Facebook is cooking up an ambitious new idea, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it sounds like sci-fi rigmarole. We speak of the upcoming metaverse; a shift away from traditional internet media toward something else entirely. Frankly, it all sounds a bit complicated. What is a metaverse? And why is it so important to the team at Facebook?
What is the metaverse? Facebook’s virtual world explained
Technically speaking, Facebook’s metaverse is a new collection of virtual spaces providing an alternative way to engage in common internet activities. It’s billed — as its name implies — as a sort of self-aware universe inside another. You could call it a virtual reality version of the internet, though that wouldn’t be entirely accurate.
Facebook itself provides this brief summary of what the metaverse is supposed to be:
“The “metaverse” is a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren’t in the same physical space as you.”
That’s a bit of an oversimplification, of course. In reality, the final goal — the final iteration — of the metaverse sounds like something out of science fiction. That may come as no surprise; science fiction fans will likely recognize the phrase from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash. There it’s presented as a shared virtual space serving as the successor to the internet itself.
Could this be the future of the internet?
The core concept of the metaverse is based around engaging with the internet in new ways. We typically experience communication, videos, news, and so on through the frame of a monitor, phone, or other display. Virtual reality and augmented reality technology offers a chance to present those some activities in an immersive way that doesn’t involve an inherently two-dimensional experience.
Think of it this way: You can speak to a friend online through text, or audio, or video. Or, through use of a VR headset, it could be a face-to-face conversation held in a simulated environment. That’s the sort of idea the metaverse is going after. The technology informs the exchange; the medium is the message.
In an interview with The Verge, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the metaverse is “a persistent, synchronous environment where we can be together, which I think is probably going to resemble some kind of a hybrid between the social platforms that we see today, but an environment where you’re embodied in it.”
Of course, it’s not necessarily VR. It’s not necessarily AR, or even 3D. Though it’s a familiar concept, the ultimate goal is a new (and for now entirely unfamiliar) alternate reality. That’s why Facebook is shaking up its structure, changing its name, and hiring over 10,000 people to help bring this tremendously ambitious project to life.
The comparisons to the Snow Crash metaverse, or Ready Player One’s Oasis, or even to games like Second Life will be inevitable. We fall back on comparisons to science fiction and fantasy because reimagining the internet is difficult, to say the least. Still, this real-life metaverse is being billed as a new virtual world where communication and collaboration happen within persistent, simulated environments. Put another way, it could be a new version of the internet for an all-new generation of users.
