Put on the game helmet, put on the physical device, or log into the game pod, let us leave the reality of all the bad things behind for a while, and enter the virtual world than the reality is bigger, more exciting and even more real. This is a setting that has been repeatedly described and taken for granted in science fiction novels such as Snow Crash, the movie Top Gun, and many of today's cyberpunk pop culture works, and is the future that human society is racing toward at full speed.
No, don't be so quick to deny it, but if you think about it, you'll see that we've been diving headfirst into the metaverse experiment long before our real-world tech overlords, Facebook, renamed themselves Meta and made a giant ad for the word "metaverse".
If we think of the metaverse as a giant social experiment, a series of science fiction works have provided repeated theoretical validation of virtual worlds, both from a natural science perspective and a social science perspective, and the theoretical phase has been completed; then, with the development and popularity of the Internet, some unprecedented non-linear game genres (such as "Second Life "or the more popular "My World" or Roblox) were constructed globally, we can call it the laboratory experimental phase of the meta-universe; then, there is the rise of Bitcoin and other digital currencies in the last decade, wearable physical devices, virtual reality (VR) and augmented The metaverse has already entered the first phase of clinical trials.
Since 2020, the world has been plunged into an epidemic of new coronaviruses, and community lockdowns and travel restrictions have contributed to the further popularity of online working, learning, and socializing, with people gradually experimenting with video conferencing and interactive collaboration sites to work and learn, watching shows and sports games through AR technology, participating in sports through physical games, and the beautiful scenes shown at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics. scenes, that was thanks to the real-time special effects system of the show based on artificial intelligence technology. So the metaverse is no longer a science fiction vision, it seems to be within reach.
Although it is too early to talk about the future direction of hard-core science fiction such as "decarbonization into silicon", "data immortality" or even "from 3D to 4D", it is still too big and advanced for us now. It is still too large and ahead of its time; but today's technology giants and investors wielding large sums of money are betting heavily on the meta-universe, and from this point of view, the meta-universe is the future we are most likely to enter. Understanding the metaverse, then, is a necessary subject for us in order not to be the one left behind by the times.
Digital Life
The so-called "business opportunities" around the concept of metaverse that have appeared more often in the news media are still largely in the superficial aspect of life, that is, providing people with unique identifiers and identities through various seemingly useless methods, thus completing the social process based on interest mapping. Simply put, it's about building a "self" and then presenting it to attract people like you.
This involves an important concept called "avatar". The concept first originated in Hinduism, referring to the present incarnation of the gods, and was first invoked by the game studio LucasArts in 1987 in the game Habitat, where the player's identity in the game was called "avatar"; later, science fiction writer Neal Stephenson used it in Snow Crash The word "avatar" officially entered the field of English literature and has been used, leading to many adaptations of the concept, such as the film "Avatar" directed by James Cameron. Beginning with Snow Crash, the word "avatar" gradually became the equivalent of self-description in the online world.
Appearance is the most intuitive setting of an avatar. In order to gain satisfaction or to better attract others, users of the metaverse spend time and money on seemingly meaningless physical adornment, just as they do in real life; we have learned this long ago with QQ Show and Kings of Glory skins.
The real world determines the looks of genes and medical cosmetic surgery, while the meta-universe to determine the face of the incarnation is the aesthetic and hands-on ability, and when too many people can not keep up with the aesthetic hands-on ability, face pinchers become a profession. In the domestic meta-universe app, Soul, a Gen Z social platform that builds relationships based on interest mapping, has developed a mature face pincher service. They will use the app's own face pinching system to adjust the face shape, features and color scheme according to the customer's needs, creating an avatar that represents the customer's mental outlook and emotional state. A certified face pincher is said to earn 40-50,000 yuan per month.
Similarly, Discord, widely regarded as the "native meta-universe platform," has developed an emoji pack customization service because emoji packs are very important props in user chats, and experienced designers will design a series of custom emoji packs based on customer needs, featuring either cartoonish animals or realistic characters. The price varies greatly, from a few dollars to several dozen dollars.
