Written by: Shreebisha Shrestha - 23040, Grade XI
Posted on: 04 February, 2022
If you could join a new world that provides you with a new face, a new personality, a new environment, and finally do things you could never achieve here on Earth. Would you want to only live in it? Welcome to the metaverse! Right now many people are confused about Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp changing its name to meta. So exactly why they did it and what is metaverse? The simplest way to visualize the metaverse is to think about yourself as a character in a video game, you can take on a new face and a new personality, interact with your own friends and family as fellow characters, and do a bunch of stuff that you could never achieve in real life.
We've progressed from desktop to phones, from text to videos, but this isn't the end, the next platform and medium will be an even more fascinating and embodied internet where you're immersed in the experience, which we call the metaverse. We will be able to do nearly everything we can imagine like getting together with friends and family, work, study, play, shop, and create whole new things which are beyond how we now think about computers or phones.
Everything you do in the metaverse can be considered valid in reality. And I know it might sound quite overwhelming to some people, let me explain how your life could level up in the future. For beginners, long-distance relationships will no longer exist.
Because we will experience the closest things to teleportation. The partner you miss so badly, your remote coworkers, friends you’ve never seen since last year can now be present in the same room as you and it will all feel real as if they’re right there beside you. You'll be able to attend both real and Metaverse concerts together, visit fascinating tourist sports built by virtual creators, and even play games and sports with anybody in the world by just wearing a VR headset and a haptic suit.
Everything we do online now, whether it's socializing, playing games, or working, will be more natural and realistic. This isn’t about spending more time on screens. It's about making the time we already spend more productive. Screens just cannot capture the entire range of human emotion and connection. They can’t deliver the deep feeling of presence, but the next version of the internet can. That's what we should be working towards technology that builds around people, and how we actually experience the world and interact with each other. That’s what the metaverse is all about. Metaverse will be a part of our lives in the same exact way. Mark Zuckerberg knows it very well, and that is why Facebook is now known as Meta.
In the metaverse, everyone starts from zero. In the same way, a regular person can tweet to a celebrity online, anyone can meet up with a Hollywood star in that virtual world. And their avatars can share meaningful experiences together. After all, the metaverse is meant to be its own world. You also have the right to own the things you see there. From the very outfit your avatar is wearing, the title to the virtual land you’re spending time in, down to the digital art that people now call NFTs. And as we’re on business and money, just imagine shopping in a virtual mall. Unlike on shopping apps where you just judge from the screen, here you will get to pick up the actual product from the brand’s Metaverse stores, feel it with your hands and literally add it to your digital cart. Just imagine disabled people can just log onto the metaverse and finally perform things they have never physically done before. Architects can create the most beautiful metaverse structures without attempting to follow structural physics laws. From their homes, students can attend virtual campuses and interact with classmates from across the world.
Today’s kids will work in metaverse-focused jobs. The same way we right now work in social media. Of course, as we get excited about all of this, we cannot deny valid questions such as. How will this virtual world affect our health? And most importantly, what if people want to only live in it, to actually leave the real world? Only time will answer these questions. But as we move closer to the future era of living with the Metaverse, I hope we use it to make us feel more connected and not disconnected from reality.
