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the game is Cashing in on the New Year’s hype.Last week, Microsoft described its $68.7 billion Acquires game studio Activision Blizzard– The move is often explained as the Xbox maker simply expanding into gaming – as a way to create “metaverse building blocks.” Meta — which was renamed from Facebook to the Metaverse — is working on the world’s most powerful supercomputer to power the Metaverse.According to reports, now Meta also Plans to introduce NFT functionality on its Facebook and Instagram platforms; Twitter already allows users to convert their NFTs into hexagonal avatars; and YouTube may soon be doing something similar. according to The ever-expanding team of Metaverse analysts NFT is a cryptocurrency token that is regarded as a digital property contract and will become a core component of Metaverse.
Of course, that’s when and if such a thing exists.The metaverse is an obscure concept: it entered the dictionary through Neil Stephenson’s 1992 dystopian science fiction novel avalanche, in which the Metaverse is a virtual sanctuary for a mafia-controlled world full of anarchy, and is brought back by a series of blog posts by VC Matthew Ball. In Ball’s swift ascent to biblical status, the Metaverse is an always-on virtual world that blends seamlessly with the real, flesh-and-blood world, provided by augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. Video games are part of it, but not; cryptocurrencies and tokens will play a considerable role as Metaverse’s currency and assets, as people will actually work and earn money in them.
Rest assured, we are told, the metaverse is coming.
What’s most striking about the buzz around the Metaverse is that everyone claims to build it, but no one knows what it’s going to be or what it’s supposed to look like — and whether people are going to want to use it.As Editor-in-Chief of Wired Gideon Litchfield sayswe are witnessing a “term snatch”: companies and entrepreneurs are already feeling a certain Change Showing up on the air, they scrambled to call it the next big thing, label them (in some cases to the extreme of a meta-rebranding level), and find ways to monetize it. The question is whether we – the target users – will accept it.
The shift Big Tech found is clear: Over the past few years, people have started spending more time online. The Covid-19 pandemic has dizzily accelerated this process. For white-collar workers who were asked to work from home, the office was instantly reduced to the size of a screen. For the same reason, free time is also forced to look for digital alternatives. Movie theaters are closed, bars are closed, and parties are impossible to talk about (unless you work for the UK government), bored people spend a lot of time playing video games, engaging in gamified activities such as Flip meme stocks and dabble in cryptocurrency Or encrypt adjacent products (such as NFT images).In some cases, these two things merged into a strange chimera of gaming and crypto-finance, making the world of online pay-to-play like NFT-based video game Axie Infinity, source of income for poor Filipinos. The bet by Meta et al. is that this state of affairs will persist and eventually lead to the Metaverse, the next internet, with faster internet, better VR, and a more powerful online economy.
This is an unfair gamble. In order to actually work, it requires us to be bored at home for the foreseeable future. Barring extreme circumstances, people will only go to their Metaverse equivalents when clubs are closed, concerts are canceled, and in-person meetings are banned. It might be a smart gamble — a new variant, climate crisis or nuclear disaster could force us all to stay indoors again — but in dramatic terms, it’s a gamble with humanity.It’s not necessarily a bad thing for tech companies to learn from sci-fi, but if you really must, at least try to pick something utopian, like Amazon’s Echo, to blatantly imitate Star TrekThe twittering computer in a disturbing dog-eat-dog hellscape avalanche.
Also, the Metaverse project has the fewest ethical issues of its kind. Unlike Google Glass, The Gold Standard for Technical Mistakes, it’s not an over-hyped (and ill-conceived) product: it’s pure hype, with no product – except for some supposed “building blocks”. Benedict Evans is a venture partner at London firm Entrepreneur First, draws an appropriate parallel The relationship between the Metaverse and the “information superhighway” – a term very popular in the early 1990s that announced the emergence of some kind of US-wide digital communications network, covering everything from video games to interactive television to fiber optics. everything.
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