In Discord, people can create their own server and invite other users to join, which is more similar to a hobby club. Societies that discuss pop culture such as games are of course the most numerous, but there are also servers with a higher threshold for discussion, and their topic is NFT.
NFT refers to non-fungible token, which translates to non-homogenized token in Chinese, and has become a very popular thing since last year. Art collection is a mainstream manifestation of NFT, which is mainly related to the characteristics of NFT based on blockchain technology: unique, indivisible, easy to verify, and traceable, suitable for marking the ownership of specific assets, more perfectly suited to the needs of the art collection and buying and selling industry.
An NFT artwork could be anything: a scan of an authentic Tang Bohu painting, a tweet by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, a digital torch released by Alipay for the Asian Games, or a dunk video by NBA superstar LeBron James. The most famous NFT work comes from digital artist Beeple, who stitched together 5,000 digital works he had created and uploaded since May 1, 2007, into a 316MB JPG file, and then infused the image, which looks almost like a mosaic book, into an NFT coin named Every Day: The First 5,000 Days.
In March 2021, this NFT digital artwork fetched a high price of $69.34 million (about 450 million RMB) at Christie's, completely igniting the NFT art market.
But NFT is not only applicable to artwork, its characteristics are also naturally suitable for use as proof of identity. The French professional soccer club Paris Saint-Germain has issued its own NFT tokens, each token has a certain price, with which they select a portion of the fan base is particularly loyal "premium members", the token is the exclusive identity of the premium members, they can hold the coin in exchange for some minor operational power (such as They can exchange their tokens for minor operational privileges (such as the right to vote on team celebrations) and special benefits (video chat with the players). Along these lines, all clubs and private circles that need to set barriers to entry could introduce NFT, easily maintaining a niche identity in the metaverse era.
These business opportunities and attempts to exploit the metaverse may seem useless from a material pragmatic point of view, but they provide an anchor point for our incarnation in the virtual world and for us in the real world, a confirmation and emphasis of "who I am", so that from a psychological point of view, the act of speculating in the metaverse is not so unbelievable: we may not really need to live and sleep in the virtual world, but we still want a home. So from a psychological point of view, the act of speculating on land in a metaverse is not so incredible: we may not really need to live and sleep in a virtual world, but we still want a home.
Virtual worlds
If we just stop at these popular "business opportunities", the concept of metaverse still sounds like nothing to most of us, but at most an investment option for "speculation", like Bitcoin; or like the idol periphery of the entertainment industry, a product of the fan economy. The product of the fan economy.
However, the metaverse is bound to be relevant to us, the general public, and its ultimate goal is to digitize our identities (avatars), assets (bitcoins, NFTs, virtual space properties, etc.), and relationships as well.
The Internet has revolutionized the way we make friends over the past few decades, but maintaining a long-term relationship, whether it's a romance, a friendship or a partnership, still requires people to meet face-to-face offline to a great extent. The online experience of work, study, sports, relationships, and watching games and shows live is still far behind the offline experience.
Technology leaders have made a lot of efforts to do this.
Meta (the original facebook) has launched Infinite Office, a virtual office on their VR platform Meta Quest (formerly facebook Oculus), whose main function is to combine screens in virtual space with real-life peripherals, ultimately bringing the work product of the virtual world back to the real world. . According to early users, this virtual office is very "cool", you can build a huge office space in the virtual space, of course, you need to pair a good Bluetooth mouse and keyboard in the real world, but with Logitech's K830 Bluetooth keyboard, the keyboard position can be presented in the virtual world and be The entire operation is almost free of any inter-dimensional obstacles. The main application scenario of this virtual office is forced to work from home or travel, you can call up their own office environment in the virtual world without restrictions, to multiple large screen monitors, in a relatively independent and isolated space, in accordance with their original habits undisturbed work.
