Metaverse Concept Analysis: Threats and Reassurances

I discuss the pros and cons of the Metaverse. It can erase boundaries, reduce poverty, and lead to an anti-utopia with completely virtual life. Let’s dive deep right now!

What is the Metaverse?

70 years ago, computers were the province of engineers, but now 60% of the world's population uses the Internet - technology has become much easier and more accessible. Continuing this logic, engineers and sci-fi experts developed the concept of a Metaverse.

The Metaverse should become the next stage in the development of computer technologies - they will become as simple and convenient for people as possible. The main feature of the Metaverse is the erasure of boundaries. Internet websites, social networks, messengers, games, and apps will merge into one big virtual world. And this virtual world will become an extension of the real one.

"the embodied Internet, where instead of looking at the Internet, you are in it.”

Mark Zuckerberg described it as "the embodied Internet, where instead of looking at the Internet, you are in it.” It's a kind of extra dimension - the Metaverse is always there; you just have to wear special glasses. Judging by the concept, one becomes a three-dimensional avatar, and in the form of a hologram, one can even walk back into the real world.

It may seem that the Metaverse will be limited to a three-dimensional Facebook for VR helmets and will remain another attempt to "hype" virtual reality technologies. That's not quite right - the Metaverse concept is much broader than the "3D Internet with holograms," and there are several arguments for why it should be that way.

Why do we need a Metaverse with 3D and virtual reality?

The development of computer technology has led people into the information age - production has shifted from manipulating atoms to manipulating numbers and bits of information. But the digital world still exists as if in a separate reality behind a glass screen that one cannot touch. This makes it difficult to interact with information technology.

Humans are not evolutionarily adapted to stare at a screen for hours at a time and manipulate virtual objects that behave very differently from real objects.

This state of affairs reduces engagement. Despite the efforts of designers and programmers, people still find it difficult to use computer programs and online services. Even in developed countries, about a quarter of students cannot fully cope with searching for information on the Internet, editing photos, and working with databases and spreadsheets. Most students do not understand the concept of files and folders.

Using computers is not only difficult but also harmful to health - you can get a whole bunch of diseases, from carpal tunnel syndrome and bad posture to obesity and depression. Gadgets slow down the development of two- to three-year-old children - having received a smartphone, they spend less time interacting with real objects and live communicating with people, which causes the neural connections in their brains to grow slower than they need to.

The Metaverse will bring users back to a normal evolutionary pattern of interaction. People will stop sitting in front of screens and start manipulating three-dimensional objects, talking and physically contacting each other in a three-dimensional environment - as their bodies have been used to doing for hundreds of thousands of years of their biological history:

Children will be able to fully play with each other, communicate and develop their motor skills in the virtual world.
Schoolchildren and students will get a more comprehensible learning process with full immersion in the material.
Even more, "analog" professions will go digital - tailors, doctors, trainers, and even firemen and policemen will be able to work remotely, increasing labor safety and the chances of remote residents finding decent jobs.
Digital professions will become easier; for example, the source code of a program will be possible to turn into a volumetric mechanism with precise, logical links that the programmer will not have to keep in his head anymore.
People with limited mobility will be able to visit concerts, exhibitions, museums, clubs, schools, and universities, not in such a little format as now, but by immersing their whole bodies in these virtual locations.

Metaverse can solve many problems faced by humanity.

What's stopping us from immersing ourselves in the Metaverse right now?

Humans can see, hear, feel, smell, taste, and feel their position in space. The Metaverse can now only partially cover the first three senses - sight, hearing, and touch. This requires using virtual (VR) and augmented (AR) reality helmets, glasses, tactile gloves, and suits. They don't work perfectly.

VR headset users complain of seasickness - nausea, dizziness, and pain. The slightest discrepancy between the visible image and the actual position and movement of the body can cause stress to the body. This has been shown in pilot training on flight simulators since the middle of the last century.

About one person out of every four thousand who uses a VR headset ends up with eye and muscle twitching, cramps, and fainting - even if they don't have epilepsy or other neurological diseases.

