Source: Xinhua.
Almost overnight, the metaverse was everywhere; it even made the 2021 list of the year’s top ten internet slang terms. The shockwave in tech circles began on 10 March, when the gaming platform Roblox put the concept into its IPO prospectus and broke through USD 40 billion in market value on its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. One research forecast puts the metaverse market at USD 800 billion by 2024.
The term first appeared in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash. According to a 2020-2021 metaverse development research report, the metaverse is a new form of internet application and social structure that integrates multiple emerging technologies into a blended virtual-and-real world. In plain terms, it is something like enhanced virtual reality: people use brain-computer interfaces, VR headsets and other wearables to enter an immersive digital world, working, socialising, attending concerts and watching films through a 3D avatar that represents them.
A push for technology integration
The rise of the metaverse is expected to integrate and drive technological innovation, ultimately fusing the virtual and real worlds. Today big data, cloud computing, blockchain, VR and AR largely operate in silos and struggle to work as a whole. The metaverse is meant to weave together the information revolution (5G/6G), the internet revolution (Web3.0), artificial intelligence and VR/AR/MR technologies into a parallel holographic digital world.
Building such a complex virtual world relies on six supporting technologies: interaction, blockchain, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, networking and computing, and game engines. The hype, in other words, rests on confidence in continuing technological iteration. Much of the technology is still immature, but the market attention and capital chasing the metaverse in 2021 suggest that integrated applications will advance quickly, and that scenarios and user experience will keep improving.
A new way of seeing the world
If the metaverse first excited tech circles through technological innovation, its wider appeal comes from the promise that, once realised, it will change everyone’s life. Until now people have received information in two dimensions, whether from print or from online media; the metaverse promises genuine immersion, a three-dimensional, multi-perspective way of perceiving the world.
As vast online information enters subjective experience more directly, human consciousness is greatly extended. At the same time, virtual personas are forming new social relationships and emotional connections, feeding experiences gathered in virtual space back into the real one. This real-time interplay of the real and the virtual is expected to push breakthroughs and reconstruction across the social sciences and change research paradigms in the natural sciences, with information science, quantum science, mathematics and life sciences increasingly intertwined.
The rules of virtual worlds deserve deep thought
As the metaverse takes shape, traditional notions of life, time and space, energy, community and economics may all be reshaped or even overturned. Three questions stand out.
First, when community members set the rules themselves, cultural clash and value misalignment become possible. How should civilisational rules such as values, institutions and hierarchies be designed? How can different cultures blend in a virtual world, and who maintains order?
Second, virtual worlds carry the risk of wealth polarisation. The metaverse has no traditional industrial structure; the “concept economy” would be the basic form of economic activity. Its embryonic economic system can borrow and test every innovation of the digital economy, from cooperative and sharing economies to inclusive finance, but over the long run an independent virtual economy should also fall within the scope of macroeconomic regulation, to avoid another kind of polarisation in a parallel world.
Third, it remains an open question whether the monopolies, hegemonism and racial conflicts of the real world will seep into the metaverse; price differences between digital avatars based on race, gender and skin colour may already be a sign. A metaverse co-created by millions or hundreds of millions of people through play, creation and interaction must establish rules for harmonious coexistence.
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