There is a significant change happening in the world, and this change is happening digitally. This change is going to determine our lives in the future. It will be our medium of connection and communication, and to some degree, it’s going to be our lives. The exciting part of it all is that it’s inside a video game.
When the internet and the digital world were created, people started to theorize about a world they could live in. The term for that was “metaverse,” and it was a complicated structure that can’t be defined in the mere use of words.
The metaverse is a virtual reality (VR), where various virtual worlds exist, and people can live inside those worlds. When someone connects to the metaverse, their experience feels accurate enough to replace real life. Now, we know what you’re thinking. We’ve all thought about it before. The metaverse seems like a dystopian future where people can’t identify reality. However, the metaverse we are building is far from that.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta
Mark Zuckerberg’s purpose for creating a metaverse through Facebook and other social media apps is to help people connect even better. Sure, we can connect using the internet, have a Zoom video call meeting, and it’ll genuinely feel like we’re talking to each other as if it were real life. But it lacks its physical aspect: the feeling of being in the same room as our friends and loved ones.
Through VR and augmented reality (AR) tech, Zuckerberg plans to create Meta. A world where we can live our lives, but digitally. It’s a place where people connect as if they are in the real world. It’s a place where people can create and start businesses, purchase plots of land, and more. Zuckerberg has already invested over $10 billion of his own money to start this world. However, if you’re interested in feeling the metaverse as early as now, you don’t have to wait for Meta. There are already metaverse platforms that exist out there.
Decentraland
Decentraland is considered to be one of the top metaverse platforms right now. It’s an online platform where people can communicate and connect using virtual reality. It’s advertised to be the first world owned by its players. The advertisement is not far from reality since players can purchase various things in the game using cryptocurrency and use it as they see fit.
One of the things that players can purchase in Decentraland is properties. Some properties are now costing players about $13,000 to buy. That’s insane if you think about it. The land prices in a virtual world are almost reaching those from real life. Furthermore, there is an actual marketplace that’s backing this. Once you’ve purchased your land, you can build nearly anything on top of it.
You can choose to build a mansion, a club, or even a restaurant. Players can then visit your property and enjoy your amenities there while praising you for your investment. Also, other players can choose to purchase your property. You can then sell it for a profit and invest in another one.
It’s an interesting look into what the metaverse could be. However, Decentraland is just a peek into it, and we don’t expect that it’ll be more than just a virtual life simulator.
So Can the Metaverse Exist?
Yes, the metaverse can exist, and it’s existing right now. However, none of them are similar to the one we envisioned: a world we can immerse in as if it were real life.
Such a reality seems to be pretty far away, and it’s plagued by problems such as performance issues. Furthermore, if you want to play some of these metaverse platforms, you’re going to need a decent gaming PC or laptop. So you already need to spend on that while also purchasing and investing money into the virtual world. The high cost of entry is just not accessible for everybody.
Another major problem is if people are willing to invest their time and lives in a fictional world. There is still a great divide between people who’d like to live in a digital world and those who don’t. A metaverse will need people interested in it to gain investments to sustain it, but right now, not many are willing to do it.
However, with Mark Zuckerberg at the helm, it seems that the metaverse can exist soon. He has a good chance of doing this because he has millions of backers and billions of dollars to spend. However, we can’t know whether it’s good for the world. The only thing we can do is experience it.
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