This year, tech companies announced plans to build the metaverse which Reuters describes as a “shared virtual world environment” while Time says it promises “a greater overlap of our digital and physical lives”, covering aspects such as shopping, entertainment, socialisation and productivity.
The term metaverse was first coined by author Neal Stephenson in his science fiction novel Snow Crash, published in 1992.
In the book, the metaverse is the successor to the Internet where characters escape into a digital world dressed as their chosen avatars.
Similarly, in the movie Ready Player One, released in 2018 and based on a book of the same name that was published a decade earlier, many people shun the real world in favour of the digital wonderland Oasis.
In the Hollywood blockbuster, Oasis is controlled by a corrupt company that bombards users with ads. The protagonists don virtual reality (VR) goggles and suits with haptic technology – which engages their tactile senses – and go in search of an Easter egg which will allow them to wrest control of Oasis from the firm.
Making the metaverse
In October, CEO Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta, hoping to merge the company’s services to bring the metaverse to life.
“I think we’re basically moving from being Facebook first as a company to being metaverse first,” he said in an interview with The Verge.
He has invested at least US$10bil (RM42bil) in Facebook Reality Labs, the hardware division that will be building content and software, as well as VR and augmented reality (AR) gadgets for its digital world.
In a video presentation, Zuckerberg spoke enthusiastically about elevating the digital experience to make activities like gaming feel more immersive by giving people a shared sense of space despite not being in the same room.
“This isn’t about spending more time on screens, it’s about making the time that we already spent better.
“Screens just can’t convey the full range of human expression and connection. It can’t deliver the deep feeling of presence but the next version of the Internet can,” he said.
Does presence really matter in an online space? According to Microsoft, despite the convenience of remote meetings that has become the norm during the global Covid-19 pandemic, ongoing studies by the company’s research division showed that workers feel that they are impersonal and lack “small moments that build relationships and careers”.
Also, while people feel more present and engaged in meetings when everyone turns on their cameras, not everybody does.
To overcome this, the company announced Mesh for Microsoft Teams which uses mixed-reality tech to allow users to join meetings or virtual workspaces as a customised avatar of themselves.
In a post in November, the company described Mesh as the “gateway to the metaverse – a persistent digital world that is inhabited by digital twins of people, places and things”.
It is also encouraging organisations to build immersive spaces or virtual environments for their employees to mingle and collaborate on projects. Mesh is expected to be released sometime next year.
Meanwhile, South Korea’s Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) has unveiled plans to build a platform for contactless communication made for the post-pandemic era dubbed as “Metaverse Seoul”.
Its vision is to create a metaverse where users can check out tourist attractions and seek help from public officials who will be present in the virtual world to offer consultation and other civil services.
“From 2023, Seoul’s leading festivals, such as the Seoul Lantern Festival, will be held in the metaverse so that it can be enjoyed by all people around the world,” it said in a post last month, adding that it will also be developing services for the socially vulnerable and people with disabilities.
Another company joining the metaverse race is Epic Games.
In an online report, the company CEO Tim Sweeney said the metaverse has the potential to become a huge lucrative industry in the next few decades.
Sweeney added that the next three years will be crucial for his own company, as well as Meta, Microsoft and Roblox that want a stake in the meta- verse.
“It’s kind of a race to get to a billion users, whoever brings on a billion users first, would be the presumed leader in setting the standards,” he said in a Bloomberg interview.
Epic has already expanded its popular multiplayer game – Fortnite – into an online space for socialising and even hosting virtual concerts with top artistes, including Travis Scott and Ariana Grande.
For Scott’s Astronomical show held last year, the players’ characters could float through space and react to the music by selecting specific dance emotes as the superstar belted out his tunes, appearing as a virtual avatar of himself, often as a towering giant.
In Grande’s concert, dubbed Rift Tour, players found themselves in a dream-like virtual world where they could snowboard, fight monsters with friends and float through the clouds while a digital version of Grande sang some of her latest songs.
At its heart, Fortnite is still a player versus player title that is based on the battle royale formula though it has since expanded its rosters of modes, and players can purchase digital items, including exclusive clothing from brands like Balenciaga and Nike for their characters.
Sweeney said his metaverse strategy is to expand Fortnite from a game with about 60 million monthly active users to one billion.
He also hopes that companies from other industries will take advantage of its Unreal Engine – a suite of development tools for building virtual worlds – so that they too can be a part of the metaverse.
However, Epic has a new challenger in the form of Nvidia’s Omniverse – a platform for engineers and designers to build “physically accurate digital twins of buildings and products” or simulate environments for training robots or autonomous vehicles before they are made available in the real world – which Nvidia released in November.
Nvidia, a popular maker of graphics processing units (GPUs), is also hoping that its hardware will be crucial in building computing devices needed to power the metaverse.
“We now have the technology to create new 3D virtual worlds or model our physical world.
“These virtual worlds will obey the laws of physics, or not. There can be AI (artificial intelligence) or friends with you.
“We will jump from one world to another like we do on the Web with hypertext,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during his keynote speech at the GPU Technology Conference last month.
To experience the metaverse, devices like VR headsets or AR glasses will be required.
There are many in the market, including the Oculus Quest 2, which has its own operating system and graphics chip built-in and comes with a pair of touch controllers for users to navigate and experience the virtual world.
Another popular model is the HTC Vive Flow which can be paired with a smartphone to be used as a controller or navigation tool.
As for AR glasses, there are models like the ThinkReality A3 which can be connected to a laptop for users to see an expanded workplace such as virtual monitors or 3D models.
However, it’s too early to tell which models will be supported by the virtual worlds that the tech companies are building.
Meta, for example, announced on Dec 9 that its virtual reality social platform Horizon Worlds will be compatible with the Quest and Quest 2 headsets but that’s hardly surprising as it owns Oculus.
Horizon Worlds is only available for users in the United States and Canada for now.
Reality check
Some experts have voiced concerns over the metaverse.
In an interview with AP, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen said characters in the novel Snow Crash were using the metaverse to escape reality as they were living in a dystopian world.
She also highlighted that the experience of being in immersive virtual environments can be “extremely addictive” and that it encourages people to withdraw from reality.
An article by Psychology Today on the possible impact of the metaverse on mental health also said that the virtual worlds will likely encourage people to become detached from the real world, resulting in “delusional or psychotic symptoms”.
Data privacy is another major concern.
Haugen said she is also worried that “the metaverse will require people to put many, many more sensors in their homes and workplaces”, forcing them to relinquish more of their data and their privacy.
Meanwhile, Dr Ben Egliston of Queensland University of Technology said in a report that there needs to be more information and transparency on how biometric data will be collected and used by companies such as Meta.
“Virtual and augmented reality are really intimate forms of media in the sense that they are capturing data about our body, about our movement – potentially our facial gestures, our gaze and eyes. Things that can be used to infer various things about us.
“I think there are real concerns here, not just about data in a broad sense, but also in terms of the very specific forms of data that the company has the potential to extract,” Egliston said in a SBS News report.
An article by VentureBeat highlighted the need to regulate how companies will track user movement and interaction in the metaverse.
It stated that users should be informed what is being tracked and how long the information will be retained by the companies.
Users were also encouraged to push back against advertising algorithms that gather information on biometrics such as facial expressions, postures and vital signs.
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