Choose To Become Iron Man? For Sure in Metaverse

“Facebook Changed Face”, last month, Facebook announced to change its company name as it shifts its focus to the “metaverse”. The market has a strong positive view on its new business strategy, Facebook’s stock price rally 12% since its announcement.

Another tech giant, Nvidia, also bet on metaverse. At its GTC developer conference this month, Nvidia added more capabilities to its collaborative engineering and modelling metaverse platform. That includes the ability to build “digital twins” of cars, robots and other real-world projects to help speed development. Nvidia’s stock price also rally 128% this year.

Talk of the metaverse has been everywhere. Not just Facebook (now “Meta”) or Nvidia, Microsoft, Epic Games, Accenture and so many companies bet on this concept.

So what is the metaverse?

Author Neal Stephenson is credited with coining the term “metaverse” in his 1992 science fiction novel "Snow Crash," in which he envisioned lifelike avatars who met in realistic 3D buildings and other virtual reality environments.

So metaverse is a combination of multiple elements of technology, including virtual reality, augmented reality and video where users "live" within a digital universe. Supporters of the metaverse envision its users working, playing and staying connected with friends through everything from concerts and conferences to virtual trips around to the world.

It sounds like a parallel universe you heard from The Marvels. And yes, it will become real in the coming future.

What could the metaverse look like?

Here are some components that come together to create compelling virtual universes:

·     Avatars

Avatars are 3D representations of players. In the metaverse, users create customized avatars that can take on any physical characteristics and personalities they want. Your avatar can interact with other players, as well as with the platform.

·     Moving seamlessly between different components

Today we already have many of the different components that could make up a metaverse (like virtual shopping, games, casinos, and concerts), but we don't have a platform that brings these pieces together and allows us to move around the entire "world" seamlessly, with the same avatar.

·     Emergent user behaviour

Instead of being limited to a narrow range of functionality, the way you are in existing VR apps, players would be capable of doing virtually anything they want in the metaverse. For example, if two players are playing checkers together, they don’t necessarily have to finish the game in the metaverse. They can stand up and go for a hike with their virtual dog instead, then come back to the same place later in the day (or later in the week) to finish their game.

·     Mature tech that gives a great user experience

The right technology is a critical part of creating a great metaverse experience. Now we have high-quality virtual reality headsets, better computers, augmented reality, and faster networks that will continually improve and evolve to provide better metaverse experiences.

We also have ways to create digital twins – virtual models that are the exact counterparts of physical things like cars, buildings or bridges – and haptic technology, which creates an experience of touch or motion for the user.

·     Interoperability

Today, the digital world acts like a mall where every store uses its own currency, content, and ID cards.

In the metaverse, everything needs to be interoperable. Digital assets, content, and data need to carry over from area to area and activity to activity. If you obtain a car in Porsche's virtual store in the metaverse, you should be able to drive that car throughout the virtual world.

To our point of view, the challenge to realize the real metaverse is the development of hardware. Examples such as VR headsets, more than twice of the current resolution (1832×1920 per eye, roughly equivalent to 4K) is required to overcome pixilation. Technology breakthrough for other consumer-facing hardware as well as enterprise hardware (those used to operate or create virtual or AR-based environments) are also required to contribute to the coming to metaverse.

When the metaverse really comes, we might live in two parallel universes as two different characters, one physically and one virtually. In the virtual world, we will be able to choose to be another “me” or go to the most faraway places without having to leave the comfort of our room, we are more additive to the virtual world which is much bigger than the physical world we live currently. There will be much more possibilities there, change how we live and how we work.

Sounds unbelievable? Keep in mind, technology is changing the world at a pace which has not been seen before.

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