Meta is also launching Horizon Workrooms in September 2021, a VR software in which you can hold a virtual meeting where everyone's body language can be delivered in its entirety through wearable devices (although only the upper body is sufficient for the meeting), and you can connect your own computer to the virtual meeting room's blackboard, while other attendees can use their own hands of the controller on the blackboard to circle the content of the evaluation. In addition, Microsoft has recently been considering developing a VR version of its Microsoft Teams-based conferencing software.
In the education field, Carnegie Mellon University has launched a multimedia classroom of global languages and cultures built entirely in virtual space, where students are able to maneuver their avatars around the virtual classroom, listen to professors, watch instructional videos play on the screen, engage in group discussions with classmates, and so on, more realistically than teaching in a simple Zoom meeting format, and people communicate more smoothly with each other.
Digital people is a noteworthy term. Virtual idols from Hatsune Miku to Luo Tian Yi are already familiar names, and since last year, Alibaba has launched AYAYI as a digital human employee, Baidu has launched CCTV News AI sign language anchor, and Shang Mei Life has released "Shang Xiaomei", who will take on the role of an NPC in the new digital world.
Pan entertainment, the U.S. game company Epic Games invited a number of singers, including "A sister" Ariana Grande, in the "Fortnite" game performance; through the VR device 360-degree panoramic view of sports matches is not new, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics broadcast rights distribution even added VR VOD this item; Disney is also developing meta-universe, their ambition is to let people at home to experience Disneyland; and cultural tourism, Google Street View service was born 15 years ago, there are countless companies invested in this industry for VR and AR applications, without leaving home to visit the world has long been no dream.
Virtual reality interoperability
But the current virtual spaces are all still just downgraded versions of the real world, with the advantages of convenience, breaking the limits of physical space and looking really cool, but the disadvantages can be too many: too low resolution, too slow internet speed, lack of interactive details, etc. As a short-lived alternative to the epidemic, but to completely replace real life, it is too early. No, the goal of the metaverse is not to replace the real world, but to make the whole world a better place through a high degree of interoperability between the virtual and real worlds.
Digital twin technology is widely used in today's smart industry. By digitizing all the elements of the physical world, such as people, objects and events, and recreating a corresponding "virtual world" in cyberspace, the physical world in the physical dimension and the virtual world in the information dimension can coexist and blend reality and reality. From design, construction, commissioning to operation, the "digital twin" follows the whole life cycle of the pipeline and grows together.
You can think of the digital twin as a "sandbox" with a high degree of simulation, and its guidance for production, observation, renovation and maintenance is self-evident - perhaps one day all our experiments can be done in virtual space, without fear of accidental explosions Cause casualties, do not have to waste precious experimental materials, and even drug clinical experiments can also save a huge amount of time, money and save the health and lives of experimental animals.
In the field of sports, Intel's 3D Athlete Training (3DAT) technology has been implemented in the daily training of professional sports teams and athletes. In the two national teams of Chinese cross-country skiing and speed skating, there are already technical experts working with biomechanics experts and coaching teams to professionally collect every human body data and biomechanical model of athletes through this markerless and wearable 3D human motion capture technology. The three-dimensional data and biomechanical model of the athlete's body are collected by this technology, and the collected video data are intelligently analyzed and processed by computer vision and artificial intelligence algorithms, and added to the daily training of the athlete.
It is not hard to imagine that once this technology is developed, it can be widely used in sports and fitness, musical instrument playing, calligraphy, painting and many other learning training that currently still need teachers and coaches to guide by hand in order to regulate the movements.
All of these technologies have great room for development, even the game industry, which is currently running at the forefront of the meta-universe concept, has a great visionary goal. The current VR body game may be that we wear a VR glasses, hand-held controller, wielding a lightsaber in virtual space; but the future may be that we wear full body sensory equipment, using their own body data, relying on their own body sensing to movement or combat, which brings a sense of realism is really worth looking forward to the change.
