What is the Metaverse?

In mid-October 2021 we heard rumours of Facebook Inc. changing its name to something new, most bets were on the new name having something to do with the metaverse. Many people, including those of us in Team Digit, were convinced it would be Meta or Metaverse because it was not a secret that this was the direction Facebook was heading in. It wasn’t just Facebook’s announcement that suddenly formed the metaverse out of thin air, even though it feels like it because that’s the power of Facebook. If anything, the metaverse is much older than it seems. 

Tech pundits have seen this coming ever since Facebook bought Oculus in March 2014. VR has promised to be the next big thing for a decade now, and here at Digit, we’ve been waiting with bated breath for the first successful brain-computer interface (BCI) for at least 15 years. I’ve written about BCIs myself several times over the past decade and a half! In short, the direction we’re headed in has not been a secret to anyone who follows the tech industry, and certainly not surprising to those of you who have been reading Digit for more than a decade. 

Science fiction writers have been writing about this for even longer, and though they were not prescient enough to imagine the leaps in terms of computing and the miniaturisation of everything, the general trend was towards computers/machines/robots that were smart, and us interfacing with them as one would the real world. 

The term “metaverse” itself is a portmanteau (blending of words) of the prefix “meta” with the word “universe”. It was first used in Neal Stephenson’s book, Snow Crash, in 1992, and it’s a use that all of us would identify with immediately. In the book, Stephenson’s description of the Metaverse conjures up images of a virtual reality world, or universe, where nothing is real, and people can live in a fantasy, or if they choose to, live very average lives. Those familiar with my writing style know how I like to veer off course for a bit, so brace yourselves. 

To understand what meta is you have to first have watched the movie Inception. If you haven’t, go watch it now, then come back, because the great thing about written articles is that this one will still be here 148 minutes laster when you have finished. Well, maybe longer than 148 minutes, because like most of us who have watched it, you probably had to do some internet searches to try and understand what the heck it was you just watched.

Back? Now that you have been subjected to mind-bending explanations of dreams within dreams, or dreams about dreams, you’re ready to understand what on earth the term “meta” actually means. 

Just as dreams about dreams could be considered to be meta-dreams, data about data is considered ‘metadata’. A joke about a joke is a metajoke, metamathematics is the mathematical study of mathematical principles, metafiction is a fictional work about a fictional work, metaprogramming is programming of programs that program another program… and now you understand why I wanted you to watch Inception first… don’t be fooled into thinking all words that start with meta mean <something> of <the same something>, because that’s not actually the case, but many words where it is an obvious prefix do tend to mean that. Cognition of cognition = meta-congnition, the study of languages is linguistics, the study of the relation between different languages is metalinguistics, etc. 

The Metaverse

So, what’s the meta-universe? What’s “meta” about Facebook anyway? For some people, nothing at all, for others, it’s exactly what the name suggests… a universe within a universe. Most people will point to the game Second Life as perhaps the first stab taken at creating a ‘cyberverse’ (cyber-universe), and for most people, there really is no difference between the cyberverse and the metaverse. Come to think of it, for most people, cyberspace, cyberverse and metaverse all can be used pretty interchangeably for one another. However, are those people correct? 

The term cyberspace is used more to describe the internet itself. Essentially a place online made up of interconnected servers which allow people connected to those servers to communicate with each other. Just another word for the internet, as it appears to us end-users, though system admins and companies will disagree about the internet being just cyberspace. 

Coming back to Second Life, a game/life simulator that still exists today. It was in 2007 that we (Team Digit) all logged in and made our accounts, and boy was it new and fun at the time.  We’d just got fed up of Facebook, or at least Facebook had stopped being new to most, and so Second Life seemed like a huge improvement. We met strangers online and chatted with them, at first with text but then they introduced voice chat, which made it feel far superior to Facebook at the time. Then all the adult smut took over, and it stopped feeling fun and started feeling seedy, and more like a red light district than a game. The fact that ping times were terrible for us in India, and frame rates crawled meant that adult content was actually a much smaller problem than a terrible user experience. And then we forgot about it. 

However, nothing will take away the exhilaration we felt when logging in and seeing a first person view of a world, where people were able to design their own avatars and talk to one another in real time. It looked like a game, but there was no scripted path to follow, no quest, just do what you like, explore, go where you want. It was essentially the earlier form of the metaverse, but way before its time. Though it still exists, it’s not innovating, and seems behind the times now…

VR?

Most people think of the metaverse as something that’s accessible only via VR. Even our cover design follows this trend, because that’s the perception that we have for how to enter the metaverse. 

While Meta (Facebook Inc) and others might be pushing for this VR-style metaverse in a big way, there are other ways in which we see the metaverse starting off at least. The simplest is the laptop, or desktop PC display. We already play games on those, and have impressive hardware on most gaming systems because of the demands of the games. Gamers are a no-brainer of a target audience for all things metaverse related. So many of us gamers have VR hardware as well, which means a better metaverse experience out of the box whether it’s on a simple monitor, or if it’s a VR display. Certainly we see a lot of the early offerings being targeted at gamers, and more specifically PC Gamers. 

