What is the metaverse?
What is the metaverse?
The metaverse: Companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google see it as the future of the Internet. What was born as an idea from science fiction has long since become reality. The metaverse is more than just virtual reality, augmented reality, extended reality, or cyberspace - it’s all of those things at once.
Meaning of the word
At the moment, there’s not one unambiguous definition of the word. Rather, there are discussions about what the metaverse could be, what it’s not, what it should be, what it has to be, and what comes along with it.
Even though big tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), and Jen-Hsun Huang (Nvidia) are investing billions into it, the metaverse is still just a thought experiment. Nevertheless, it has a couple of distinguishing features that set it apart from the Internet and technologies like augmented reality, extended reality, and virtual reality.
Matthew Ball emphasizes that it’s not just an extension of the Internet but a completely new form of computing. In the metaverse, digital spaces don’t exist parallel to “reality” - instead, they are a fusion of cyberspace, virtual reality, and the physical world.
See John Coogan's vision on the metaverse. John Coogan writes about technology, marketing, ecommerce, productivity, and anything that can be hacked.
