TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
The Metaverse: Its unfolding story
The metaverse can generally be understood as a shared, immersive digital environment in which people can move between computer-generated spaces.
Change Size
A person walks past a newly unveiled logo for Meta, formerly known as Facebook. (AFP/Noah Berger)
T
he mixture of online and offline experiences, referred to as on-life experience (Floridi, 2014), that we are currently enjoying, involving remote work, online shopping and interactive web communications, will probably disappear one day, or even becoming blurred, as some people choose to exist totally in, or “escape” to, a virtual world.
This virtual world is popularly known as the metaverse. If the pundits are correct, there are tons of opportunities to be unlocked in there.
The metaverse, as the next stage of the information age, will arguably allow us not only to expand the production and sale of products and services and evolve our experiences, but also to keep pace with ever-changing technology and trends in the digital economy. This recent technology buzzword brings to the forefront the transition from what life was like in the pre-digital age, which focuses on “here” (offline, analog, carbon-based), to the future, which focuses on “there” (digital, online, silicon-based).
The vision that people can escape to virtual reality started in Snow Crash, a 1992 book by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson that presented a 3D virtual world in which people, represented as avatars, could interact with each other and artificially intelligent agents. In 2022, Mark Zuckerberg, who rebranded his company Meta in October 2021, has sets a goal for a billion people across the globe to enter his version of the metaverse by the end of the 2020s.
Zuckerberg’s initiative certainly intensifies the metaverse hype. New Scientist magazine, published on Jan. 8, reports that almost 160 companies mentioned the metaverse in their income statements in 2021, and, according to financial research firm SENTIEO, 93 of them after the Facebook rebrand.
Since October of last year, searches on Google for “metaverse” have soared, The Economist has reported. At this point, Zuckerberg is sharing his vision of the metaverse.
“In this future, you will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends or in your parents’ room to catch up,” he said, as quoted by the BBC.
