MetaWhat? Get to know it with 5 words.

As the pandemic got into our life, work and social spaces, the average people spent 7 hours a day online last year. And many of us developed Zoom or Teams fatigue. We have used video calling platforms to celebrate birthdays and met all family or friend members during the pandemic. Maybe we still use it for that. Even our oldest family members made video calls during the pandemic.

On the flip side, during this period, we lived the limits of the abilities of the most cutting-edge technology to connect us. We rolled up our sleeves to experience more advanced technologies as soon as possible. Today’s virtual assistants, photo-based social apps, video filters are shaping the way we engage with the world and each other.

Okay! What the next stage of the Internet will look like, and who will control it?

Todays, everyone is talking about the “metaverse”. Facebook has changed its name to Meta and declared the metaverse to be the future of the internet. Suddenly metaverse has become the biggest buzzword in tech.

According to some, it is said to be the inevitable future of the internet. So what, exactly, is the metaverse?

“The metaverse is the internet evolving into a creative space for anyone who wants to craft experiences.”

The term doesn’t refer to any type of technology. It is a broad shift in how we interact with technology. It also changes to a digital economy, where users can create, buy, and sell goods.

If the word is new to you, here are the 5 words in its world that you need to know before the “metaverse”. Also it may help to understand of the “metaverse”.

Virtual Reality

Yes, if you want to mention the “metaverse” you must first accept the virtual things.

Because this world is 3D. VR enables three dimension of things using of computer modeling and simulations. So in this 3D world, we walk around as an avatar, interacting with other avatars, we can buy and sell virtual stuff, go to work, form communities, get educations, play games, perform all social activites. The metaverse is to allow a greater change of our digital and physical lives in experience, socialization, productivity, shopping and entertainment.

It is said that we will experience this with virtual glasses and wearable technologies. Virtual glasses will be more meaningful to live this world with increasing 3D environments. Big companies continue to invest heavily in hardware .

Some of those:

• Facebook Oculus
• Microsoft Lens
• Playstation VR
• Amazon Eco Frames
• Apple
• Rayban

But if you think that the metaverse is like playing video games, you’re wrong. The gaming companies have already created their own thriving virtual worlds. Gamers might already be living in it so it will be the first in the metaverse world. But games are an obvious starting point, if you take the broader Web3.0 view, the metaverse is about much more.

The Future Of The Web (Web 3.0)

Metaverse is an advanced version of the Internet. So to truly understand how the metaverse might become real, we have to go back to see how technology has evolved over the last decades.

Web 1.0 (1989–2005): The World Wide Web allowed people to connect to the internet through a web browser. It allowed people to obtain information from the Internet. Turned out millions of different websites with increasing informations. But Web 1.0 didn’t have algorithms to find the web pages. So it has become difficult to access the right information quickly. It also was an information sharing platform where there was a completely centralized structure and data entry was provided from this central structure.

Web 2.0 (2005-present): With the developing technologies, web 2.0 entered our lives. So, it brought on user-generated content in our life. In this way, we were able to enter the digital life individually by producing our own content and using social media. Today, we largely interact through apps that we download to our smartphones. The web 2.0 changed everything from finding information to the way we communicate. This development of the web has made the internet much more interactive.

Web 3.0: The next step is the web 3.0, which will allow us to do more in the digital world, with developing technologies such as AR, VR, AI and IOT. In this way, content creation and decision-making processes will be completely independent from the central structure. It will realized by both humans and machines. So a peer to peer relationship will be established in the internet.

Metaverse is tied to the development of Web3.0, which will be the next chapter of the internet’s existence. The web 3.0 is the technology that will form the infrastructure of this world. In addition of course the 5G. Because being able to switch from 2D to 3D, to be able to use the digital economy and to provide all these on the internet with machines without interruption depends on a more advanced and decentralized structure.

Decentralization

Decentralization refers to the transfer of control and decision-making from a centralized entity (individual, organization, or group thereof) to a distributed network.

The idea of decentralization is at the heart of blockchain that also forms the infrastructure of cryptocurrencies.

Todays, decentralized is a world that we enter a little bit with cryptocurrencies. Especially with metaverse we will use cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to buy and sell things inside the metaverses.

The metaverse will rely on our user-generated content like our digital creations and personal stories.

Right now, our data is owned by companies and platforms. This means for content creators, they lose control over the things they produce, and surrendering potentially huge amounts of money to the centralized companies that host their work.

It is said that in a decentralized ecosystem, creators and users will have more power and control, more revenue channels and more money.

Also it is said that it would allow for greater privacy and security as well as provide opportunities for users to own their own data.

DApps

With the use of the decentralized web, the decentralized apps will take their place in our lives.

Todays, in the world of mobile phones, we have to enter and exit from one app to another. But thanks to dApps in the metaverse world, we will do our work just like walk around in a universe and establish interactive relationships with each other.

Concept Of The Virtual World And The Real World

Actually, the metaverse refers to a variety of virtual experiences, environments and assets. But there is no mention of the end of real world. An uninterrupted experience which the real world and the virtual world are interconnected. I see that like an “omnichannel life.” While we continue to do our work in the real world, we will be able to attend our favorite Arctic Monkeys concert virtually in the evening. Thus, we will blend the experiences. By the way, it is an excellent opportunity for brands in terms of customer experience and diversity of channel that information gathering from customers.

People connect with you in the real and virtual as being “digital twins”.

Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist and prolific essayist, describes the metaverse not as a virtual world or a space, but as “a sort of successor state to the mobile internet.” Web 2.0 has included smartphones in our lives. This makes possible to be mobile and always be online. Web 3.0 will also allow us to be more in this world by incorporating metaversal stuffs in this way.

In fact, most of the things we talk about Metaverse are just conjectures for now. Because we don’t yet have a technological infrastructure that can fully create the Metaverse universe. We still have a ways to go.

On the other hand, we have been actively using the components of Metaverse such as AR / VR technologies, MMO games, NFT based artworks and blockchain applications separately from each other for a while. For this reason, we can speculate about what the Metaverse will look like when all these components come together.

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