A deep-dive into metaverses

What is a metaverse and why is it so important in our modern digital world? The term metaverse was originally coined by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 book Snow Crash. Stephenson used the term to define a computer-generated universe. Such a universe is generally understood to be a highly immersive shared virtual world where people gather to play games, socialise, and work.

Since then, people had completely forgotten about metaverses – except perhaps for their occasional appearances in sci-fi movies like Ready Player One – until quite recently when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be renamed as Meta in an attempt to focus on virtual reality technologies and the creation of a metaverse. This step was criticized by the media and experts, who said that Facebook’s history of data breaches, privacy violations, spreading misinformation, and so on would prevent it from gaining customers’ trust. What makes Zuckerberg's plan particularly ambitious is that Facebook is already playing catch-up, following other Silicon Valley tycoons like Snap, which are one step ahead.

Despite Facebook’s difficulties, we truly believe that it has created a great social network, connecting us to one another. In light of the company’s monumental success in social media and vast user base, the chances of it creating an exciting metaverse seem pretty high.

Developments take place very quickly in the world of computing and while Facebook has just announced its new direction, there is already debate over whether the US or China will steal the march in dominating the AI field. Meanwhile NFT are spreading to the metaverse and you can now literally buy yourself an island in this virtual world – it would be the size of a basketball field and cost you more than $2 million though!

There is, however, another player that has already forged ahead and created an ideal metaverse that could entice us all: Microsoft, which in 2014 shrewdly purchased a small Swedish video game developer, Mojang Studios, and its main game title, Minecraft, for a hefty $2.5 billion. Minecraft currently connects 140 million active users in various predefined and user-generated worlds. It has also become a childrens’ education platform, helping young people around the world to learn mathematics, physics, chemistry, and even coding skills. In a sense, the true metaverse is already here, it is just a very square one made for kids.