The Metaverse Will Reshape Our Lives. Let's Make Sure It's for the Better

The very premise of the Metaverse presumes that the “next” platform shifts from hardware-based operating systems and hardware-centric experiences to persistent and ubiquitous virtual simulations.

Taking us on an expansive tour of the “next internet,” Ball demonstrates that many proto-Metaverses are already here, such as Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox. Yet these offer only a glimpse of what is to come. Ball presents a comprehensive definition of the Metaverse before explaining the technologies that will power it―and the breakthroughs that w... See more

Learn how to live in the future, the world is moving towards being distributed firstMark finds it odd that VR/AR related science fiction assumes the world is in a dystopian state, both worlds can positively coexist and even mutually benefit from each other

Thus my definition: the Metaverse is the set of experiences that are completely online, and thus defined by their malleability and scalability, which is to say that the Metaverse is already here. Sure, today’s experience is largely denominated by text and 2D, but video is already a major medium, first in the form of entertainment and now a vital to... See more

I think our history with proto-­metaverses should make us more skeptical about any claims for the emancipatory power of technology and technology platforms. After all, each of them both encountered and reproduced various kinds of social inequities, even as they strove not to, and many created problems that their designers did not foresee. Yet this

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