Of course, everyone will want to scale to be able to reach billions, instead of the tens of millions of gamers, and this means finding a way to allow access to the metaverse on cheaper hardware, most importantly, relatively cheap mobile phones. It’s highly unlikely that the masses of the world will shift away from mobile phones any time soon, so it’s far more likely that initial metaverse offerings will be non-VR, or at best, simplistic mobile-VR experiences. As a simple example, initially, we’re more likely to be walking through the virtual shops of e-tailers such as Amazon or Flipkart than we are to be socialising and partying with friends at virtual nightclubs.

Avatars

If there’s one thing that will define the metaverse, it will be your presence in the form of an avatar. Many of us already have cartoonish avatars that we use for games, for certain services, or even for personalised gifs that we use in signatures of emails. We use animated avatars when clicking selfies, and they’re also popular on social video apps across the world. 

We’re going to see more advanced services pop up that let you scan yourself to create avatars, and if possible, import the same avatars into multiple services. Even those of us who have not spent much time on creating avatars are going to create one in 2022, just out of FOMO (fear of missing out) if nothing else, because over the next few years that’s the direction we’re headed in. 

There’s a huge advantage avatars have over actual video, which is that it’s less of an invasion of privacy. Thanks to the pandemic, our work (or study) life has invaded our homes. Everyone from school kids to professionals working at home have attended virtual classes or meetings using their actual webcams. While the errors that happen are PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair – i.e. the user), it can be embarrassing when you think you turned off a camera but haven’t. People have ended up going to the toilet in front of their whole classrooms, showering in front of colleagues, and believe it or not, far worse as well.

None of that happens with an avatar. Even if the avatar is set to follow your actions and movements using your camera, it’s still not going to drop it’s pants to sit down on a toilet when you do! 

What else?

So that’s it? VR and Avatars make a metaverse? No, and we have five more articles to follow this one, because there is obviously a lot more to the metaverse than we can ever cover here. 

What we’re still struggling with is a nailed down definition for it. Meta (Facebook Inc) has a definition of their own. On Meta’s own site, they describe the metaverse as, “…a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren’t in the same physical space as you.”

But that’s just about anything we do now, right? Here at Digit, the team is spread around the country and abroad as well, and we all collaboratively work on files together. It’s not uncommon for us to be sitting on video calls, talking to one another just as we would if we were sitting in the office next to each other, working on multiple files at a time, quite often many of us are working on one file together. Is that the metaverse? Are teams using one of the myriad cloud services to work together remotely already participating in the metaverse experience? Maybe! 

Because there’s no definition that anyone can settle on, just about any real-time collaboration or communication, or socialising online could technically be qualified as part of the metaverse experience. In our team itself the opinions are varied. One group thinks the metaverse is just another buzzword that’s trying to describe how tech advancement and the internet is changing, rather than the metaverse concept itself changing anything. Another camp thinks the metaverse concept is more than merely the internet, and is a huge push being engineered by Meta (previously Facebook Inc.),  so that their large investment in Oculus comes good. 

The Universe Problem

What virtual meet-ups in the Metaverse could look like

There’s one major problem with a universe. It’s too big. It’s too spread out. It’s too isolated. Just look at the real universe we know exists, because we can see it on a cloudless night by looking up at the sky at any area of the planet not totally ruined by light pollution. And is that the universe we see? Not even close, that’s just the Milky Way or rather a small part of it that we see. In amongst all the millions of stars we see, and billions of galaxies as well. There are so many, in fact, and spread across such distances, that even time itself is meaningless when looking up at space. 

Imagine that only one in every 200 galaxies produced an intelligent species. That’s only one star out of billions, across billions of years of time, gives rise to only one species at least as intelligent as us, then there could have been a billion intelligent species like us. A billion species who have lived and died out in the 14 billion history of our universe, and yet all separated by vast amounts of space and time, making it impossible for any species to ever find out that another existed. Just little isolated silos of life, sparking into existence and then being snuffed out again.

The metaverse might be no different. 

Every large corporation wants to run their services like an isolated galaxy. This means that startups have to choose one of them to side with. Like picking a supermassive galaxy to start up in. Hundreds of such startups and services will fail before even a single one succeeds. The one that succeeds will be the shining star for that platform. Same thing will happen on a different platform, and all could be as isolated from one another just as we are from whatever life form was the closest to us in the vastness of space. 

Expect to drown in metaverse offerings, and heck, we will probably be helping push your head under! We’re going to be letting you know of the promising metaverse offerings as time passes, and there’s bound to be plenty of them. 

Those of us using whatever the work version of the metaverse becomes will have it easier. Our bosses will pick the metaverse to use from amongst the many in the multi-metaverse (or is that meta-multiverse?) and we will just go with the flow. 

So did we answer the question about what the metaverse is? Probably not, because there is no one answer to that question. If you haven’t already, you should really get started trying out some cheaper VR options, just to get used to it. 

Expect a whole lot more coverage of the topic from us. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts about the metaverse, and whether you’re looking forward to it or terrified by it.

Read more articles about the Metaverse.

This article was first featured in the January 2022 issue of the Digit magazine. To subscribe to the magazine, head to this link. To get the digital subscription, head over to Geek.Digit.in

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Robert Sovereign Smith

Robert (aka Raaabo) thinks his articles will do a better job of telling you who he is than this line ever will. View Full Profile