What is the Metaverse? It is technology in the future?
Metaverse is a virtual world combined with multiple elements of technology, including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR),... where we can “live” within a digital universe.
Hello everyone,
I can be sure that anyone of us will know the keyword “Metaverse”. At this time last year (2021), Metaverse became a new big trend in the cryptocurrency coming after NFT, Gamefi,…trend.
Epic Games, maker of Fortnite and a video game digital distribution service and storefront platform like Steam, have announced publicly the ambition by raising $1B in funding to support Epic’s long-term vision for the metaverse.
Metaverse is becoming more popular even for everybody who hasn’t come to Cryptocurrency after the announcement of Mark Zuckerberg to transform Facebook from a “Social Media company” to a “Metaverse company” and rebrand Facebook to Meta at the end of October 2021.
With the increasing and development of NFT and Gaming in the crypto market, Metaverse is expected to become the next trend after Play-to-earn.
And it’s me again. I’m Neo — Admin — Community Manager of Optimus Finance and Growth Marketing of LECLE Vietnam. Let's go!
1. What is the Metaverse?
1.1. Definition
Metaverse is a virtual world combined with multiple elements of technology, including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and video where we can “live” within a digital universe and feel the most realistic experience.
If this “abstraction” term still seems hard to understand, then the movie “Ready Player One” will give you a more apparent aspect.
1.2. The origin of Metaverse
Metaverse was initially mentioned in Snow Crash — a Sci-Fi (Science Fiction) novel by Neal Stephenson in 1992, the story of which describes the inhabitants of humankind who met in realistic 3D buildings and other virtual reality environments and where they could interact with each other through a Cyberpunk-like space.
The definition of Metaverse has existed for a long time and the word Metaverse starts itself from two other words:
Meta: Means “beyond”.
Verse: In the word “universe”.
=> So we have the word Metaverse which means “beyond the universe”.
2. The features of Metaverse
- Sustainability: The ability to maintain and continuously improve high productivity.
- Immersion: The level of realism in Metaverse, how realistic Metaverse is.
- Openness: Openness, which means that Metaverse allows us to connect or disconnect at any time. At the same time, it must be an open space that allows creativity to become limitless.
- Economic System: An economic system parallel to reality where we can transfer assets between the real world and Metaverse easily, as well as accumulate and earn more possessions.
In fact, Metaverse can be built on a variety of technologies and it seems that Blockchain will be one of the key technologies of this world.
3. Different Layers of Metaverse
There are 4 foundational Layers including Metaverse, which are:
Layer 1 — Foundation layer — The Internet: this is the internet that supports connectivity on the Metaverse.
Layer 2 — Infrastructure layer: supports hardware components to create an authentic user experience. Other technologies forming this layer are IoT, Big data, AI and blockchain for creating a shared ecosystem.
Layer 3 — Content layer: includes applications and platforms designed to create more natural and experiences for one and more Metaverse projects to help us immerse ourselves in one or multiple worlds.
Layer 4 — True Metaverse: forms when layer 1–2–3 develop and create a parallel virtual space.
We can realize that every Layer is constantly updated in the development process. Such as:
The Internet — Layer 1 is being developed well nowadays. We are still releasing and developing new Internet technologies, they will be faster and more convenient (5G technology now and 6G 7G or more in the future).
Infrastructure — Layer 2 is also growing up in the hardware industry.
Content — Layer 3, we can see it through the form of various games (in the next part). This Layer is still in the development period and waiting for breakthroughs.
4. Metaverse through games
There are some familiar games that follow the concept of Metaverse, we could have played, such as:
GTA V: Of course, I love this game so much. In the multiplayer mode, we can interact with other people, with so many activities happening around us like in the real world. I think that we used to enjoy this game with our fellows in our leisure time in the original version or mod version.
Minecraft: is an open-world game where we can craft a lot of tools, exploit and explore the world in our own way as well as interact with other people through features and game modes.
Roblox: with this game, we can program games and play games created by other users. The game also supports VR and Cloud data.
In the cryptocurrency market, there are some Metaverse games such as Decentraland, The Sandbox,… In these games, we can create our own world and obtain properties through our NFTs, as well as buy/sell them through the Marketplace.
