WHY METAVERSE? IS IT REALLY WORTH THE HYPE?

Let us get this cleared first. What’s metaverse and where did it start? The word metaverse is a portmantologism of the Greek term Meta and the English word universe. Meta in Greek is traditionally used as a prefix to mean after or beyond, a use that continues in the English language. The first reported use of the word metaverse was in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel, Snow Crash. In today’s terminology, it means three-dimensional and is alleged to be a metaphor for the real world.

Metaverse began to acquire its popularity when the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company will be pivoting around metaverse and renamed facebook, Meta. In his imagination, every human is ready to work, socialize, and play in the offices, conference rooms, concert halls, and amusement parks of the metaverse. Zuckerberg laid the stepping stones of meta in 2014 by buying the corporate Oculus which used to sell virtual reality gears or headsets.

He was not the first one to pitch this idea. Google attempted to make VR/AR products mainstream with Google Glass but in 2014, it failed because the tech was seen as uncool and privacy-invasive. Microsoft is another major Big Tech player trying to create a metaverse. Its idea is termed, Mesh. One of the most interesting features of this is what the company calls “Holoportation”. Simply put its users are ready to project their holographic selves to other users. Its virtual and augmented realities can be best experienced with HoloLens devices — an exclusive gadget that can make the experience of ‘Holoportation’ altogether different.

In simple terms, the metaverse is a virtual reality application or a 3D space similar to the games like Decentraland, Fortnite and could be experienced through a VR headset. Here virtual characters are called digital avatars. But that’s not it. It’s an amalgamation of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), online gaming, and cryptocurrencies. Metaverse isn’t an old term for gamers. Snapchat’s bitmoji to games like Minecraft and Roblox all of them have been using the lesser-known version of the metaverse for a long time. Mayday for all people who own cryptocurrency. Every Metaverse platform is anticipated to own its cryptocurrency and for now, Decentraland (CRYPTO: MANA) and also The Sandbox (CRYPTO: SAND) are two of the metaverse cryptocurrencies that can be utilized in their respective metaverse games.

Here’s a snippet of Stephenson’s description of the metaverse in Snow Crash (1992):

“Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you’re ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you’ve just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these.”

Is it worth the hype? If you consider a common man this might mean nothing to him. All of those might sound interesting to a teenager but not an adult who is working his ass off to pay his bills. We’ve progressed far enough as a society to acknowledge that nearly every seemingly useful technology has downsides: Cars destroy the climate. Smartphones make us anxious.

The lone purpose of the metaverse is to create a more immersive internet, to spend our time engaging in virtual spaces and experiences instead of the physical world. Practically, this world will disengage us from our physical realities: the office, the living room, the outdoors. We can shop, attend virtual concerts and office meetings, play games but could you imagine eating food virtually or going out for a long walk or a trek, or playing a favorite sport.

Some critics say that by specializing in the metaverse and renaming itself while the company is reeling from a PR crisis, Facebook is distracting from the issues it’s creating or contributes to in the real world: issues like harming teens’ psychological state, facilitating the spread of disinformation, and fueling political polarization. In simple terms, it’s a perpendicular world.

Here’s how an individual felt after attending a meeting using metaverse for the first time” there have been clear drawbacks — mainly, that my avatar didn’t have any legs (because the headset can’t pick up your leg motions the way it can your head and hands, there aren’t any legs in the Horizon Workrooms app). For once, I began to sweat and feel nauseated. My headset weighed on my face. Anytime I wanted to play a game in this space that Facebook hadn’t developed itself, I had to travel through the process of creating a new avatar from scratch. The initial wonder I had, began to drain away. It’s hard to imagine myself eager to hang around within the current version of Facebook’s metaverse for long periods.”

Any conversation about the metaverse is basically hypothetical, debatable, and too early to gauge a technology. Every new technology includes its terms and conditions. It’s up to us to settle on them sensibly for the betterment of our lives. When the tech giants introduced mobile phones within the market for the first time, people rushed to shop for them, and now doctors advise us to reduce the screen time because it’s affecting our eyes and sleep cycle. So choose your weapons wisely…