The metaverse is not just VR or AR technology, not just digital currency, not just artificial intelligence or arithmetic revolution, it should be a compound of multiple technologies, a way forward, not an isolated technology product. Unlike cyberpunk sci-fi works like Snow Crash or Top Gun, we in the real world, looking ahead to the age of the meta-universe, are hoping not for a shot of anesthesia as we escape the real world, but for a better, safer, more efficient future.
Cyber Tower of Babel
So what can be done to avoid the horrible scenario of a "high-tech low-life society" and a virtual world monopolized by big capital, as repeatedly depicted in cyberpunk novels? At this stage of technological development, what stands between us and the metaverse is probably no longer natural science, but many sociological problems.
First, in the virtual world, do we still follow the same ethical concepts as we do now? One of the advantages of the metaverse era is that we are free to change our avatars, and the discrimination caused by differences in physical conditions such as race, gender, height, and size naturally disappears; but likewise, because we are free to change avatars, will many of the feelings of belonging based on physical commonalities also dissolve? Will people's "selves" and "boundaries" remain clear? Will we be lost in the virtual space?
In December 2021, during the beta testing of Meta's Horizon Worlds metaverse platform, a female beta tester reported that she had experienced sexual harassment in the virtual world - a stranger tried to "touch" her virtual character in the square. in the square. The feeling (of discomfort) was more intense than being harassed on the Internet," she wrote.
The incident sparked much controversy, with some arguing that it was certainly sexual harassment because the virtual touch felt real and caused discomfort to the victim, but many others arguing that it was not sexual harassment because it did not touch the real body.
The popularity of this view reflects the lowering of people's moral threshold in virtual space, so what if it is a move to kill someone in the meta-universe, or even maliciously harm the other person's avatar without somatic feedback? It is difficult for the existing moral system to make a judgment on this, and a world where reality is combined with reality requires a new era of morality.
Another issue is privacy and data security. The amount and richness of personal data collected by the metaverse will be unprecedented, including personal physiological reactions, movements, and perhaps even brainwave data. Who will safeguard this data from misuse or theft, and in some extreme case, in an era of highly developed virtual worlds, if the data of a particular individual or group of individuals is lost, did they ever even exist? Like that old philosophical proposition, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound?"
The meta-universe is not just VR or AR technology, not just digital currency, not just artificial intelligence or arithmetic revolution, it should be a composite of multiple technologies, a way forward, not an isolated technology product.
Most importantly, the goal of the metaverse is the largest platform in history, large enough to accommodate the world's 7.9 billion people and uncountable digital people, and you can hardly imagine it will be driven by a single force to run. In the current vision, most metaverse-related practitioners seem to tacitly agree that it will consist of countless smaller metaversees connected together like a giant web. This is precisely why blockchain technology is a natural fit for a metaverse that is unique, immutable, traceable and decentralized, with no one able to tamper with its data, just like our real life.
Among the several metaverse platforms that have emerged, the game platform Roblox is perhaps the most famous, with 43.2 million daily users and over 200 million monthly users, with an average age of no more than 15 years old; while the hottest ones in the wave of metaverse speculation from the end of last year to the beginning of this year are Sandbox, Decentraland, Cryptovoxels and Somnium, these four platforms have a total of 268,645 virtual land or virtual properties of various sizes and locations for sale, and sales have exceeded $500 million; they do not have as many users as Roblox, but seem to be more favored by large and established capital institutions; as for technology giants like Meta, Google, Apple and Microsoft are launching or will soon launch the meta-universe platforms, they don't even come close to ranking in this competition.
So the big question arises: who can connect these platforms together? Although everyone is based on the technology developed by blockchain, there is not yet a unified standard among the metaverse platforms, and who will set this standard and how many platforms can be called to join is the key to whether we can actually achieve the ultimate interconnection of metaverse. After all, 20 years have passed, the game console platform is still not interoperable, cell phone charging and data transmission methods are still several camps, even MacOS and Windows can not be seamlessly connected yet, human technology may have developed, but the Tower of Babel is not so easy to establish.
The road is long, but the picture of the future is already unfolding. If one day, humans will finally solve these problems, we will not hesitate to walk into that meta-universe era.
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