Metaverse is being developed and adopted. However, we have a long way before we can see an actual Metaverse as in “Ready Player One” film. There are currently some limitations:
We can’t build the realistic experiences because of the limitation of the AR technology (Augmented Reality).
The interaction rate among non-blockchain games is low, we can interchange our assets in one game with another as well as with real assets.
The creativity of humans is still limited.
5. The big names come into Metaverse
Metaverse attracts big attention from big organizations that have enough resources to turn this vision into reality.
The first name, I mentioned at the beginning, Mark Zuckerberg — the Founder & CEO of Facebook.
“Well, what I’m excited about is helping people deliver and experience a much stronger sense of presence with the people they care about, the people they work with, the places they want to be. And the reality is that today with the mobile internet, we already have something that a lot of people access from the moment they wake up to when they go to bed. I don’t know about you, but a lot of mornings, I reach for my phone by my bedside before I even put on my glasses, just to make sure, get whatever text messages I got during the middle of the night and make sure that nothing has gone wrong that I need to jump into immediately upon waking up. So I don’t think that this is primarily about being engaged with the internet more. I think it’s about being engaged more naturally.” — Source: theverge
After that, Facebook actually changed their company name to Metaverse, showing their contribution to this space. Mark said:
“Today we are seen as a social media company, but in our DNA we are a company that builds technology to connect people, and the metaverse is the next frontier just like social networking was when we got started” — Source: CNBC
Furthermore, the big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Samsung… to create the future of “Experiential Reality”.
Additionally, Tim Sweeny mentioned about Metaverse will not exist in a single world such as in “Ready Player One”, it will exist in many applications and interact among different worlds.
6. Blockchain is the key to a true Metaverse
Through this picture of Jon Radoff, we can easily see the Metaverse industry including the participation of tech companies in fields ranging from hardware, software, blockchain or gaming,…
As I mentioned, the interaction rate among non-blockchain games is low. We can’t transfer or trade some items in Fortnite for an equivalent one in Minecraft, for instance.
The assets that we are owning actually do not belong to us, so personalization and ownership are not appreciated. We will lose all of them if we delete the game. Sometimes or depending on laws or companies’ policies, all our items will disappear from our accounts if we break them.
Those things can be solved by the Blockchain technology:
Scalability: Current blockchains adopted scalability, especially with the concept of Internet of Blockchain, such as Avalanche, Polkadot or Cosmos Network.
Interoperability: Assets on different blockchains are able to transfer through cross-chain technology. But it is not yet fully established, resulting in a number of hacks recently.
Ownership: This is proved by NFTs — unique tokens that are not fungible.
Security: Blockchain technology will provide high security that can help protect us from hacks and exploits.
Cryptocurrency has contributed to an economy with the growth of DeFi. DeFi (Decentralized Finance) will play an indispensable role that keeps all economic activities happening easily:
We would like to buy/sell any assets on Metaverse, we can use Decentralized Exchanges (DEX) or Marketplaces, working in a decentralized way.
We would like to transfer assets between the blockchains, we can use Cross-chain bridges.
We would to borrow some money to grow our business on Metaverse, we can use Lending Protocols.…
So, Blockchain technology is very suitable for the development of Metaverse — a parallel and virtual world, which allows unlimited scalability and creativity, at the same time appreciating personalization and ownership.
7. The Metaverse is still a future concept
Although information technology has been developing, Metaverse is still a future concept and couldn’t have exploded yet.
In fact that at the moment, VR devices are still limited, expensive, and not widely supported. VR devices are the core basis for a true Metaverse.
However, it does not mean that VR devices (Infrastructure layer — layer 2) have to be fully developed and the Content Layer — layer 3 follows to develop too, but both of them will develop in parallel and explode when VR hardware is ready.
Summarizing, Metaverse is a promising industry in the future. With the participation of the big tech companies, a virtual and parallel world will no longer be imaginary anymore.
8. Closing thoughts
That’s all I would like to share with you some information about Metaverse as well as its massive potential. I think some of us will not believe in this, because it seems to be dubious. But we will not predict anything and only the knowledge for us.
Hope that it will help you to gain more valuable insights into Metaverse, and understand what you need to learn about this.
This post is for educational purposes only. All materials I used were the different reference sources. Hope you like and follow us and feel free to reach out to us if there is an exchange of information. Cheers! 🍻
#web3 #Metaverse #blockchain