Metaverse
Metaverse comes from two words: meta and verse. Meta is a Greek word that means beyond or after and verse is used to depict the Universe. From this, we can infer the meaning of Metaverse, that is, Beyond the Universe. It just shows the diversity of this novel concept of Metaverse.
Metaverse is actually a 3D virtual World that is the result of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) combined. It makes the use of VR and AR headsets to give the people a real life experience. It helps the users to live in a virtual 3D World in which they can carry out their life activities such as work, sleep, shopping, business, social gatherings, land ownership and all possible things a human being can do in real life. Each person has his own Avatar that represents that person in the Metaverse just like our physical bodies represent ourselves in the real World. It’s just like the game Fortnite where an Avatar represents you. A lot of other video games also make use of this concept of avatars to represent the user. One can also attend parties, concerts, and meetings virtually with real life experience. Just like the Internet connects all the computers on planet Earth, Metaverse is aimed to connect each and every human on Earth in a hyper-connected, virtual World where they can live just like actual life and carry out all of their life activities. Strangely enough, an emerging concept of crypto currency like bitcoins will have a significant role in Metaverse as a metaphor of paper money to sell or buy things and for business and trade.
Although the concept of Metaverse has been in the foresight of scientists and science fiction writers for a long time (1838, Sir Charles Wheatstone, coined the notion of Binocular Vision) but the term Metaverse was first coined by Neal Stephenson in his science fiction novel Snow Crash in 1992. In this, the humans were shown as mechanized or computerized Avatars that can interact with one another in a virtual world with the help of different softwares.
This mere idea of a writer was anticipated to be put to practice with various inventions of people in the gaming industry. For the first time, in 2010, Palmer Luckey created an original model of VR headset for Oculus. Later in 2014, Facebook bought Oculus and it was announced that the two would work together to build more games.
After this, many other remarkable companies like Samsung, Google, Microsoft, and Sony announced that they will manufacture their own VR headsets. The other companies such as Apple, Ikea, continued to add innovations in this VR concept.
Finally in 2021, Facebook ceremoniously announced to shape the World into Metaverse by presenting various aspects of Metaverse. Not only this, they also changed their company name from Facebook to Meta.
Currently, a lot of work is going on to put this concept to reality. Many of the big companies including Meta, Apple, Microsoft, and Google are investing a huge sum of money to transform Metaverse from a mere notion to existence. It has been speculated that the Metaverse market will grow to 800 billion USD by the year 2024.
Will the companies investing and working with endless efforts on this concept be able to incorporate it into our real lives? Will people accept this virtual world? We are still trying to contemplate it.