What’s the difference between a metaverse and a virtual world?
Preparing a session for the IE University faculty on the metaverse that I delivered on Wednesday, I came across a good article that classified the attributes needed to establish, explain or understand the differences between the metaverse as such, and proposals such as Meta’s Horizon Worlds and the like.
As far as I’m concerned, Meta’s idea of the metaverse is simply a glorified video game that looks an awful lot like Second Life two decades back, including the way it is sold to companies, “buy viewers, buy space, get developers to paint your scenery, etc.” — and which, in reality, doesn’t really provide much more than a platform for users to move around, meet, socialize, talk, etc. Anyone who enters Horizon Worlds and similar proposals can see it clearly: a Unity development with legless avatars.
In my presentation, I explained the crypto world, starting with cryptocurrencies, moving on to the blockchain and moving on to the things that can be done on it: wallets, tokenization, smart contracts and DAOs. With that introduction to the use of…
