Metaverse: Will we soon be sitting around the virtual campfire?
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Ever since Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook, everyone has been talking regarding the Metaverse. Corporations and small companies are now working on appealing virtual worlds that are intended to make the Internet accessible through all the senses. It’s not just regarding the mass market.
In a world in which reality and virtuality continue to merge with the introduction of data glasses, Meta, Microsoft and others are promoting it Metaverse. For them, the metaverse is the logical consequence of technical progress and the digital transformation of our society. At this point, most of us don’t even realize what this metaverse actually is. Or how it differs from other developments in which the real world is digitally mapped, such as the “digital twin”. The digital twin is currently still very expensive and is mostly only used by large-scale industry – the core of the metaverse here is to democratize the capabilities of a digital twin for the general public. Ultimately, the real and virtual worlds are currently converging in several places. At the same time, technical, socio-economic, ethical and legal issues are far from being fully resolved. These open questions relate to complexity, energy consumption, security, privacy or interaction options between people and virtual worlds. But it seems clear that if the Metaverse is not degraded as a gimmick or platform for the big players, there will be a wide range of opportunities for our society and industry.
Incidentally, the word and the idea are not new: the idea of a metaverse came regarding as early as 1992 in a science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. In it, he outlines how people and virtual avatars interact with one another in a virtual world. Shortly following the turn of the millennium, the first virtual worlds such as Second Life allowed users to meet in such environments. This virtual space was also called the Metaverse back then. Players from all over the world are represented by avatars. Using this, they can then play with each other in the metaverse, interact or just discover the new digital world. Parallel to this beautiful, digital world, there was also an economic reality in which hard currency might be used to acquire virtual elements. Such approaches were primarily aimed at the consumer market – following an initial boom, however, interest in this gimmick quickly ebbed.
