THE METAVERSE

In 1981, the first televised report about the internet was released, of course it was described as the “highway of information”, it featured a man who had to call a phone line to a center, this center in turn sent the morning newspaper to the man’s personal computer, there were no images, no comics, only lines of text from 8 newspapers on his computer screen and it took a 2 hour wait(which cost around $5 an hour, that is around $15 today), this man is probably someone you have never heard of Mr
Richard Halloran. The reporter said back then that it will take “a few years” before every newspaper will be on the internet (It will take until 10 years later).

In 1984, BBC did a live tutorial on how to send an email to another person, I find it amusing that emails then ended with “electronically yours” but it showed the massive jump we had made from 1981, e-mails were now getting up to speed with a small number of people “rich people” and privileged kids in high schools and colleges, ABC in 1990s (can’t remember the year) broadcasted a special on ABC science and it spotted the real problems with the internet, “the Infrastructure was buggy”, the thing is to connect to the internet you needed a modem, a phone line, another line, a personal computer, someone to help you set up your connection and a hosting company to give you a dial-up number (something similar to our current cloud servers), it was in 1991 that the first commercial dial up connection was introduced and it would take until the 2000s (nearly 25 years after the 1981) for the broadband connection to be adopted for us to truly witness the power of the internet as imagined by Arthur C Clarke in 1965.

Why are we going back through history when we are supposed to be talking about the metaverse? This is because I want us to understand our current stage in the awesome story of the metaverse (which I believe is the future of not just the internet but our human race) but also for us to be able to filter through the noise and focus on what is really important.

The concept of the Metaverse isn’t novel as a matter of fact we had a good idea of what what facebook peddles as the metaverse would look like since the early 90s, the metaverse is a universe likened to ours only that it is purely digital and can be felt as if it were to be our physical world and that’s where the misconceptions comes in, “Who owns the metaverse?”, “is facebook building the metaverse?”, “Is the metaverse only about 3d avatars and cartoons?”,.

No one owns the metaverse, it is just like the internet that you log into and then there are multiple websites offering multiple services, either as social media networks, uploading sites, content sharing and collaboration sites etc. so facebook isn’t building the metaverse, it is trying to build its own domain in it, so that one day you can be able to visit their domain and access their own section of the virtual world.

Think of it like a Building(Facebook) in a City(Metaverse), it is owned by an independent person and it can either be a gaming house or a business building or a strip club depending on the company that owns the building.

Ever since Mark Zuckerberg announced the change of the company name to “meta”, the world has been going bananas over every thing from Blockchain to NFTs to crypto, everyone now doesn’t want to be left behind and now every company will slap anything with the 3D Avatar as the “metaverse”, Microsoft called their Mesh platform “the future of virtually immersive and hyper realistic team work”

The thing is, we don’t know what the future of the metaverse is because we are looking at it from the lens of our current technology and the eyes of the current big tech companies, Facebook has invested nearly $10 billion in VR projects even assigning 20% of it’s staff to VR projects and it makes sense that they would want to position themselves as “building the metaverse” (they are not) and “industry leaders of design” would want to position themselves as “metaverse designers” to cash in on the trend but just like it was the newspapers who drove the adoption of the internet, the big winners at the end became social media companies because they made us communicate better with people and it was evident because the most revolutionary thing that came with the internet then was the e-mail yet everyone seemed to focus on just the newspapers and getting more information, the internet made us switch from holding information with our hands to seeing information with our eyes.

Now with the metaverse, what do people really want from it? I don’t personally think it’s to see more things but rather we want to feel more of the information, The VR headsets do a good job in the visual aspects of this but it’s very limiting because of the current technology and always taking on a large chunk of white box to place over my eyes is not really the best user experience, while this might work for a number of years like the dial up connection, modems and floppydisks helped us for a while but I beg to differ when people imagine this as our future, it even feels more downgrading to limit the future of the metaverse to just hyper realistic 3D avatars in game like worlds because the network to power a realistic, realtime, immersive and cognizable information is not currently at our disposal and neither is the technology to enable us experience this new phase of our evolution.

Just like people would have never imagined that we would one day be having content creators, crypto currencies and a massive economy based on the internet alone when it was just a tool for newspapers to send their morning editorials to a man in an office, The same is how I think it is too early for anyone to make definitive positioning around the metaverse because we have no idea how game changing the metaverse will be for our society and the possibilities it holds or who will be the winner at the end of it’s maturation.

Just like we had to invent the smartphone to be able to make the internet very accessible and we had to invent the efficient browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox) to help visit domains and operating systems (Android, IOS, Linux) to enable us build easily accessible apps, we would have to create a supporting infrastructure to power the metaverse to enable us realize it’s true potential, because there’s no way you can make a convincing argument with VR headsets powering this future.

So, where are we currently? I personally would reckon that we are back to 1984 on the technology for the new phase of the internet and we certainly do not have a definite say on what the future holds or what possibilities the metaverse will open for humanity and it would take the trails and failures of multiple companies to help us build the infrastructure to usher in the true power of the metaverse, maybe by then Nueralink would ready and we can begin a new age of pseudo bionic integration of our reality with the digital world.

Who knows? For now, let’s all be optimistic Richards and Visionary Arthurs.