Do we know which metaverse we are talking about?

To some extent, we already live in a meta­verse. Play­ers of League of Leg­ends or World of War­craft will tell you they have been trav­el­ling through vir­tu­al worlds for a long time – meet­ing, trad­ing, and hav­ing great adven­tures. Our cor­po­rate net­works can also be seen as meta­vers­es. We share con­tent, and have meet­ings on Teams, on Zoom; all in spaces that don’t phys­i­cal­ly exist. The same goes for our social networks.

What is the next step? And how far will this go? With the rebrand­ing of Face­book as Meta, many see the meta­verse as Mark Zucker­berg does: a vir­tu­al space that we will enter through vir­tu­al real­i­ty head­sets and con­trollers, such as Ocu­lus. It is pos­si­ble, and will very prob­a­bly become a real­i­ty for cer­tain pur­pos­es, for which this meta­verse will make a real difference.

We may think of train­ing spe­cial­ists in envi­ron­ments that are dif­fi­cult to access (off­shore plat­forms, nuclear pow­er sta­tions, etc.), or vis­it­ing muse­ums from a dis­tance where the han­dling of works of art and sci­en­tif­ic objects would be cap­ti­vat­ing. But it seems unlike­ly that the bil­lions of users of social net­works or smart­phones will con­vert to a hypo­thet­i­cal glob­al meta­verse. There are too many obsta­cles: pro­duc­tion, cost, and com­fort of head­sets; inter­op­er­abil­i­ty of plat­forms; and added val­ue com­pared to mobile inter­net, to which we are already accustomed.

Oth­er meta­vers­es are pos­si­ble on the devices we already have via the third per­son, as in Man­za­l­ab’s Teemew solu­tion – a cor­po­rate meta­verse spe­cial­is­ing in the world of busi­ness and train­ing. Or even in two dimen­sions, such as with the Gath­er­Town plat­form. It allows vir­tu­al events to be ani­mat­ed on a 2D map that can be con­fig­ured and is inspired by pix­el-art video games, with web­cams that pop up as soon as two par­tic­i­pants pass close by. Many of the func­tion­al­i­ties we need to inter­act remote­ly are already acces­si­ble on these small­er platforms.

This is the chal­lenge today: to find uses and pur­pos­es for which vir­tu­al real­i­ty will offer some­thing extra that will make it worth­while invest­ing in it. Pan­dem­ic lock­downs have pro­vid­ed us with plen­ty of them, but haven’t we already felt their lim­its and the need to see peo­ple in real life? And isn’t it vital­ly impor­tant to ask our­selves what the eco­log­i­cal and social costs of our meta­verse are? 

Beyond that? Is the Oasis of the Ready Play­er One book and film, a vir­tu­al world of refuge on a plan­et con­cerned about cli­mate change, with­in our reach? In addi­tion to see­ing and hear­ing through head­sets, this type of meta­verse requires that it speaks to our oth­er sens­es, in par­tic­u­lar with touch. While hap­tic (a phys­i­cal or mechan­i­cal tac­tile-kinaes­thet­ic sys­tem) and force feed­back tech­nolo­gies exist, there do not seem to be any plans for them to enter mar­kets in the near future. More­over, motion will remain a major tech­ni­cal hur­dle, often over­looked: how to feel motion with­out mov­ing or get­ting motion sickness.

And since we have just opened the doors to sci­ence fic­tion, let’s men­tion the ulti­mate meta­verse, the Matrix of which we would not even be aware… Some peo­ple think that we are already there. The accel­er­a­tion of com­put­er pow­er would mean that in the dis­tant future many sim­u­la­tions of our descen­dants’ past could exist. From then on, as Nick Bostrom has sug­gest­ed, the prob­a­bil­i­ty of liv­ing in the ‘orig­i­nal’ past would become ridicu­lous and we would log­i­cal­ly already be liv­ing in a metaverse.