Device-dependent interactions will be phased out and new types of interactions and business models will emerge across multiple applications. Examples of early-stage solutions include gaming, virtual collaboration, navigation apps, social media, and fungible and non-fungible tokens. In addition, the real-time multilingual skills of conversational AI will break down language barriers, facilitating interaction in the globally connected metaverse. The metaverse allows companies to connect, communicate and incentivize customers to create new value exchanges and revenue streams.
Some said that the rumor of augmented reality is mainly what was called “typical technological hype.” Some of them said they expect this group of technologies to likely make some expected but fairly small ripples in the overall technological development flow. Kathee Brewer, editorial director of CANN Media Group, wrote: “The metaverse is another in a long series of developments that saw their origins in science fiction and then became a reality. (Think mobile phones, internet, “smart” homes, space travel, nuclear submarines, etc.) Virtual reality and augmented reality are already making new product demonstrations safer and more immersive in fields such as medicine. Jamais Cascio, a leading fellow at the Institute for the Future, commented: “By 2040, technologies that fall under the umbrella of the ‘metaverse’ will most likely become ubiquitous, even if the term ‘metaverse’ has fallen into disuse. Fully immersive virtual environments other than the physical environment are likely to be used occasionally, as we see today with gaming. More often, we probably use some sort of daily mixed reality system that allows both the physical and digital worlds to overlap. Results released on June 30, 2022: The Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center invited thousands of experts to share their insights into the likely near future of augmented reality and “the metaverse” in a winter 2022 survey. More than 600 technological innovators, developers, business and political leaders, researchers and activists responded; of these, 367 wrote explanatory comments after answering the “yes-no” question of this study. This report organizes and categorizes the most common themes expressed by each of these experts in their comprehensive analyses of the likely future based on current trends.
The experts who participated in this survey wrote hundreds of pages of thought-provoking ideas about the potential future of augmented reality and how these tools and society might evolve over the next 18 years. They were fairly evenly divided on whether or not metaverse will be a much more sophisticated and truly immersive aspect that works well for the daily lives of half a billion or more people around the world by 2040. Reducing bullying and protecting children from bad online actors has become one of the emerging concerns surrounding the immersive virtual reality and augmented reality platforms that Metaverse News make up the metaverse. Current game reviews, as well as abuse reporting systems implemented for console games, have generally helped to keep 2D video games viable as a growing entertainment platform. As pioneers, gaming companies have built an early prototype of the metaverse, and their position as early adopters is well known across all industries. For example, the much-played Minecraft and Fortnite games, as well as the popular roblox gaming platform, have incorporated many aspects of the metaverse, including virtual worlds where players come together to play and use social features like in-game chats.
While some proponents argue that new technologies like NFTs can enable portable digital assets, this just isn’t true, and bringing elements from one video game or virtual world to another is a hugely complex task that no company can solve. Kids who are obsessed with Roblox and Fortnite want immersive digital experiences as they grow up. “The metaverse has its own brands that are specific to the metaverse and more important than traditional brands in real life,” says Janine Yorio, CEO of a landowner and digital developer named Everyrealm. Sneakers from RTFKT, a digital fashion company, are more coveted than virtual kicks made by Adidas, he noted.
“I’ve spent about 17 years from time to time experimenting as an avatar and exploring virtual spaces and experiences within Second Life, and I’ve found that this has significantly changed my perception of myself in my real life. The whole experience can be summarized as liberating. Virtual worlds dissolve social and geographical boundaries, and in them we are able to communicate and establish relationships with people we would otherwise never meet. R “Ray” Wang, founder and chief analyst at Constellation Research, said: “We just released a report outlining the expectations for monetising the metaverse economy. We see many components for the development of the metaverse. Interfaces: Headphones, glasses, human and gesture-based APIs. Worlds: Every studio, esports, gaming platform, digital twin and social network will create a world as a distributed autonomous organization to establish rules for membership, governance and voting rights, symbolic economic models, funding mechanisms and balance between centralization and decentralization. “As more and more corporate control was imposed, internet-based technology began to subtly invade our personal spaces in exchange for the Faustian bargain of a new set of technological ‘conveniences.’ Now, Big Tech not only wants to extend this intrusion with technologies like Alexa, but make life impossible to live without… hence the concept of metaverse. “Having experienced a number of iterations of technologies that have great potential to improve our access to knowledge and provide a wider range of virtual experiences, I have fallen less in love with the technologies themselves and more intrigued by the questions of 1) how these technologies are merged into systems and services that provide experience opportunities for users and 2) who the users are.
First of all, it is likely that it will incorporate both the physical and the digital/virtual world into the user experience. Second, the metaverse is expected to have a native economy, including digital native assets and commerce. Although the internet today has an important relationship with the economy, the metaverse could have its own economy. For example, Epic has acquired a number of companies that help create or distribute digital assets, in part to bolster its powerful Unreal Engine 5 platform. And while Unreal may be a video game platform, it’s also used in the film industry and can become easier for anyone to create virtual experiences.
A professor of public policy at a major U.S. technical university said, “The metaverse may be ‘more fully immersive’ and skillfully ‘refined’ by 2040, but it will be in a way designed to extract information and dollars from those who come in. For some, that may be a “well-functioning aspect of everyday life,” but it provides tremendous unchecked power to those who control it. “But for the dream of the metaverse to come to life, we all have to live in the same ‘world’. The metaverse, like social media, requires a network effect. People want to talk to people; For that to happen, we need to be on the same platform. Platforms are expensive and complex, relying on internet infrastructure to reach everyone. The money and technical expertise needed to build the platform on which the metaverse should run are in the hands of a small group of people, the same people who built and mastered the current neurodigital media landscape. “What has happened so far in that regard is rather child’s play compared to the truly dystopian ‘Blade Runner 3.0’ imaginable in 2040, when people are much more immersed in digital worlds. When they don’t just relax by playing games or communicating/sharing with friends and family and random strangers and social media data collection bots. When they invest more time and more of themselves when the metaverse is also the workplace/future of work. Blurring psychic and physical boundaries can be very ugly. “By my count, this is the third iteration of a ‘graphically intensive, computer-generated’ multi-user virtual environment, counting ActiveWorlds and Second Life. Both spaces still exist, but our ahistorical and ephemeral media hardly acknowledge that metaverses have been tried before. Not to mention virtual worlds like Habbo Hotel and Club Penguin, or massively multiplayer online games like EVE Online, World of Warcraft, and EverQuest. It also has at least two other key features that increase its potential as a new platform with a wide range of applications.
About half of these expert respondents supported the idea that the metaverse will be a fully immersive aspect of daily life for many by 2040. Many of those who expect augmented reality, mixed reality and virtual reality to progress significantly predicted that that progress will come from a natural evolution of the current innovations underway. They noted that people have always been motivated to push boundaries and explore new experiences, to advance and improve their daily lives, and to seek profit and power.
All technology developers, regardless of their position in the product ecosystem, have a responsibility to provide users with clear disclosure and explanation of the enhanced, virtual, mediated or multimedia experiences that users will find themselves in. Such awareness-raising initiatives should engage social scientists, humanities scholars, marketers and practitioners, including emotional intelligence or positive psychology, alongside policymakers and manufacturers. Mirror worlds are digital creations that mimic the physical and social structures of the real world in a virtual reality environment.