Have you ever thought about why Facebook changed its name to Meta? What is with this word ‘Meta’? What’s the hype going around the metaverse? Let’s explore all this in this blog.
Let’s start with the word META. What is meta, and what does it mean? Meta comes from the Greek prefix and preposition meta, which means “after” or “beyond”. Remember there are a lot of suffix words that come with meta, like meta-data, etc which have no relation with our metaverse. Just for the info, metadata is something related to websites.
Coming to the metaverse. Why Metaverse? It could have been meta-world, meta-earth, meta-planet, right? The reason is that our universe is the biggest unlimited space. There is nothing beyond our universe. Our universe is always expanding and is limitless. That’s the reason, the metaverse came where we go beyond the limitless world. Here it's virtual reality. But wait, we’ll talk about all the realities later on.
Now comes the question, “why was the metaverse invented? What purpose did it have to play?”. The aim of the metaverse was one universe or let's say a virtual universe where everyone can collaborate, work, meet, game, and socialize together. This is possible through connecting people virtually with the use of external devices, like the Oculus VR headset. Using this device, you get into the virtual game world, where your physical action will be replicated in the game.
The aim of the metaverse is to support gaming or social media, the metaverse will combine economies, digital identity, decentralized governance, and other applications. Everyday, the road to metaverse is developing and blockchain has the future to power this technology forward.
Now that the metaverse is here, where can I find the closest resemblance to our metaverse? The video games are the best place to grab the experience of metaverse because of its 3D environment. The use of a 3D environment helps it to easily phase into 3D virtual space. These 3D virtual spaces are our virtual realities. Nowadays, people don’t just play virtual reality games, the game host provides a lot of other services like meetups, concerts, shows and more. For example, in the multiplayer game Fortnite, 12.3 Million players took part in Travis Scott's virtual in-game music tour.
Now that things are happening in the virtual world, how do people buy stuff in the virtual world, if they want to? Well, one answer to this will be using your normal payment methods. But that is too sophisticated and difficult and at times frustrating.
This is where our crypto fits in. Crypto can offer the other key parts required, such as digital proof of ownership, transfer of value, governance, and accessibility. In the future of metaverse, when we buy stuff, we need to show proof of ownership and secure our purchase. We also need to feel safe transferring these items and money around the metaverse.
All this is good, but how does it affect the way we do our job? Imagine you’re sitting at home, working and you connect virtually to all your teammates, have conversation, creating your own avatar who talks exactly as you do. Imagine everyone else is having a 3D avatar inside the metaverse. You will be having your own cubicle, home, building, park everything inside the metaverse.
The Metaverse NFT world is now becoming the strongest of them all. Integration between NFT marketplaces and 3D virtual universes is the next biggest step NFT platforms are looking into. While Opensea and Rarible are platforms which offer to buy and sell NFT to users, there isn’t any 3D platform where users can navigate through and buy with a virtual environment. Why? VR is perhaps the best possible platform for viewing art. You get to see it up close with every detail and from every angle. Nowadays, many museums are currently placing NFT artwork in metaverses such as Сryptovoxels, powered by the Ethereum blockchain.
As you can see, metaverse is still in its infant stage. Only a handful of companies have started to incorporate VR into their platforms. One of the main reasons is the lack of tech expertise in this area, and the department of knowledge required to make metaverse into a full-fledged platform.
Platform-specific knowledge of VR software such as building with Unity and Unreal or implementing movement tracking is super crucial in creating VR environments. But in the meantime, we can experience metaverse-like projects and continue to implement and integrate blockchain technology more into our daily lives.
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