Meta: Why has Facebook changed its name and what is the metaverse?

Selecting a headset with higher resolution and dpi display can minimize this effect. North American executives were markedly more enthusiastic about the metaverse than their European and Asia-Pacific counterparts, with a whopping 85% stating its importance for future success, compared to 57% in Asia-Pacific and 46% in Europe. Moreover, nearly two-thirds (65%) of North American executives polled said they already had a metaverse strategy, in contrast to 32% in Europe and 27% in Asia-Pacific. Other corporate VR use cases include training for high-complexity scenarios, such as astronaut preparation, institutional knowledge transfer to record workers’ knowledge before they retire, empathy lessons for customer service employees and soft skills training.

1. Apple’s vision of the metaverse currently revolves around its Apple Vision Pro headset.
2. The recent hype around the metaverse belies a history that dates back to the previous century when the name was introduced into the lexicon, albeit in a fictional setting.
3. Author Neal Stephenson coined the word metaverse in his 1992 dystopian sci-fi novel Snow Crash to describe a virtualized environment where people gained status based in part on the technical skill of their avatars.
4. Regardless, the uniqueness and supposed portability of NFTs has metaverse proponents excited.
5. On the positive side, an immersive metaverse enables humans to go where they were never able to go before, including outer space.

Bill Gates jumped on the bandwagon, predicting that meetings would move from screens to the metaverse in two or three years. Today, kids learning remotely navigate a series of apps, websites, zoom rooms, google docs, etc. But imagine instead a virtual world where kids inhabit a virtual avatar and walk to their school, alpari review enter their classroom, sit at their desk and see their teacher “in person”? Then for a field trip they could hop through a portal, or ride in a ship, to visit a virtual Louvre museum. Afterwards, perhaps they could walk the streets of a virtual Paris and practice their French with real people (or “players”).

What are companies to make of a technology phenomenon that’s hot one day, cold the next and in the throes of rebranding itself? TechTarget’s guide to the metaverse breaks down where this rapidly evolving set of technologies stands today and where it’s headed. In November 2021, Facebook renamed itself Meta and announced a $10 billion investment in developing virtual experiences, prompting enthusiasts to anoint the metaverse as the world’s new computing interface.

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Today, companies use the term metaverse to refer to many different types of enhanced online environments. These range from online video games like Fortnite to virtual workplaces like Microsoft Mesh or Meta’s Horizon Workrooms to virtual dressing rooms and virtual operating rooms. Rather than a single shared virtual space, the current bitfinex review version of the metaverse is indeed shaping up as a multitude of metaverses with limited interoperability as companies jockey for position. Although the vision of a rapid gestation of fully-realized virtual worlds where humans work, shop and socialize from the comfort of their couches has dimmed, the metaverse isn’t dead.

The metaverse refers to the convergence of physical and virtual space accessed through computers and enabled by immersive technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality. Nvidia Omniverse, launched in 2022 and purpose-built for developing applications in the metaverse, has been heralded as shaping the future of 3D and the metaverse itself. By integrating 3D design, spatial computing and physics-based workflows, the real-time platform enables the creation of digital twins for factories, warehouses, products and other infrastructure. It also streamlines the creation of 3D-related media for entertainment and product demos and enterprise media content, which in turn can be rendered on computers, smartphones and extended reality devices. The world’s largest provider of cloud services and technologies plays a significant role in the development of the metaverse by virtue of its compute, storage, database, networking, AI and blockchain services.

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games

Technologists can use the VR extension of a digital twin to simulate various issues, according to Johna Till Johnson, CEO and founder of Nemertes Research. “In gaming, you see Roblox, Minecraft and other immersive video games — and even Zoom — foreshadow what the metaverse is designed to offer,” said Ben Bajarin, CEO and principal analyst at Creative Strategies. The degree of interoperability among virtual worlds, data portability, governance and user interfaces will depend on what the metaverse eventually becomes. Another novel that popularized the metaverse was Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, published in 2011 and later made into a movie by Steven Spielberg. It depicted a future where people escape real-world problems by entering The Oasis, a virtual world accessed using a VR headset and haptic gloves that provide tactile sensations.

What happened to the metaverse? Is it dead?

One of the most famous virtual worlds, and perhaps the closest to the metaverse ideal, is Second Life, an “online multimedia platform” which launched in 2003. TechTarget interviewed analysts, consultants, business executives and researchers on metaverse pros and cons. On the positive side, an immersive metaverse enables humans to go where they were never able to go before, including outer space.

Its track record to date on metaverse-adjacent products, however, is underwhelming. The company announced in 2023 that it would no longer sell Google Glass Enterprise Edition, AR smart glasses launched in 2013 that failed to catch on. Several metaverse initiatives are in the works, including Project Starline, a 3D immersive video chat forex broker listings technology. Beyond marketing puff-pieces and proof-of-concept demos, metaverse-like virtual worlds have actually existed for almost as long as their fictional counterparts. Hype pieces about people getting married in the metaverse will elicit a sigh of recognition from anyone who has followed online gaming for the past few decades.