METAVERSE – A Parallel Digital World

 We all live in the real world today but imagine when you get home you can wear a whole set of special personal wearable devices and enter another surreal virtual reality society. When you transform into another form, into a new world, you stand on a 100-meter-wide road illuminated by neon lights and screens. As this road passes through the entire planet, hundreds of millions of people just like you are visiting the same world. Everyone has the ability to customize their appearance, travel in virtual vehicles, purchase virtual real estate and items, and engage in a whole range of human social activities in the virtual world. Just like the “OASIS” in the movie Ready Player One, you live in a huge immersive utopian world in a new digital form.

The word Metaverse comes from the 1992 novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. The prefix “meta” of Metaverse means “beyond” and the suffix “verse” is the abbreviation for “universe”, which literally means: it is a world beyond the universe. The Metaverse represents a fully immersive three-dimensional digital environment and broader cyberspace. Ultimately, with the help of technology, the Metaverse will become a shared online space that encompasses all dimensions of representation.

Social media giant Facebook announced its Metaverse ambitions to the world some time ago. The first step is the creation of a virtual reality workspace – Horizon Workrooms. On August 19, Facebook released a free beta version of the program. This is a virtual reality application (VR) for remote collaboration. Users can easily access 3D virtual offices on the Internet via Oculus VR devices. In Facebook’s vision, any user who wears VR glasses and has an internet connection can access the wearable device to work in the virtual office.

Unlike video conferencing software such as Zoom, Oculus VR allows users to see the avatar created by the other party in the virtual reality workspace, and spatial audio technology also allows users to hear sounds from various locations near and far. All activities taking place in the office can be replicated in the virtual world, and even colleagues in other offices can join a meeting at any time.

Your own avatar can walk, talk, shake hands, comment, and consume in 3D during a digital event. They can move freely, experience and interact with random moments and chance encounters.

The immersive design of the Metaverse is not only created by the details of special effects and technical rendering but also requires the use of other senses and technological innovations in addition to vision to provide users with psychological immersion and emotional involvement in the virtual environment.

Aspects that impact Metaverse:

Sound

One of the keys to the Metaverse is to narrow the gap between the physical world and the virtual world. If one of the five main senses, hearing, is not satisfied, it is impossible to create a “real environment.” To achieve a more realistic effect, you need to recreate the human ear. The auditory effect and the design of the 360-degree spatial audio experience can be considered as the key to recreating the “real”.

Touch

We touch objects all the time, and tactile feedback in the Metaverse world is force feedback that can transform virtual contact into physical perception. This is a special form of tactile feedback. Using technology, simple wearable devices can make the body feel different levels of tactility.

With the improvement of new tactile and biometric sensing technologies, as well as the development of edge computing, computers can quickly process multiple streams of data, and more complex and realistic tactile experiences will emerge.

Security

The virtual world on which the Metaverse is based is a surrogate space for the real world, which means that the activities in the real world will be copied in the form of data. To achieve a truly immersive world of the Metaverse, the security and reliability of the data in the virtual world must also be ensured. Blockchain will play an important role in the stability and security of the Metaverse.

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