By Jordan McDonald
55 comms Social Media Coordinator
Facebook is leading the way to the future of social media with their recent ‘Facebook Metaverse’ announcement.
It’s a little-known concept so I’ll break it down. If you’ve read Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash or familiar with the novel and movie Ready Player One, the concept will sound familiar.
What is a ‘metaverse’?
It’s a virtual environment which brings together the real world and digital world. Rather than just looking at social media to use it, you will be able put yourself inside a social media ‘world’ as an avatar, alongside your friends.
Inside the virtual world, you’ll be able to do things like meet up with friends, play games, attend concerts or visit various spaces created in the world.
Scott Stein at CNET explains this really nicely: “Metaverses are perhaps the clearest admission yet that the future of tech doesn't lie just in virtual reality or augmented reality, but in a mix of many devices accessing a shared online world, which may be more immersive and 3D than the internet you're currently using to read this story.”
The metaverse has caused a lot of confusion online with most wanting help differentiating the metaverse and virtual and augmented reality. Here’s a guide:
· Virtual Reality (VR): a fully immersive computer-simulated environment that gives you the feeling of being in that environment instead of the real world.
· Virtual Reality (VR):
· Augmented Reality (AR): is when digital information and filters are overlayed onto the real world. You can experience AR through various apps on your mobile, the most common being Snapchat or Instagram filters.
What Facebook plans to do with metaverse is incorporate those VR and AR elements and create a ‘social sphere’ which becomes part of your social interactions day-to-day. Imagine going shopping with your best friend at a virtual clothing retailer, but once you make that purchase in the metaverse it actually ships to your address the next day.
Moving towards socialising and working in a metaverse isn’t something we are too far away from. In the last 18 months we’ve all carved out a virtual existence of some sort. Covid has forced us to go digital in order to work. Zoom is a big one – most of you would’ve experienced numerous Zoom meetings during lockdowns. The app Clubhouse has also made us more comfortable connecting with new people digitally.
It’s a remarkable concept which we’ll continue to understand the more it develops. I’m personally really curious about the idea much further into the future.
Some existing forms of a metaverse already exist in some games and whole economies have been formed in these spaces over time.
Could Facebook’s metaverse create a whole new economy for the real world? We’ll have to wait and see.
Mark Zuckerberg has a team working on the project as we speak and says over the next five years he hopes Facebook will be move from being a social media company to a metaverse company.