What will the world be like when everyone is in metaverse? – link

Mark Zuckerberg’s avatar in the Metaverse; Facebook introduced the Virtual Universe Project at an event in October

In 2007, a group of researchers at Stanford University decided to explore a new question: What is the effect of choice Online avatars From a person in their behavior? Their results were amazing: not only would the user play the avatar in a manner consistent with its appearance in the digital world, but the avatar’s properties would shape the user’s behavior back in the real world. This phenomenon can suddenly become widely relevant with the emergence of metaverso, is the perfect model for a constantly imaginable virtual world that allows an unlimited number of users to roam, play, learn, work and shop.

A person who chooses to be digitally taller becomes a more aggressive negotiator in everyday life. A person who wears an online inventor’s lab coat is more creative in real world meetings. Researchers have found that adopting a digital personality can fundamentally alter personality, in a development that has come to be known as the volatile effect.

in October, Mark Zuckerberg She outlined her vision for the metaverse – and the commitment of the newly adopted microcontroller in Facebook social networking site, a deadof spending billions in the next decade – to build that world. The company has a level of investment and consumer reach that even highly successful virtual world companies don’t like roblox game where It is an electronic game owns.

Some greeted the announcement with justifiable skepticism — for Facebook’s lack of a hardware platform and for solving the company’s technical and business challenges. But if Facebook — or, for that matter, a bunch of other people who have been watching the metaverse for years — can do that, then this move will revolutionize the way we live. A fully realized metaverse would sharply intensify existing trends, open up new opportunities, and decisively create a new set of problems.

“When it comes to metaverses, the headline should be ‘haters will hate,’” said Rabindra Rattan, associate professor in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University who has researched virtual interconnection on a large scale. The reasons why we are optimistic about this world.” “There will be evil as well.” “I think it will be a new kind of evil.”

Listening to the metaverse might sound silly. It’s an understandable reaction and may be partly because of hearing someone sell us a whole world rather than just talking about part of it or building these items one by one. After all, when today’s internet fiefdoms were built, billions of us weren’t given an accurate explanation about it 10 years ago.

“Starting building the metaverse isn’t really the best way to end the metaverse,” said John Carmack, a CEO-turned-consultant for Facebook’s Oculus division, in the same presentation as Zuckerberg. “Instead, he was in favor of silently dealing with the pieces that would fit into it.”

But this does not mean that a potentially large outcome should be ignored. After all, the idea of ​​making friends, creating fortunes, or meeting their life partners while looking at a screen in their bedroom seemed as unlikely 35 years ago to anyone as the metaverse does to us now. In the digital world, current irrationality is rarely an indicator of future viability.

“The very idea of ​​the Metaverse means that an increasing part of our lives, work, leisure, spending, wealth, happiness, and relationships will be inside virtual worlds, rather than simply expanded or aided by digital hardware and software,” said Matthew Ball, a digital expert who recently published a book on the topic, in Email to Washington Post.

virtual work

Supporters of the metaverse, including Zuckerberg, defend its potential to create virtual offices. But not everyone sees this as an improvement, to say the least. “Instead of sending a message in 2D Slack, I see a 3D avatar of myself sitting on my virtual screen looking at the same message from Slack? Why is that?” Clay Shirky, executive director of technology education at New York University and a longtime historian, has questioned technology and its effects on society.

Shirky said the metaverse-based office is ignoring the hidden truth about remote work. “Zoom is very successful precisely because it reduces presence,” he said. “You don’t feel like you’re in the office, which is why we can spend so much time in it. We don’t want to feel like we’re in the office anymore.”

But Ratan notes that the metaverse would produce a suite of tools that are impossible in remote work today, like a software developer with three huge screens you can’t get at home or an auto worker capable of fixing an entire car. Meetings could be more balanced.

“Many of the superficial biases we have now that can make a person not listen or be afraid to speak can be reduced if we appear in meetings as avatars based more on our ideas and accomplishments,” he said. (Rattan is in talks with Facebook to receive funding for his lab.)

Business conversions can go further. Metaverse experts say the question of how the metaverse will change the corporate world is the application of the wrong paradigm. It’s the business economy itself that can change and talk about more comprehensive video conferencing. It’s like focusing on the key that fixes the subway engine rather than on what’s the metaverse: the entire rail system.

“New companies, products, and services will emerge to manage everything from payment processing to identity verification, advertising contracting, content creation, and security,” Paul wrote on his website. He also describes the innovations in the article as “professionals who decide to live outside of cities.” (which – which) You will be able to participate in the ‘high value’ economy through virtual work.”

Education can come as one of the greatest opportunities. Anyone who has tried to ensure that a 10-year-old learns at home without distraction for the past 20 months has yearned for a new paradigm. Plunging into the metaverse would give the teacher more tools and students less reason to turn off the computer.

Call

Defenders of the metaverse, which has been in both fictional and primitive real-world applications since at least the 1990s, have emphasized how it facilitates social opportunity—allowing, for example, to run from our halls to a soccer game, and then move on to a communal celebration. on a national holiday.

But as hollow as a social network may seem compared to a real friendship, the real meaning of real life simulation can end up inadequately. Janet Murray, director of the Interactive Digital Center for the Liberal Arts and a leader in the study of digital communication at Georgia Institute of Technology, said in an interview. “But wouldn’t you want to be able to try turkey?”

It is also concerned, in Facebook’s case, with a kind of surveillance capitalism as companies increasingly infiltrate the metaverse, as they have begun to do in Roblox.

“There is something exciting about technology to represent things that do not exist physically,” she said. “But this is different from a company with a single platform that will always become a consumer sales nightmare.” And our regular work as an avatar can be a privacy minefield, with far more knowledge of our preferences and movements than today’s disembodied internet.

The situation regarding disinformation, which is the scourge of social media networks today, is also not so clear in this new world.

There is some hope among experts that virtualization will solve this problem, prompting or triggering a more tangible event than, say, a two-sentence conspiratorial tweet.

But the constant confusion between the virtual world and reality can also increase falsehood. If incorrect phrases look as convincing as simple words written on the screen, they will be even more convincing if they are combined in 3D. As Ethan Zuckerman, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who created the metaverse in the mid-1990s asked Facebook’s Atlantic Magazine, “How can a company that can block only 6% of hateful Arabic content that is read with dangerous speech, when it is worn over an avatar shirt or is Revealed at the end of a virtual fireworks display?”

One of the biggest effects could be an even greater distortion of reality, as users struggle to distinguish between the real and the unreal. Second Life, another virtual world, has already made several reports in this regard, where people neglect the physical parts of their lives or treat the two as interchangeable.

The possibility of digging deeper into the digital presence is attracting the attention of tech watchers like Julian Dipple, whose book “My Tiny Life – Crime and Passion in a Virtual World” traces the lure of such virtual parallelism and how it has damaged his own real-life relationship.

“It has always been an overwhelming question: Where is the line between what is immersion in the virtual world and what is not?” Dibble said in an interview. “We’re all going to be drawn into these worlds a lot more difficult. And we’re already on a very, very good path in that direction.” Translation by Ana Maria Dal Luce