You’ve heard of the metaverse. Here’s what it looks like.

Metavers is a 3D social network. Instead of a profile, you have an avatar, and so do your friends. Instead of a news channel, you have social centers where people gather to share news, gossip, and play games.

Although the virtual environment is cartoonish, for Kiernan Pearce the metavers evokes his own compelling version of reality, one that, perhaps counterintuitively, can offer richer opportunities to meet and socialize with others than those who they are usually found beyond the screen.

“I’ve had more real experiences inside virtual reality than outside,” the meditation instructor said.

“You are not alone in virtual reality,” he added. “There’s someone you can contact and talk to. And one of the things that happens naturally is amazing communication and conversation.”

We met in a quiet, colorful world of meditation that Pearce built into virtual reality. Smiling, the image of Pearce’s life in the metavers hints at the meaning and social complexity that these early converts see in what they consider a natural step in the evolution of the Internet.

“We have comedy clubs, we have nightclubs, we have meditations, we have people conducting world tours. On Wednesdays different creators show all these amazing game worlds. You know there’s something for everyone here, not just for the players. “It’s not just for the person who wants to attend the events. We have AA meetings here, we have the support of colleagues.”

What is metavers?

Most metavers environments will be it is accessed in virtual and augmented reality. Several companies, such as Apple, Sony, Microsoft, and Facebook’s parent company, Meta, are working on metavers products. Experts predict that virtual reality, a $ 30 billion market in 2021, will triple to $ 300 billion in 2024.

Many other applications of the technology are in process. For example, Seoul, South Korea, will build a virtual replica of the city as part of the Seoul Vision 2030 plan. The virtual environment will be designed to help residents communicate with city officials, join community events and visit reconstructed museums and historic sites. The city says its metavers will take a decade to build and access VR and AR headphones.

One of the most active metavers environments is called Decentraland. It’s easy to access with a regular web browser. There are currently about 300,000 active users, with some estimates showing that virtual space is gaining about 18,000 users a day. Samsung recently unveiled its latest smartphone at Decentraland and opened a virtual store.

Meta’s “Horizon Worlds” are in virtual reality and can be accessed with an Oculus headset. Much of the virtual environment is created by experienced video game developers. But in Meta’s virtual universe everyone has access to the same tools, which means anyone can build a virtual world to hang out or play.

“I’m a professional website developer,” Pearce said. Coding skills are useful in metavers, but they are not essential. “Virtual reality is more accessible. I can build a world that has a lot of effects on how it looks and sounds. It’s a more immersive experience.”

Games, creators and a new virtual economy

Horizon Worlds is built with Unity, a common video game engine that is often used to program mobile games. That means creating content on metaverse is relatively easy, Jason Rubin, founder of video game publisher Naughty Dog and vice president of Metaverse Content, told CBS MoneyWatch.

“Not only are there tools for everyone, but everyone who is really interested in making games already has the basic structure and framework” to launch a game and attract an audience, Rubin said, adding that many of the his colleagues working at Horizon. Worlds have experience building video games.

Meta also provides training for users to build virtual worlds. The tools include a variety of shapes, text, and sounds that users can put together to create a 3D world. Advanced features allow users to add codes for behaviors within the world, such as flying a ball across the field when thrown.

John McLay said he learned to create a virtual world in a matter of days, but spent more time learning advanced tools for designing complex environments such as a moving train.

“It didn’t come from a programming baggage, but once I made a couple of advances in the script, from there it was simple,” McClay said.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, last week announced a new feature which will allow creators to use voice control during the world building process. During a live presentation, the co-founder of Facebook created a basic virtual world set on a beach using only his voice.

Rubin said that “over time, the variety of things you can do will expand a lot” in the metavers, adding that “it will gradually increase to the point that we really become an immersive world.”

When spent $ 10 billion in 2021 build metavers products like virtual reality glasses and Horizon Worlds. In October, it announced a $ 10 million fund for creators, which encouraged enthusiasts like McLay and Pearce to continue building more worlds.

Outside of Horizon Worlds, games created by professional studios are also making a big impression on users. Meta said last year consumers spent more than $ 1 billion on the Oculus video game store. Resident Evil, a popular zombie survival game created for the gaming cube nearly two decades ago, is now the best-selling game in the Oculus Store, according to Rubin.

In addition, Meta said eight games generated more than $ 20 million in revenue in 2021, with more than 120 virtual reality games generating revenue per million, a figure that has doubled since 2020.

Rubin said the next step is to give users more freedom to create and collaborate while adding tools to monetize products designed by Horizon Worlds fans. From clothes for avatars to cars for video games, creators should be able to benefit financially from the products they make in the virtual world, he added.

“When we link an economy to that, the ability to make money by doing it, I think we’re changing the world,” Rubin said.

Privacy and security concerns

How Meta works move from a social media platform to a virtual reality business, security and privacy experts are concerned that some of the same issues that plague the business in the real world could be transferred to the metavers. The company announced a change in its Facebook corporate name to Meta in October, just weeks after whistleblower Frances Haugen published thousands of internal documents this showed that company executives were unaware of the public harm caused by their social media platforms.

In a December interview with CBS News, Haugen warned that the same issues that affect social media are likely to affect the metavers. Days later, a user reported being verbally and sexually harassed just minutes after using the Meta product. Given these concerns, Meta said earlier this month that everyone will have four feet of space around their avatar and that others will be prevented from entering that personal space.

“The worst case scenario is that we don’t learn anything from previous versions of the web, and we just go through these business models and this way of being,” said Alexandra Givens, director general of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a non-profit group that focuses on issues such as privacy and digital rights.

More specifically, Givens raises concerns about how companies might try to use biometric data obtained from users of metavers, such as pupil dilation or arm movements.

“We need to think about how this data is being collected and what the regulatory landscape will look like,” he said.

What comes next?

In 2003, software developer Phillip Rosedale released a proto-metavers called Second Life. By 2005, hundreds of thousands of users had registered millions of hours creating content, exchanging digital goods, and playing in the virtual world. Second Life was so popular that it was on the cover of Business Week, and Reuters news agency set up a virtual office to cover events within the digital world.

Like many social networks, Second Life was hot until it wasn’t. Users used to say sexual harassment. The developer, Linden Labs, was also unable to scale the technology infrastructure to meet demand and the code had a number of security flaws. A decade after its release, Second Life was a virtual ghost town.

Meta’s Rubin is confident that Horizon Worlds, Decentraland, and other metavers environments will not experience a similar fate. “Now, almost everyone plays video games, but they don’t necessarily call themselves gamers” because they play on their phones instead of a computer or console, he said.

As with any new technology, skeptics abound, he added. but, according to Rubin, virtual reality and metavers will eventually be inevitable.

“It simply came to our notice then [metaverse] kind of person to approach and become fun, useful or otherwise part of your life. If you don’t think the metavers will happen, fine and good. I’ll be here when it’s you. “

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