How Facebook’s metaverse could change your life

If we talk about the time when internet was still a novelty accessed through a slow dial-up modem that was used to tie up the landline phone you once relied on for the purpose of communicating. Fifteen years ago, Facebook was just opening its social network to anyone who was either 13 y/o or older, and now talking of 10 years ago it was still just a private tech startup which was on the verge of an IPO.

Now Facebook is one of the world’s most valuable and influential companies, with three of the biggest social media apps — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — which are used by billions of people, and one of the world’s most controversial and socially disruptive businesses.

Facebook also has a brand new name, Meta, and a new focus: the metaverse. Now, what is the metaverse? Will it be, in the upcoming 10 years, as important a part of your life as the internet or the social media? And if yes, would that be a good thing?

Firstly you should get accustomed with the term ‘metaverse’ The metaverse is an immersive internet experience that lets you replace or increase the reality with computerized simulations that strive to be as realistic as is possible. “Essentially talking, it’s a world of endless, interconnected virtual communities where people are able to and can meet, work, and play, using virtual reality headsets, smartphones, augmented reality glasses, or any other devices,” The Associated Press reports. They can also shop.

Meta is used to describe the metaverse as “the next evolution of the social connection,” 3D spaces where you can “socialize, learn, collaborate and play in ways that go way beyond what we can imagine.” CEO Mark Zuckerberg had displayed some examples in his two-hour presentation to unveil and unravel the Meta rebrand and Facebook’s new focus, which CNET has sliced down to barely 10 minutes.

Did Facebook invent the metaverse? No, the name has been taken from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction classic Snow Crash, but the idea is even older than that. Stephenson’s “vision of the metaverse owed a debt to Vernor Vinge’s 1981 True Names and also to a series of William Gibson novels from the 1980s,” Amherst professor Ethan Zuckerman, who had created his own kludgy metaverse in the year 1995, writes in The Atlantic. “Both of those authors owed a huge debt to Morton Heilig’s 1962 Sensorama machine, and on and on we keep going, back in time to Plato’s shadows on a cave wall.”

When did Facebook get involved in this? Facebook bought the Oculus in the year 2014 just for $2 billion. At that time, Zuckerberg had predicted that Facebook would become a metaverse company where people could share “not just the moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and the adventures.”

So this isn’t merely an attempt to distract everyone from the Facebook’s litany of scandals? Not entirely. But, the critics say the timing isn’t coincidental. “If you don’t like the conversation, you try to change the conversation,” Frances Haugen, a product managet at Facebook who turned prominent whistleblower, tells the AP. Haugen’s purloined documents have formed the backbone of damning new revelations in the papers at Facebook.

What will we do in the metaverse? Currently, Mark Zuckerberg is saying, Meta is focusing on creating the virtual office spaces where people working from home can gather with everyone as if they are in person, plus the virtual homes people can design and host real friends for the metaverse games and activities. You will also be able to attend concerts, or travel to distant cities and natural wonders, and, of course, shop for the virtual clothes and goods that will exist in our virtual worlds. Theoretically speaking, once the technology is good enough, the possibilities are as broad as our imaginations, they are limitless and boundless.

“It will make our world feel like Harry Potter,” Louis Rosenberg, the CEO of Unanimous AI and a veteran augmented reality (AR) developer, tells the Insider. Magic is fun, but just like the Wizarding World, there is a dark side to it. “Instead of us just kind of being in our own information bubbles, we are going to be segmented into our own custom realities,” Rosenberg has said.

Is that a bad thing? Well, the metaverse, as envisioned in the Snow Crash, “was a thing that people used to numb themselves when their lives had become horrible” in the Stephenson’s dystopia, Haugen told AP. “So beyond the fact that these immersive environments are immensely addictive and they encourage a lot of people to unplug from the reality we actually live,” she also added, “I’m also worried about it on the level of — the metaverse will require us to put many more sensors in our homes and into our workplaces,” opening people to so much more data harvesting.

“People should be worried,” Shawn Frayne, the CEO of holographic tech startup Looking Glass Factory, tells the Insider. “If you think that Facebook on your phone has been bad for the democracy, think about your entire field of view controlled by a company just like that.” Allowing and enabling people to literally walk through the world in a reality created by Facebook and the people it sells your data to would open a great new and dangerous vectors of misinformation and silo people even further in their ideological bunkers, experts told the Insider.

And while Meta is trying to draw the consumers into the metaverse with the promise of making their fantasies come (virtually) true, other companies, like Magic Leap and Microsoft, are more quietly focusing their Audio reality efforts on the industrial applications like the design, manufacturing, and advertising.

When will the metaverse be hitting the mainstream? Virtual reality has been the next big thing for so many years. And the most safe prognosis is that we are much closer to it than we were in the early 1990s.

That is it for this blog guys! Thank you so much for reading this blog!!

I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day!!