User:Larrypickle1234/Metaverse

The metaverse (a portmanteau of "meta-" and "universe") is the hypothesized next iteration of the internet, supporting decentralized, persistent online 3-D virtual environments. This virtual space will be accessible through virtual reality headsets, augmented reality glasses, smartphones, PCs, and game consoles. The metaverse has well-defined use cases within the video game, business, education, retail, and real-estate sectors. The largest limitation for wide-scale adoption of the metaverse comes from technological limitations with current devices and sensors needed to interact with real-time virtual environments. Numerous companies, such as Facebook and Microsoft, are investing in research in metaverse-related technologies to make it more cost effective and more widely available. Information privacy and user addiction are concerns within the metaverse, stemming from current challenges facing social media and video game industries as a whole.

Elements of the metaverse [Larry]
Elements of the metaverse include both physical and virtual worlds, a fully functioning economy, and transferability of avatars and digital assets across different parts of the metaverse. The metaverse will be decentralized, and there will be many companies and individuals that will operate their own spaces within the metaverse. Other qualities of the metaverse include digital persistence and synchronicity, meaning that all events in the metaverse occur in real-time with permanent effects. The metaverse ecosystem encompasses user-centric elements including avatar identity, content creation, virtual economy, social acceptability, presence, security and privacy, and trust and accountability.

Potential implementations [Brian]
There are many potential applications of the metaverse. An ideal metaverse would allow the user to do any experience or activity or address almost any of their needs from a single starting point, so in its completed state the metaverse could be applied to anything.

Within the business sector, the metaverse could be used for virtual office platforms, where users can virtually collaborate in a 3D space that emulates an office environment. Examples of this include Facebook’s Horizon Workrooms and Microsoft Mesh. This could further allow employees to work from anywhere virtually, reducing the need to live within cities.

Within the education sector, the metaverse could be used for immersive field trips anywhere and any point in history. Currently, NVIDIA is developing a metaverse infrastructure project called Omniverse that will allow developers around the world to collaborate in real time to build metaverse content creation software. Students could explore the historical heritage of ancient civilizations and architectures through this project. Together Labs Inc is also working on technology to create realistic avatars, which could reanimate historical figures using artificial intelligence.

The metaverse can be used in the real estate sector for fully immersive virtual home tours. Home buyers could potentially tour homes located anywhere in the world from their own home via the metaverse. There is also a new market for virtual real estate, in the form of NFTs. An example of this is ‘Mars House’, which is an NFT home that sold for $500,000.

Business owners will also be able to participate in the metaverse. They can offer virtual versions of their brick and mortar facilities, providing an upgraded online shopping experience. Customers could visit a virtual shopping mall and try out virtual 3-D items that are in scale with real-life sizes, which could reduce uncertainty in products when shopping online.

Technology [Jordan]
The metaverse infrastructure’s necessity for connectivity requires the use of a network of servers powered by computers. The internet serves as the first iteration of the metaverse. Access points for the metaverse include general-purpose computers and smartphones, in addition to augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and virtual reality (VR) technologies.

Currently, there are multiple companies investing in research in metaverse-related technologies. Facebook bought VR company Oculus in 2014, looking to build a new 3-D social space with “connective tissue” to bridge the gap between varying services. Snapchat has been developing AR technology that places complex custom avatars and filters over the real world in real-time.

A virtual environment is considered to be the most likely access point to the metaverse. The metaverse’s dependency on VR technology places limitations on its development and wide-scale adoption. Limitations stemming from the balance between cost and design include the lack of high quality graphics and a lack of mobility. Current lightweight wireless headsets lack image quality, which is optimized for bulky, wired VR goggle systems. Another issue for wide-scale adoption of the technology is the current cost, with the HTC Vive Pro 2 headset costing $799 USD plus controllers. Many high-end computers are incapable of powering VR machines. NVIDIA estimates that 99% of computers currently on the market are incapable of handling the software requirements for an adequate virtual reality experience.

More sophisticated sensors than currently available are needed to make AR and VR movements more precise and visual overlays more accurate with higher image quality; visual anchoring, movement tracking, and motion following all need to be handled at scale in order to support these improvements. The widespread adoption of VR largely hinges on sophisticated sensors with the ability to reliably measure depth while consuming little amounts of battery power, all in a portable and affordable model, which has not yet been efficiently produced at a large scale.

