Metaverse
Are you ready to dive into it?
Well, everyone is talking about the change of Facebook’s name to Meta. I tried to delve deeper into the Metaverse.
Let’s talk about the vision. The vision is to create a virtual world parallel to the real world we live in. Think about a digital world where you are able to do everything that you do in this real world. And, think deeply about this, and what this means. You would be able to walk, talk, eat, buy, travel in this virtual world. You would be attending virtual conferences and even music concerts. The concept has been there forever. Check out this Post Malone song video with the same concept: https://lnkd.in/dR-wC8kT.Recently, even a movie: https://lnkd.in/da_HBb4E by Ryan Reynolds came out with a similar concept.
Now you know, what’s the vision. Now let’s see what would be the impact of this in our world. This move signals the boom of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Meetings would happen with holographic avatars of people. The digital would not be something stealing our attention, but rather the real world because we would be spending more time in the digital world.
After the move announced by Facebook, MANA a cryptocurrency jumped by around 400% because it is the cryptocurrency that is used to buy and sell places in Decentraland which is the nascent version of Meta’s vision. If the digital world got this big, the only currency we would be bothered about would be a cryptocurrency, and FIAT currency is definitely going to lose more of its value over time. Microsoft is a great player in this too because of its existing VR and AR technology. With everything being digitized, art will also become digitized. NFTs now make a lot of sense because they will be the technology that will support the real world’s art over its shoulders. Other big companies like Google and Amazon still have to make a move over this. I am no future teller, but I believe blockchain is to us like the internet was in the 1990s. Many things would fail and the others would go on to become the biggest companies in the coming decades.
But let’s delve a bit deeper on this one. It sounds great to have digital avatars and spend a lot of time wearing VR headsets and doing our job. But, the issue in this which I feel is, unless it is not linked to real-world then, it cannot be the biggest thing ever. For example, your avatar may eat at burger king in the metaverse, but you are still hungry. you still need to have food. But, with this, I am not saying that you have to somehow link whatever your avatar is doing to your body. This is no voodo. But, there should be at least some significance. The same issue lies with the NFTs. NFTs seem a great technology, especially for digital artwork collectors and artists. But, in the real world collections, we get the product, which we can showcase and the product in itself has some intrinsic value. Like, a painting is beautiful, a poem is priceless, but a digital token in itself is nothing like that. It needs to have some value which it provides to the users. It is fine at the collectibles level. At this level, it would just end one day and would never become as big as the internet today. But, the craze of NFT’s is beyond belief today.
Metaverse in itself will create a lot of opportunities for people in the field of AR and VR and also in the blockchain space. Another platform will rise which will serve for further growth and development. As a techie, I feel quite behind and late in knowing all this. And I feel, where have I been living under the rock. There will be many of you getting to know all about this for the first time. Well don’t worry, I think there is still time. We are going to hit this new platform definitely by 2024 and by then we would be moving towards it slowly. By the end of this decade, many projects would die because they made no sense at all. And it would be then when the industry would be completely understood and unraveled.
Currently, a lot of money is being poured into a lot of startups, which in the future have no idea of the profitability of actually providing any value to the users. They are just a fad as they are using this new technology. This is definitely a bubble, but also a great time to actually build something new. This is the first time in this century that we are going to experience a new era. What a great time to live in!!!! Let’s make the most out of it.
Let me know in the comments, what are you doing in this nascent era of the internet!!!!!
