What is the Metaverse?

Isn't Web 3 the Metaverse? No, it is not the same. People seem to use one for the other – but its quite different.

The metaverse is the next frontier in social connection. It is essentially a digital space which is the convergence of virtually enhanced reality (like a hologram or augmented reality like Pokemon Go), along with the related physical hardware to operate in this alternate dimension (eg. Oculus from Meta) – think of it like being inside The Matrix.

Connections in the metaverse are becoming more immersive and activities that we can do in the physical world are now being replicated or enhanced in the digital world (eg. attending concerts, playing multiplayer online role playing games like Warcraft, purchasing virtual real estate, building your own avatars, etc)

The word ‘metaverse’ first appeared in the 1992 sci-fi novel, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson which described the metaverse as a “computer-generated universe that his (Hiro’s) computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones”. Neal incidentally also popularized the word ‘avatar’, your identity in the metaverse.

The primary use cases are seen in social experiences (gaming,fitness and virtual concerts), education (evolving the classroom experience) and of course building commerce (virtual worlds, NFTs, other goods and services). The current gamut of metaverse as per Gartner, is shown below.

Many companies have been working on building their own vision and version of the metaverse, with inter-operability still in question. Though most people associate the metaverse with news in the gaming world (eg the recent ‘metaverse’ acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft and confusion around their vision for the HoloLens3), it’s much more than gaming! Meta, for instance has been working on their version of the metaverse for over 7 years, especially with the acquisition of Oculus in 2014. Sandbox (SAND) and Decentraland (MANA) are also two popular metaverses, where you can buy plots of virtual and build on them. The boom in NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and digital commerce also attributes to the growth of the metaverse.

So if this is the Metaverse, what is Web3? That's the topic for my next article. Follow me to make sure you don't miss out.