The metaverse is a network of virtual environments where people can interact with digital objects while operating virtual representations, or avatars, of themselves. It’s a combination of immersive virtual reality, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, and the web.

Many experts believe that the metaverse is a concept that may succeed today’s internet. Right now, it’s just a vision, but companies like Facebook are so sold on the idea that, in their case,  they renamed themselves Meta, to highlight its drive to dominate the metaverse.

What can we expect from a metaverse?

The key to the metaverse is that it can be fully immersive, or at least much more so than current virtual reality. So yes, we will have some kind of device, like glasses, to immerse ourselves in it and sensors that record our physical movements so that our avatar within that metaverse does the same.

Another of the main ideas of the metaverse is total freedom of creation, both to make our avatar similar to our physical person and to create the environment and our businesses and rooms to our liking. Think about what the internet is like today: it is full of virtual communities and social networks that we access from different devices. Nowadays, the bulk of our interactions is virtual rather than physical. Well, the metaverse wants to take that one step further and narrow the physical and virtual world, a place to chat and zip a virtual coffee with a coworker or a match from a dating app.

A metaverse will undoubtedly have its economy in the form of NFTs or an evolution of that technology, requiring investment in actual money, or could be rewarded to specific actions, creating virtual jobs. And finally, the metaverse will enable us to interact with people at a distance realistically, including gestures to enrich that communication experience, all through VR equipment. And as we can define how we look to others in the metaverse, we can express ourselves as we feel we are. 

How close are we from the metaverse

Currently, the metaverse is just a concept. The Meta company, formerly known as Facebook, has presented the idea and announced heavy investments to make it real. But it remains to be seen if other companies join in the effort to create the technologies that make it possible. Why? Because we still don’t have the technologies that can make that concept real. We don’t have virtual reality devices that make us move realistically enough. The entire infrastructure is also missing in terms of design. It is a universe that wants to be created, but it still does not have regions, streets, or anything, only some virtual rooms used for the first tests.

Yes, we have our first steps in creating virtual universes, like Second Life or Decentraland, but over the next few years, we will see how new devices will try to accomplish the tasks of hooking up (or not) to this concept. 

We are still a long way from connecting to a metaverse to interact. We need to envision what that virtual universe will look like, develop the technology to make it possible, and scale it to make it affordable.

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