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Until last week, nobody outside the tech industry had ever heard of metaverse. After the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, announced that the company is changing its name to "Meta", short for metaverse, it seems to be the place to be.

As the pandemic forced everyone to live and work and connect online, metaverse is the next logical evolution of the virtual meeting trends. If previously you only appear in a small window alongside with your meeting partners, metaverse allows for a more immersive experience. Instead of a flat screen showing who's who, metaverse is a virtual space with a room for exploration, where everyone can appear in the form of an avatar and do various activities.

"We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet," Zuckerberg said during the keynote. "We'll be able to feel present like we're right there with people no matter how far apart we are."

However, metaverse is not actually limited to the virtual world or space developed, managed, and owned by a specific individual or company. In its broadest sense, metaverse refers to the  entire spectrum of augmented reality. 

A brief history of metaverse

For those who were born in the 90s and had dabbled with Second Life, metaverse might be a familiar concept. Indeed, Facebook --now Meta-- is not the first company to develop metaverse.

The term "metaverse" itself was coined by American writer Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash (first published in 1992). Known for his speculative fiction, Stephenson used the term to describe "how a virtual reality-based internet might evolve in the future."
While metaverse requires sophisticated technology to truly implement, the first platform that tries to bring the concept to life, The Metaverse, was developed and launched in 1993 as an MOO (a text-based, low-bandwidth virtual reality system). In 1998, the use of avatars to represent users was introduced in Active Worlds, which also had its own currency, therebucks. 

In recent years, metaverse's latest manifestation might be more familiar to gamers. Roblox, an online game platform and game creation system that was first released in 2006, is now growing rapidly thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. It allows users, appearing as avatars, to develop their own game, try out others', and conduct transactions in its universe.
Fortnite,  an online video game developed by Epic Games and released in 2017, is now marketed as a metaverse where players can "watch a concert, build an island or fight." 
“It’s more than a game,” Matthew Weissinger, the vice president of marketing at Epic, said in May. “We’re building this thing called the metaverse — a social place.”

What's next?

Besides Facebook, other tech giants are also trying to pursue metaverse. Microsoft is developing metaverse, focusing on how it can improve remote meetings. Nvidia is reported to have an "Omniverse" project, which is described as  "virtual platform built for collaboration and real-time photorealistic simulation". Amazon and Disney are reportedly interested in investing in metaverse as well.

There's also Decentraland, a virtual world which uses cryptocurrency MANA, where individuals and corporations alike can buy plots of digital land. Apparently, where there's space, there will always be property. Virtual world is by no means an exception to this rule: metaverse is the place to be, so you might as well own a piece of it.

However, some questions remain for the development of metaverse: How can it represent the whole internet, and not just limited to a commercial space operated and owned by tech giants? How will people interact in the metaverse, as there has yet to be a single institution or rule that will govern behaviors and conduct? Seeing that Facebook (ahem, Meta) is pursuing metaverse development, will metaverse end up just like the social media network: a platform riddled with advertising, hate speech, and misinformation that threatens democracy around the globe?

For all of its promises, metaverse cannot escape from the physical world that we're living in today. In the internet lingo today, "meta" refers to self-awareness and self-referential quality. Let's just hope that metaverse and its developers have enough of this self-awareness quality that allows it to deliver an alternative or solution to our world, and not only blindly replicate it and all of its bugs.

What can FromLabs Offer?

Along with the rising trends of metaverse, FromLabs has also been creating and developing similar ideas of immersive virtual experience with Our3dSpace, which has been developed and used for more than 8 years. To optimize our own personal virtual space, Our3DSpace is determined to cover many aspects of virtual space including professional working space for office use, educational use for school and uni, event and conferences, and many other commercial uses. With Easy to custom avatar, items, spaces, and interiors, Our3DSpace enhanced the reality of telepresence.

In the long run, virtual space could be a solution to the efficiency of many professional lives including telework. With an integrated platform to provide easier access to communicate not just a display of members' team and chat but also as many-to-many video and voice conferencing with a presence of a customized avatar to increase the reality.

Both metaverse and Our3DSpace try to press down and minimize the barriers of on-screen interaction. With numerous innovations and integrations, the social interchange via network leads to another era of digital experience. Although a real presence face-to-face interaction of the human body can not be replaced with anything, and the global adjustment of using a telepresence will be a long marathon of alteration, the existence of virtual space could help evoke unlimaited possibilities of digital development for future generations.

For more virtual experience, visit our website on our3dspace and for more information contact us at info@fromlabs.com