We have a new trend in Silicon Valley: the metaverse . Behind this enigmatic and bombastic name, there is the idea that large companies like Facebook have to expand not only the possibilities offered by the internet, but also to expand its scope and mix it in the most homogeneous way possible with our daily lives outside the screens.
For Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, the future of the company has to go beyond its current business of developing social platforms. For this reason, Facebook will strive to build an interconnected set of virtual experiences that seem taken from science fiction novels or movies . A kind of parallel world that he calls metaverse.
Zuckerberg defines it as a virtual environment where you can feel present with other people in digital spaces. It is a new way of surfing the Internet by immersing yourself in it, instead of just watching it through a screen. “We believe that it will be the successor to the internet on mobile phones,” the CEO of Facebook assured the company's shareholders last July.
The origins of the metaverse and change looming paradigm
The term metaverse was first used in 1992 by science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash. In it, human beings, represented by digital avatars, interacted within a three-dimensional space. It was accessed through expensive virtual reality glasses or through public booths, which only offered a blurry black and white representation.
Movies like The Matrix and Inception, novels like Ready Player One and superhero comics or video games like World of Warcraft are several examples of the many cultural references that we can find about alternate or parallel realities. It is a concept widely explored in fiction. And now, is close to being tangible if we stick to the advances and promises of large corporations.
It is not difficult to imagine that we can emulate the characters from the novel Ready Player One by putting on virtual reality glasses like the Oculus, which Facebook sells, to enter a parallel universe where the notion of the sensible world (that of physical objects, which is accessed through the senses) and the virtual are blurred in a singular consumer experience. We are promised to enjoy every experience that the Internet offers us today, but in a more natural and immersive way . In the metaverse, watching a chapter of your favorite Netflix series will be quite similar – that's the goal at least – to going to the movies with your friends.
Obviously, within the universe from Facebook —or from any other trademark universe—, everything will be done by Facebook , by its partners or by the different companies that disburse x amount for being there to sell their own virtual goods or exhibit your brand in the different advertising spaces that are there.
The consumer could take a walk along an avenue designed by Facebook, observe the windows of the stores that Facebook decides to open or go to play a game of bowling or virtual pool programmed by the engineers from the American company. After all, breaking down the barriers between the sensitive and the virtual is a great opportunity to open more business avenues now that the mobile market and the development of the internet as we know it have It has now reached maturity.
Because the question that has been asked in meetings within the most powerful and capable companies in the world is clearly this: what will come after the smartphone ?
Industry has constantly shifted its center of gravity every ten to fifteen years : first mainframes, then personal computers, then the web , and, now, smartphones. Facebook believes that the next thing is the metaverse, although at the moment its first proposals seem limited by the hardware – years of research and advances in refresh rate, cost and miniaturization of chips and screens remain – and by human ingenuity.
«We have virtual reality (VR) devices that are suitable for video games and some very specific cases in the industry and there is hope that both hardware and software can advance until they are universally adopted, but it is not yet clear that following the hardware roadmap is all that is necessary for this to happen, or if VR needs a fundamental change to be something deeper and broader than a branch within the video game industry ”, writes analyst Benedict Evans.
«Augmented reality glasses, on the other hand, are situated on the frontier of science fiction: Can we create optics that look like a pair of ordinary glasses and that at the same time show digital elements clearly within the world that we perceive with the eyes with a field of vision as close to the human eye as possible? And if it is achieved, as in the case of VR, which would be something almost magical, what use would it be for? Thinking about these advances is like watching a multitouch technology demo in 2005; it clearly seems like something useful, but it's hard to imagine why. ”
Not only does Facebook flirt with the metaverse
Photo by Billetto Editorial en Unsplash
At the moment, Facebook presented in mid-August Horizon Workrooms , a trial version application in which users of the Oculus Quest 2 VR glasses can host and participate in work meetings within a virtual office through a digital and three-dimensional representation of themselves. This application is a clear response to the challenges still posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced the closure of most offices around the world.
