What is the Metaverse?
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Loading... - Mike Kuate
- 01 Sep 2022
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The internet made it possible for us to imagine living in another world. Since its creation, multiple novels, movies and video games have been released detailing living alternate realities in interconnected networks. In the 1984 book Neuromancer, the main character, a cyberspace cowboy, goes inside a matrix. This virtual world is explained as a consensual hallucination. The movie 'The Matrix (1999)' depicted a majority of humans jacked into a virtual world, all living in an alternate reality.
These are what you would call metaverses. Meta is a prefix that means 'beyond,' and 'verse' comes from 'universe,' making the word Metaverse. So what would the Metaverse mean for the world, and what are its effects on cryptocurrency and NFTs?
What is the Metaverse?
A metaverse, to put it simply, is a space where humans can participate in a shared virtual universe. The term originated from the novel 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, where humans interact with each other as avatars in 3D space. Recently, the movie 'Ready Player One (2018)' depicted people who can go inside a virtual world and become a 3D being, an avatar, inside it. Its players experienced things that they wouldn't be able to do in the physical world, like performing extreme physical feats or driving technologically advanced vehicles.
So far, virtual worlds haven't brought a dystopian apocalypse as depicted in popular books and movies. On the contrary, virtual worlds have made it possible for us to engage with communities of other people. Gamers would recognize these as being Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) worlds like World of Warcraft. There, people chat with their friends and raid the dungeons to destroy powerful virtual monsters for loot. Their avatar is the warrior, sorcerer, thief, healer, or other beings with supernatural powers that make up a game character. Read More...