The headset itself is not very comfortable. VR glasses weighing 400-800 grams strain the neck, put pressure on the ears and face around the eyes, and sometimes fog up from the inside. Mark Zuckerberg admits that few people want to spend hours in such conditions. The best option at first might be augmented reality glasses, which do not take a person into a completely virtual world but draw virtual objects on top of the real world. It is desirable that such glasses do not differ from ordinary glasses.

Three-dimensional interfaces and "realistic" virtual or augmented reality objects look impressive but may be unsuitable for work. When people work at a computer or laptop, their hands are on the table. A VR or AR user would have to actively move his hands in the air, keeping them weighted down. It is unlikely that many people will be able to do this for hours on end during the work day or find it comfortable.

In the early stages, the tangibility problem of virtual objects will likely have to be solved. Suppose the Metaverse claims to be a more natural embodiment of digital technology. In that case, it has to provide feedback - at the very least, to create a sense of surface texture and hardness. The brain doesn't like to have its expectations deceived, and instead of a dense object, the hand or foot falls into a void. In addition, a tangible digital world would be a real salvation for visually impaired people.

Without the full tangibility of virtual objects, the Metaverse cannot be a comfortable playground for athletic games and competitions. Holographic avatars could also use "hardness" for normal handshakes and hugs.

Tactile gloves and whole suits can be bought now, but they only solve the problem by half. Besides, the price of gloves starts from 1500-2000 dollars, so we can only hope for lower prices in the future. And on reducing the weight, too - it won't be easy to swing your hands in heavy tactile gloves.

Finally, there are questions of physical safety. In a VR helmet, a person cannot see real objects around them, so even a few steps forward can lead to injury or death. That leaves running VR platforms costing hundreds of thousands of dollars or sitting still - but you might as well be sitting at a computer. A compromise solution is to add a system to the headset to notify you of approaching an object or person.

Less obvious and more remote Metaverse immersion problems

Metaverse problems:

For maximum realism, virtual reality will need to be adjusted to the capabilities of the senses. The eye's resolution is approximately 576 megapixels, and flicker is generally no longer felt at 60-90 frames per second - but the micro-movements of the eye allow people to notice flicker at 500 hertz as well. Video cards capable of producing a picture with 24k resolution and a frame rate of more than 500 FPS for each eye are unlikely to appear in the foreseeable future.
This means that the creators of Metaverse will have to make compromises for a long time to come. For example, Valve's research has shown that a resolution of 1080 pixels per eye and 60-95 frames per second is enough for the "presence effect.” This is within the capabilities of modern graphics cards. But the slightest delays and jerks in the picture destroy this effect and irritate the user, so there should be no FPS slippage at all.
It is still unclear how the brain and psyche will react to a long systematic stay in virtual reality or the use of augmented reality. Studies show that children are more "trusting" of VR than adults - this can instill in them incorrect patterns of interaction with the environment.

Despite Metaverse problems, it can greatly change people’s lives.

How the Metaverse will improve users' lives

The world of digital technology is highly fragmented. Websites, services, and games, not to mention local applications, exist in their isolated worlds. There are several major social networks, dozens of messengers, hundreds of thousands of games, and millions of websites - and almost every one of them is trying to be a different ecosystem. The same online game sometimes falls into separate virtual worlds when run on different hardware platforms, making Xbox and PlayStation users unable to play with each other.

Why fragmentation is inconvenient and harmful

You must have dozens or even hundreds of accounts to cover all relatives, friends, colleagues, and all sources of information and entertainment. These are corporate and personal messengers, e-mail services, social networks, Internet banks, game services, and websites. For example, I have already accumulated 259 actual entries in the password manager, 15-20 of which are actively used.
This can irritate even experienced users. Sometimes, you need to find something or someone quickly, and the website or service does not even allow you to browse pages without registration. The very process of registration scares people away, especially if the email is needed.
Users of different websites and services find it more difficult to find each other and cooperate. The quality of interaction falls - not everywhere is crossposting available, and not everywhere it works as it should. In any case, this is extra effort. Finding information is also more difficult - for example, search engines search poorly for the content of posts in messengers or "do not see" them at all.
People's efforts are often devalued and wasted. If a person performs well in one ecosystem, he or she remains a nobody in any other ecosystem. Job search exchanges rarely consider a user's ranking on other exchanges. Achievements in one game mean nothing in another, and in-game values (loot) cannot be transferred from one ecosystem to another. There is no publicly available mechanism for monetizing user efforts and achievements.