Quest 2 en a great consumer device, but it lacks a really useful and interesting app beyond video games . And video games are not the universal and revolutionary experience needed by a company whose revenue depends primarily on advertising. This test seems to be just that: testing technology on a larger scale to introduce improvements in software and hardware. Who is dying to substitute a Zoom call for a virtual reality call wearing for an hour some – still heavy and intrusive – glasses?
More interesting is the proposal of Epic Games, creators of Fortnite, which raised $ 1 billion in a round of financing in April to carry out its proposal for interconnected virtual worlds. The video game has been constantly evolving since 2017 to become the social phenomenon that it is today for millions of young people around the world . Players can cooperate with others and attend special events that go beyond the limits of the games that can be played in it as concerts performed by the most famous artists of the moment, such as Ariana Grande, who made a live virtual tour within the video game a few weeks ago.
If there is any company that is prepared to profit from the metaverse, that is the creator of Fortnite, whose video game generates millions of dollars in sales of digital goods that personalize the experience of their players such as costumes or dances . Epic Games also has its own video game sales platform, and since its inception it has been able to constantly collaborate with companies like Disney that expand and complement its “universe.”
In Korea del Sur, the most important companies in the country's technology sector have formed an alliance for the development of technology and applications related to the metaverse with the support of the government.
¿ Do we really want to live in a virtual world?
The evolution of technology linked to the Internet was always linked to narrowing the distances that separate people, to the dissemination of ideas and to elevate the individual as a member not only of his community, but of something greater. Internet always had a social component , although now that it gravitates on social networks, it seems less and less evident.
«I think that the social, When it comes to connecting people, it is almost always a positive thing. But what we call social today has nothing social about it; it is just a matter of consuming an endless series of content selected and suggested by an algorithm so that ads can be inserted into them. Facebook didn't come up with this idea in mind, and neither did Twitter, “says John Hanke, director of Niantic, the studio responsible for the Pokémon Go mobile phone video game. We cannot argue with the great benefits of the Internet and technology, but in recent years their misuse is “dividing society by pushing individuals through algorithms into information bubbles that reinforce the most extreme views.”
This bombardment of information —selected by an algorithm to keep your attention and that you observe more advertising—, increasingly banal, ephemeral and striking to attract the attention of the Internet user, together with the tendency of being human to feel part of something, they have transformed the largest space for free and plural dialogue, the Internet, into a clear set of tribes.
The tribe converts erroneous statements into acceptable; affirmations that, expounded by an individual without the endorsement of the tribe, would cause him to be classified as crazy or profoundly ignorant. But the tribe is capable of protecting and expanding any thought, even if it lacks scientific rigor.
What is Twitter if not tribes fighting each other? The problem is that they are becoming more and more powerful, and the word is no longer a means of understanding, but a combat weapon with increasingly serious consequences for society. Going from watching the Internet from the mobile screen to “immersing ourselves” inside it using virtual reality glasses will allow us to be more sociable?
Manuela Battaglini, expert in ethics digital, published a tweet, which I think is relevant when analyzing the implications of these possible metaverses, in which he says that the first question when developing a new technology should be in what kind of world do we want to live. Do we want to live in Zuckerberg's universe? Because perhaps, without realizing it, we are entering as a society in a world where we don't really want to live. Would anyone have found it ideal in the nineties that almost all of the content uploaded to the Internet depended on no more than a dozen companies?
The superposition of different «universes »Virtual within our physical world may, far from broadening our horizons and humanizing the social interactions that we carry out every day through the Internet, enclose us even more if possible. If we already miss what happens in front of us when we look down at the phone screen, what will happen when all we see is a phone screen? I fear that we can enter voluntarily, and perhaps without being aware of it, in a situation similar to the allegory of the cave described by Plato in Republic, Lib. VII to explain the existence of the sensible and the intelligible world (the world of knowledge that is accessed through reason and not the deceptive senses).
Perhaps, the different virtual universes that could come to life in the future turn out to be little more than a cavern in which nothing but shadows are observed; a cave where the consumer is promised to enjoy endless possibilities and unparalleled entertainment where the first requirement is that you cover your eyes; a universe where the sun is trademarked; a universe where, inevitably, you will end up being watched.