Technical standards
Common standards, interfaces, and communication protocols among virtual environments are in development. Collaborations and working groups are attempting to create standards and protocols to support interoperability between virtual environments, including:


 * Virtual Worlds—Standard for Systems Virtual Components Working Group (P1828), IEEE (2010–Present)
 * Information technology—Media context and control—Part 4: Virtual world object characteristics (ISO/IEC 23005-4:2011), ISO (2008–Present)
 * Immersive Education Technology Group (IETG), Media Grid (2008–Present)
 * Virtual World Region Agent Protocol (VWRAP), IETF (2009–2011)
 * The Metaverse Roadmap, Acceleration Studies Foundation (2006–2007)
 * The Open Source Metaverse Project, (2004–2008)

Timeline of notable developments

 * 1978 - MUDs and MOOs - multi-user virtual environments often based on a map of connected locations and described in text to the users who navigated through the environment and the puzzles with it.
 * 1993 – The Metaverse was a MOO (a text-based, low-bandwidth virtual reality system) operated by Steve Jackson Games as part of their BBS, Illuminati Online.
 * 1995 – Active Worlds, based entirely on Snow Crash, distributed virtual-reality worlds implementing at least the concept of the metaverse.
 * 2003 – Second Life was launched by Linden Lab. The stated goal of the project was to create a user-defined world like the metaverse in which people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate.
 * 2004 – X3D was approved by ISO as the successor to the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) as the open standard for interactive real-time 3D (web3D). Today X3D is the standard defining the 3D web and mixed reality open metaverse by combining virtual, mirror, and augmented realities with the web.
 * 2006 – Roblox was published.
 * 2018 – NeosVR Metaverse was launched by Solirax.
 * 2019 – Facebook Horizon was announced as a social VR world by Facebook.
 * 2020 – Decentraland launched as a decentralized virtual platform owned and operated by its users.
 * 2021 – Epic Games directs fundraising to build out Fortnite into a metaverse.
 * 2021 – Microsoft Mesh, a mixed reality software enabling virtual presence through Microsoft devices such as the HoloLens 2, was announced.
 * 2021 – South Korea announces the creation of a national metaverse alliance with the goal to build a unified national VR and AR platform.
 * 2021 - The parent company of the social network Facebook is renamed from "Facebook, Inc." to "Meta Platforms". Its chairman Mark Zuckerberg declares his company's commitment to developing a metaverse ecosystem. Various augmented and virtual reality concepts are presented, though much of the underlying technology remains in or has yet to enter development.

Concerns [Leslie]
Information privacy in the metaverse is an area of concern because the companies involved will likely collect users’ personal information through wearable devices and user interactions. Facebook is planning on persisting targeted advertising within the metaverse, raising further worries related to the spread of misinformation and loss of personal privacy.

User addiction is another concern for the development of the metaverse. Internet addiction disorder, social media, and video game addiction can have mental and physical repercussions over a prolonged period of time, such as depression, anxiety, and obesity. Experts are also concerned that the metaverse could be used as an ‘escape’ from reality.

The metaverse may magnify the polarization within society caused by media fragmentation and online echo chambers. Since the metaverse could algorithmically tailor virtual worlds based on each person’s beliefs, the metaverse may further distort users’ perceptions of reality with biased content to keep them engaged.

Snow Crash
The term metaverse was coined in Neal Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, where humans, as avatars, interact with each other and software agents, in a three-dimensional virtual space that uses the metaphor of the real world. Stephenson used the term to describe a virtual reality-based successor to the Internet.

Neal Stephenson's metaverse appears to its users as an urban environment developed along a 100-meter-wide road, called the Street, which spans the entire 65536 km (216 km) circumference of a featureless, black, perfectly spherical planet. The virtual real estate is owned by the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, a fictional part of the real Association for Computing Machinery, and is available to be bought and buildings developed thereupon.

Users of the metaverse access it through personal terminals that project a high-quality virtual reality display onto goggles worn by the user, or from grainy black and white public terminals in booths. The users experience it from a first-person perspective. Stephenson describes a sub-culture of people choosing to remain continuously connected to the metaverse; they are given the sobriquet "gargoyles" due to their grotesque appearance.

Within the metaverse, individual users appear as avatars of any form, with the sole restriction of height, "to prevent people from walking around a mile high". Transport within the metaverse is limited to analogs of reality by foot or vehicle, such as the monorail that runs the entire length of the Street, stopping at 256 Express Ports, located evenly at 256 km intervals, and Local Ports, one kilometer apart.

Ready Player One
Ready Player One is a 2011 science fiction novel by Ernest Cline, depicting a world gripped by an energy crisis and global warming in the year 2045, causing widespread social problems and economic stagnation. The primary escape for people is a metaverse called the OASIS, which is accessed with a VR headset and wired gloves. It functions both as an MMORPG and as a virtual society. A sequel entitled Ready Player Two was released in 2020.