facebook rebranded to Meta, signalling the company’s intention of becoming the one that will build the metaverse of tomorrow, or at least be the biggest player in it. The announcement kicked off a new hype cycle, which has continued until today.
The metaverse doesn’t exist yet
"Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education 2014 - Connections" by CallieDel Boa- in and out... is licensed under CC BY 2.0
When people talk about something happening “in the metaverse” right now, what they usually mean is something that happened in virtual reality, in a multiplayer game or in a virtual meeting room.
Those things are part of what the metaverse promises to be, but they’re not quite the full picture. If you defined the metaverse as any virtual space where you can interact with others in 3D, then games like Fortnite, World of Warcraft, IMVU and VRchat would already be the metaverse.
Instead, what will really define the metaverse is that it will be a platform for others to host their own spaces in.
Imagine it like a shopping mall: places like Fornite are like individual stores. The metaverse would be the whole mall.
A lot of companies are vying to become that mall right now — and Meta is maybe the most eager out of all of them. The company already owns Oculus, one of the leading names in virtual reality headsets, and a few of the online social spaces we already spend our days on, including Instagram and Whatsapp, and to a certain extent, Facebook. Combine those two advantages, and it sets the company up to take an early lead in the metaverse race. But for now, it still needs to be built.
The metaverse has nothing to do with NFTs … mostly
When you hear people talk about the metaverse, they’re often the same people who talk about crypto, web 3.0 or NFTs. That’s mostly because these people are emerging trend chasers, and are excited about being at the cutting edge of what’s happening on the internet.
But it’s important to differentiate between the metaverse and NFTs or other blockchain applications.
There are some areas where the blockchain and NFTs are being used in virtual spaces. For example, the people trying to build the metaverse right now are figuring out how to let people own things like property or digital assets. If you have a house or land in the metaverse, how do you prove it’s yours? Crypto- and NFT enthusiasts think the answer will be on the blockchain.
By definition, the metaverse will simply be a virtual online space to hang out, shop, and do other stuff in. Like any internet thing, it’s possible that it might include blockchain applications. But whether the whole thing will live on the blockchain is as likely as the whole internet moving to the blockchain — sure, it’s possible, but we’re a long way off right now.