Metaverse: a promise or a reality?

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Written by Dong, 2021 Cohort

A brand new concept – Metaverse is soaring over the Internet. What is it? Is it a ground-breaking reality or just a grandiose promise?  

Swelling references

Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., got jazzed about what virtual reality can bring to people’s relationship enhancement from a recent Time interview, a bit later than Apple’s fall conference. But when virtual reality was compared with Metaverse, Tim denied such a description:

“There are clearly different words out there; I’ll stay away from the buzzwords. We just call it augmented reality.”

TIM COOK – Chief Executive Officer of Apple

This wasn’t the first time that Metaverse was mentioned in public. Epic Game is unremittingly proving that Fortnite, a trailblazing virtual world, is in fact a Metaverse rather than a game. Building off of concerts from Marshmello and Travis Scott before her, pop superstar Ariana Grande got her own Fortnite concert in the summer of 2021, bringing in more than US$20 million for her in-game tour. 

On March 10 of 2021, Roblox, an online game creation platform, was successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange as a “Metaverse” concept stock, with a market value of over US$40 billion on the first day of listing. In February 2020, Tencent participated in Roblox’s Round G financing at the expense of US$150 million and thereby became the exclusive agent of Roblox’s product release in China.

What is (a) Metaverse?

1992 witnessed its emergence when video games jumped into net citizen’s daily life and shaped their ways of communication. At that moment, Neal Stephenson created a paralleled cyber world in his pioneering science fiction novel Snow Crash, and that world was referred to as ‘Metaverse’ – it is a virtual world for multiple players with the function of socializing, playing, and engaging. Everyone shall be granted a unique identification, and get immersed in this place thanks to the first perspective and fantastic graphics. 

It covers many overlays with the real world. For instance, Metaverse owns its specific economic system and temporal system so that players could reform their personal financial ecosystem. Besides, unlike other traditional games, synchronicity is highlighted, which means that every action matters to the whole world and will be recognized by all players.   

Such a leading concept affected many computational and artistic pundits in the following years. Avi Bar-Zeev, one of the founders of Google Earth, claimed that Google Earth was designed based on the virtual earth program in Snow Crash. And J Allard had prepared Snow Crash for his Microsoft teammates when they were developing Xbox and Xbox Live. We are also familiar with the Oasis in the film Ready Player One in 2019 and SAO in a 2009 Japanese light novel Sword Art Online, and they are both analogs of Metaverse to some degree.

What kind of technologies does it require?

In earlier days, since hardware and software were not well developed, Metaverse was far beyond reality. But nowadays developers are making it come true with lower prices and better experiences. 

Highly realistic face making in Epic Game
Jon Radoff: The seven layers of the Metaverse

Technically, Metaverse should be supported by many systematic layers. Jon Radoff came up with the seven layers of the Metaverse. He said that it should be involved in infrastructures like 5G and advanced GPU  servers, human interfaces like wearability and voice connections, decentralization (blockchain, edge computing, AI agents), spatial computing (3D engines, AR/VR/MR), creator economy(design tools, assets markets, workflow), discovery (rating, stores, ads) and experience (games, theaters). Other people believed that through decentralized blockchain technology, the ownership and circulation of value are guaranteed in order to assure the stability and efficiency of the economic system. Unfortunately, theoretical researches have excelled in practical accomplishments so far.  

But as for Metaverse, the key point might be to make sure real people’s safety and interests in the virtual world rather than the technology itself. When a vast crowd surged into this whole new world, what could happen to them due to their various cultures, religions? A new cyber order of rights might form, and it could penetrate into the real world.

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