Blockchain Blog 18: Metaverse — A 3D Internet

Published in

Coinmonks

7 min readFeb 23, 2022

--

Since Mark Zuckerberg announced that they were going to change the name from Facebook to Meta, Everyone is talking about the metaverse, but the word metaverse is quite old. It was actually coined in the book named Snow Crash.

The metaverse is possible, thanks to a handful of technologies, like Web3, Mixed Reality, Blockchain, and NFT.

What is the Metaverse?

The word metaverse was coined by Neil Stephenson in 1992 in his book Snow Crash.

“Meta” comes from the Greek meta, which means across or after or something transcending, and the word “verse” comes from the universe.

The metaverse is a digital reality that combines aspects of social media, online gaming, augmented reality and virtual reality, and cryptocurrencies to allow users to interact virtually.

A social construction that leverages the Web 3.0, blockchain, and computer interfaces where individuals build customs, habits, and values, that allow them to spend time and socialize in the virtual world using their digital identities, avatars. It co-exists with the real world. — Henrique Centieiro

Metaverse is now is like what the internet was in the 90s and the metaverse at the moment is more like a social construction. We believe that it’s going to be something that is going to use Web 3.0 and blockchain to allow you to have to own your digital identity and your metaverse items to have ownership. And it’s going to be used for socializing. You can play games, but you can also have work meetings and you use your own digital identity It coexists with the real world, and you can see this as an evolution of the internet.

Nowadays, you don’t own anything on the internet. The only thing that you can own on the internet is a DNS domain. But there is nothing else that you can own. For example, you upload a YouTube video to YouTube or a photo to Instagram, or a social media post. Do you own that content? No, you don’t own the companies that own that content, and they can take down that content at any time.

Image Source: https://medium.com/geekculture/the-4-key-stages-of-the-metaverse-84d34cce6f6f

But now on the metaverse with Web 3.0 blockchain, NFTs, you can own your content. Or you can buy someone else’s content and you really own that and no one else, you don’t have a centralized party owning it. Most of the internet is still like a two-dimensional interface. But it’s quite remarkable that if you tell anyone 30 years ago that you would have a device inside your pocket that has access to the entire information in the world, all the music in the world to all the videos in the world, all the newspapers, that would be unbelievable.

The next iteration of the internet can be the metaverse. And you will be able to own your identity and your assets, digital assets in this metaverse. The metaverse is like a 3-D Internet.

So until now, when you go online shopping, for example, it’s like looking at the magazine. You look at the products you click, you select a product, select the quantity and the size, and you have a basket.

Now imagine that in the Metaverse, you have a shopping mall like a real shopping mall where you can walk around, go inside the shop and get the product out of the shelve and put it in your basket.
This is possible in the Metaverse!

XR, Gaming, Web3, and Blockchain

XR, Gaming, Web 3.0, and blockchain. are the technologies that when put together, allow us to do wonderful things like owning your digital assets and building the metaverse in a more decentralized way and interoperable way.
Read the following blogs to know about blockchain and gaming:
The Core of Blockchain
Blog 06 — Cryptography, Security, and Crypto Wallets
Blog 07: Inside the Blockchain Technology
Blog 08: Bitcoin’s Genesis Block
Blog 09- Blockchain and the Mining
Blog 10: Bitcoin Mining
Gaming Industry
Blog 17: Roots of Metaverse — Gaming Industry

Extended Reality (XR)

Extended reality (XR) is a term referring to all real-and-virtual combined environments and human-machine interactions generated by computer technology and wearables. E.g. It includes representative forms such as augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and virtual reality (VR) and the areas interpolated among them. The levels of virtuality range from partially sensory inputs to immersive virtuality also called VR.

XR is a superset that includes the entire spectrum from “the complete real” to “the complete virtual”. Still, its connotation lies in the extension of human experiences especially relating to the senses of existence (represented by VR) and the acquisition of cognition (represented by AR). With the continuous development in human-computer interactions, this connotation is still evolving.

XR is a rapidly growing field being applied in a wide range of ways, such as entertainment, marketing, real estate, training, and remote work.

Web3

Web3 is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web based on blockchain technology, which incorporates concepts including decentralization and token-based economics.

Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 refer to eras in the history of the World Wide Web as it evolved through various technologies and formats. Web 1.0 refers roughly to the period from 1991 to 2004, where most websites were static webpages, and the vast majority of users were consumers, not producers, of content. Web 2.0 is based around the idea of “the web as platform” and centers on user-created content uploaded to social media and networking services, blogs, and wikis, among other services. Web 2.0 is generally considered to have begun around 2004 and continues to the current day.

Web3 revolves around the idea of decentralization and often incorporates blockchain technologies, such as various cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Bloomberg has described Web3 as an idea that “would build financial assets, in the form of tokens, into the inner workings of almost anything you do online”. Some visions are based on the concept of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Decentralized finance (DeFi) is another key concept; in it, users exchange currency without bank or government involvement. Self-sovereign identity allows users to identify themselves without relying on an authentication system such as OAuth, in which a trusted party has to be reached in order to assess identity.[21] Technology scholars have argued that Web3 would likely run in tandem with Web 2.0 sites, with Web 2.0 sites likely adopting Web3 technologies in order to keep their services relevant.

There is one more component of Metaverse without which it is incomplete and not that revolutionary. That is NFT, it is a big topic that needs a separate blog, but here in the next blog, we will explore how NFTs are associated with Metaverse.

Article Inspired From: https://medium.com/geekculture/the-4-key-stages-of-the-metaverse-84d34cce6f6f by Henrique Centieiro

Read Next Part: Blockchain Blog 19: Metaverse and NFTs

Entire Series: 28 Blogs on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency

Join Coinmonks Telegram Channel and Youtube Channel learn about crypto trading and investing

Blockchain Blog 18: Metaverse — A 3D Internet

What is the Metaverse?

XR, Gaming, Web3, and Blockchain

Extended Reality (XR)

Web3

Also, Read

Written by Aakash S