Metaverse

A complex digital immersive environment accessed by people using avatars that react in real-time to the user's motion and expressions. People could use it for work, entertainment, social interaction or creative purposes.
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Technology Life Cycle

Technology Life Cycle

Growth

Marked by a rapid increase in technology adoption and market expansion. Innovations are refined, production costs decrease, and the technology gains widespread acceptance and use.

Technology Readiness Level (TRL)

Technology Readiness Level (TRL)

Prototype Demonstration

Prototype is fully demonstrated in operational environment.

Technology Diffusion

Technology Diffusion

Early Adopters

Embrace new technologies soon after Innovators. They often have significant influence within their social circles and help validate the practicality of innovations.

Metaverse

The metaverse is a term used to describe a hypothetical future iteration of the internet that would provide users with a fully immersive and interactive experience. It is envisioned as a shared virtual space where users can interact with each other through sophisticated avatars in real-time, using a convergence of technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and more.

The metaverse is expected to provide several benefits, including enhanced social interaction, improved collaboration, and increased creativity. For example, people could use the metaverse to attend virtual concerts, go on virtual shopping sprees, attend virtual conferences, and even conduct virtual business meetings. Additionally, it could provide a platform for new forms of entertainment, such as virtual sports and games, and a new medium for learning and training.

Several challenges need to be overcome to make the metaverse a reality, including the development of technologies that can handle the vast amounts of data required for real-time interactions, the creation of user-friendly interfaces, and the establishment of standards for interoperability and security. Additionally, there are concerns about the potential for the metaverse to exacerbate existing social and economic inequalities, worsen technology addiction and fatigue, as well as the potential for it to be used for malicious purposes, such as surveillance and even greater power concentration in the hands of big technology corporations.

Future Perspectives

The metaverse experience is expected to be highly immersive, with complex and realistic simulated inputs almost impossible to distinguish from the physical world. It could house human minds, purely digital beings, and visiting humans alike. At some point, it could be possible for a user to be permanently connected and inhabit this digital universe at all times, leaving the living-breathing body attached to a life-support system or detaching forever from the physical body and uploading their mind. Uploading one's mind permanently into a metaverse could be a way to avoid death or at least to perpetuate life while the physical body is deceased. First adopters for this feature could include people with severe disabilities.

The possibility of permanently inhabiting such an environment comes with several risks. A metaverse would still largely depend on private companies and servers to function, which means that all experiences and lives appended to this system would need to follow the terms and conditions set by these companies. Besides being susceptible to any privacy breach, digital beings could become homeless or even die, for instance, if the company hosting their world in a metaverse decides to discontinue its services.

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Sources
Advances in graphics and computing power have given rise to a renaissance in virtual technologies, offering people profound experiences via online personas. Will reality become a pale shadow of the imaginative worlds we've created? What do we risk losing?
Ready Player One has 436,409 ratings and 53,681 reviews. Kemper said: I originally gave this book 3 stars as harmless lightweight fun, but my opinion of ...
We are building a 1-to-1 map of almost unimaginable scope. When it's complete, our physical reality will merge with the digital universe.
As more brands start working on their metaverse strategy and entering the space, here are some examples of how several of them are experimenting with new types of products and business models.
What is the metaverse? It’s Philip Rosedale’s second crack at playing god—at least in the virtual sense. Rosedale created his first virtual world, Second Life, in 2002. Now, he and his new company, High Fidelity, are building another world in silica—and this time, they’re thinking on planetary scales.
So what happens when the world becomes a billboard, robots have spatial reasoning and virtual assistants own the relationship with the consumer? The metaverse is coming and it's a very big deal.
When Yorkie and Kelly visit San Junipero, a fun-loving beach town full of surf, sun and sex, their lives are changed.
The next version of the Internet is often described as the Metaverse, a term borne from science fiction, describing a shared, virtual space that’s persistently online and active, even without people logging in. It will have its own economy, complete with jobs, shopping areas and media to consume. The Metaverse is inevitable, many believe, and the Silicon Valley C-suite has been obsessed with the idea — as has a video game company in Cary, N.C.
Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One depicts a world centered around the ability to use virtual reality in people’s daily lives. Wade Watts, Cline’s main character goes to school within the world’s virtual reality server known as the OASIS. If I were in Wade’s situation I would definitely go to school in the OASIS rather than the standard way of schooling. The virtual education system offers a variety of opportunities for students like Wade who wouldn’t even be able to imagine such things if it weren’t for the OASIS.
Exhalation: Stories is a collection of short stories by American writer Ted Chiang. The book was initially released on May 7, 2019 by Alfred A. Knopf. This is Ted Chiang's second collection of short works, after the 2002 book Stories of Your Life and Others. Exhalation: Stories contains nine stories exploring such issues as humankind's place in the universe, the nature of humanity, bioethics, virtual reality, free will and determinism, time travel, and the uses of robotic forms of A.I.[1] Seven tales were initially published between 2005 and 2015; "Omphalos" and "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" are originals.[2][3]
Since my article on WebVR last month, I’ve gotten requests to better explain the concept of the Metaverse and why I’ve declared WebVR the undisputed missing link that will finally spark the next iteration of the Internet.
The metaverse is in its formative stages. How we can realize it, what it might look like and how we will define our digital selves.
The question what is reality has been studied and discussed for millennia. Despite of our attempts to understand reality through meditation, prayer, philosophy or science, there is still no clear answer. One thing’s for sure: We’re living in a Matrix of sorts. We take in over 400 billion bits of information per second, while our brains can only process up to 60 bits per second[01]. This basically means, there’s a lot more happening than we perceive. As Steven Kotler said in his talk on Engineering Super Humans, “So almost everything that we think of as reality, is not reality.”[02]
Experts are split about the likely evolution of a truly immersive “metaverse.” They expect that augmented- and mixed-reality enhancements will become more useful in people’s daily lives. Many worry that current online problems may be magnified if Web3 development is led by those who built today’s dominant web platforms.
NVIDIA Omniverse is a powerful, multi-GPU, real-time simulation and collaboration platform for 3D production pipelines based on Pixar's Universal Scene Description and NVIDIA RTX™.

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