Social networks and messengers have partially reduced fragmentation. They replace chat rooms, forums, photo & video hosting, payment systems, job exchanges, and trading platforms, offering it all as a single set of services.

The metaverse should be the next step here, too. It will transparently unite all existing and future ecosystems into one virtual world. WhatsApp, Youtube, Slack, Discord, and Hackernoon users will be able to gather around the same table to work together or discuss something - without registration or authorization via SMS. A Battlefield master will be able to show off his weapons to a Half-Life 3 newcomer and give him a grenade or two.

All ecosystems and worlds of the Metaverse will be in the same economic space. It will be much easier for people to monetize their actions or items, whether a game achievement, a master class in a skill, or a beautiful digital drawing like in the Vietnamese game Axie Infinity, based on the Ethereum blockchain. For some people in developing countries, playing Axie Infinity is a major source of income. In the Philippines, authorities have taxed it.

How to create a unified Metaverse

The Metaverse cannot be "one big Facebook." It has to become a single but decentralized platform for various websites, services, games, and applications. In general - for any software code that runs on devices with processor and memory.

The basis can be common standards, thanks to which websites, social networks, games, and messengers will begin to "speak the same language" and will be able to exchange data. Mark Zuckerberg cites the W3C, a consortium that creates and implements standards for the web. The W3C consists of hundreds of companies, communities, universities, government agencies, and individuals worldwide, and its standards are open and free to all. The same model could be used to develop standards for Metaverse.

Such standards already exist and work. The Fediverse ecosystem allows various social networks, blogs, photo and video hosting, and messengers to share content transparently. The universal OAuth protocol allows it to log in to thousands of different websites under Google and Facebook accounts.

The example of Fediverse may seem unfortunate because this ecosystem has not gained much popularity - its services are actively used by just over a million people worldwide. But Meta, Microsoft, and Epic Games have something Fediverse enthusiasts don't - billions of users, tens of thousands of employees, huge budgets, and influence in the industry. This greatly increases the chances of success, although it does not guarantee it.

Why merging into the Metaworld might not happen?

There are several reasons:

Data is the new oil, and it is still unclear what can make huge corporations like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon transparently share data. Often, companies try to "wall off" their ecosystems and block access to them from the outside.
Even if companies join their ecosystems to the Metaverse, they can use dirty tricks to attract users to them - for example, adding unique features and capabilities not available to others. That is, to repeat the "browser wars" and bury the unified world under a pile of incompatible "features."
A seamless Metaverse with billions of users would require a huge number of powerful servers precisely synchronized. This is incomparable to the scale of even the most popular online games. It may not be possible to implement the Metaverse without quantum computing.
Many other hardware and software technologies will also have to be created. For example, people need to transfer the Internet to new equipment with higher transmission speeds and minimum delays and rework its software protocols to meet new requirements.

The Metaverse will require a new programming model that looks like a living and open-evolving platform where millions of users seamlessly move from one world to another. So far, no such model exists.

The dystopia that somehow became a dream

Fiction writers describe the world of the Metaverse in gloomy colors - but Meta, Epic Games, and Microsoft seem to consider it a positive phenomenon. Maybe the Metaverse will indeed make technology more natural, convenient, and useful to humans, smooth out the digital divide and the difference in living standards between the metropolises and the outback, and provide a fourth industrial revolution.

However, it can be assumed that the fullest involvement in the digital world will result in the spread of "digital dictation" to the entire population of the Earth. Human immersion in the Internet will entangle them in a network of VR headset sensors, allowing them to track every heartbeat. The Metaverse will shift consumption into the virtual world and protect the planet from complete depletion of resources - but it could create an unprecedented level of social stratification. Real things assembled from atoms will become a sign of wealth, and most people will only be able to afford sets of numbers.

Maybe the Metaverse is the future of the Internet, the logical stage in the development of computer technology. However, it is already clear that the realization of this concept will take quite a long time - Zuckerberg himself hopes for 5-7 years, but most likely, we are talking about decades. It is quite possible that over such a period, instead of Zuckerberg and Meta, quite different visionaries and companies will come to the fore and make the Metaverse part of reality. If the concept itself does not lose relevance by then.

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