METAVERSE: TREND OR FUTURE?

METAVERSE: TREND OR FUTURE?

Last week, the technology world was agitated when Facebook officially announced the change of the company name Facebook Inc. into Meta and aim to build its own metaverse virtual universe.

According to a Reuters report, giant SoftBank recently poured another $93 million into another NFT game company. It’s Sandbox, a Hong Kong-based NFT gaming platform that allows players to build virtual worlds with non-fungible tokens (NFTs). 

“We are creating this open metaverse. We are positioning The Sandbox against those giant tech companies who are claiming the metaverse to be theirs, offering an alternative where users are first,” said co-founder and CEO Sebastien Borget. 

What is Metaverse?

Metaverse is defined as “A boundless, 3D digital world accessed as easily as the internet, where we do things like hang out in a park, play a game, see a concert or suffer through a work conference.”

The actual term “metaverse” comes from a best-selling 1992 sci-fi novel, Snow Crash. Its author, Neal Stephenson, imagined a dystopian world where the book’s main character, a hacker/pizza delivery guy named Hiro Protagonist, travels back and forth from his grim reality to a 3D virtual cityscape, the Metaverse, that stretches for over 40,000 miles. Stephenson’s work would later influence The Matrix series and Ready Player One, a 2018 Steven Spielberg film based on a book by Ernest Cline from seven years earlier.

In 2007, roughly a million people flocked to Second Life, eager to experience the three-dimensional, web-based alternative reality launched four years earlier. Those users roamed around as customizable, cartoon versions of themselves called avatars and enjoyed a wide array of activities. They could listen to Kurt Vonnegut give a live talk, dance at popular nightclubs like Hot Licks and Angry Ant, shop for both virtual clothes and real ones at the Armani store, visit reconstructions of famous landmarks like Rockefeller Center, have virtual sex—and, most famously, speculate on digital real estate. After exchanging actual greenbacks for Second Life’s Linden Dollars, users were spending $100 million a year on virtual purchases, much of it on real estate. 

New Opportunities for Social Networks in Virtual Words: Facebook – A Case Study

At Connect 2021, Mark Zuckerberg laid out the vision of the metaverse as the successor to the mobile internet. That is a set of interconnected digital spaces that lets you do things you can’t do in the physical world. The specialty is that all people in that space can immerse in the feeling that they’re right there with another person, no matter where in the world they happen to be.

Horizon Home

This is the first thing or the early vision for a home base in the metaverse. Until now, it’s just been called Home because the experience wasn’t social. Soon, people will be able to invite friends to join in Horizon Home, where they can hang out, watch videos, and jump into games and apps together.

Messenger calls in VR

Facebook used to launch Messenger support in VR at the beginning of the year that letting people send a quick message to friends from inside the headset. Tentatively, later this year, Facebook will bring Messenger audio calls to VR. 

Gaming

Gaming is certain to be as prevalent in the metaverse as it is today. Take Beat Saber as an example, which recently surpassed $100 million USD in gross lifetime revenue on the Quest Platform alone. Beside that, Facebook also announced a number of new games and updates, including a five-title partnership with Vertigo Games and new events for VR battle royale POPULATION: ONE.

Fitness

Today, more and more people are replacing old gym routines with VR exercise. Facebook aims to make your Quest 2 the best piece of gym equipment it can be. They predicted to launch the new set of accessories, the Active Pack for Quest 2. The Active Pack includes a new setup that will help people stay in control while they sweat. And more! 

The future of work

Facebook announced that they will begin testing Quest for Business — a new suite of features designed for businesses, but which runs on the same consumer. Tentatively, this will start in limited beta this year, expand to more beta participants in 2022, and fully launch to all businesses in 2023. Quest for Business will let you log in to your Quest 2 headset with a Work Account, an upcoming business-only login that will allow you to collaborate with coworkers and access productivity apps like Horizon Workrooms and Gravity Sketch without using your personal Facebook account. Quest for Business will also enable access to dedicated platform functions that businesses need for work, like account management, IDP and SSO integration, third-party mobile device management, and more.

Educational investment

Beyond entertainment and social experiences, the metaverse stands to radically transform the way we learn as well. To make this happen, Facebook is not only working with game engine developer Unity to help people gain the skills they need to create incredible AR and VR content, but also partnering with a number of institutions to help bring to life their visions for immersive and collaborative learning experiences, such as VictoryXR and Byjus FutureSchool; nonprofits like Generation, Urban Arts Partnership, and the Peace Literacy Institute; and learning organizations, including a number of historically Black colleges and universities.

And more!

In fact, more than 700 million people use their AR effects each month. Mobile AR effects today offer a glimpse of what we’ll see in the future with AR glasses and how we’re working to bring this future within reach. Therefore, Facebook is working on new tools that Spark AR creators can use to place digital objects in the physical world and let people interact with them, realistically, with depth and occlusion.

A few days ago, Facebook gave a sneak peek of an all-in-one VR hardware, Project Cambria. This will be a high-end device with all the latest advanced technologies, including improved social presence, color Passthrough, pancake optics, and a lot more. 

Facebook also introduced Presence Platform, a suite of machine perception and AI capabilities — including Passthrough, Spatial Anchors, and Scene Understanding — that will let developers build more realistic mixed reality, interaction, and voice experiences that seamlessly blend virtual content with a user’s physical world.

For now, we’ll have to wait and see what impact might have on the future — both in the metaverse and the real world. What do you think about this? Let’s share your thoughts!