10 words to know before entering the Metaverse

Curiosity about the Metaverse is growing: what are its functions? What utility will it have? What features will make it indispensable? Entering this virtual world also means entering a new and not always clear conceptual universe that is developing more and more, although it has not yet reached its full maturity.

The Metaverse represents a new market that has yet to be explored. It also brings with it benefits that are already evident and that make it possible to overcome problems encountered in real, everyday life, such as those related to travel, since it will no longer be necessary to travel to a certain place to experience something.

In the following, we will look in detail at the terms and definitions to lay the cognitive foundations and thus enter the Metaverse in a conscious manner:

Firstly, it is not obvious that the first term to be clear is that of Metaverse: it is frequently mistaken and thought to be a term that can be replaced with that of Multiverse, the idea that more than one parallel universe can exist, but in reality they are two distinct concepts.

“Metaverse”, whose literal translation is “to go beyond”, originated in 1992 from the novel Snow Crash by writer Neal Stephenson and is a three-dimensional space and an immersive, interactive and shared world within which one can move and perform various activities, from attending a conference to visiting a museum.

Digital transformation, the simple application of digital tools, is no longer enough, but we are faced with the virtual transformation of marketing, training, and business. Physical objects will undergo transformations as digital twins will be created, which we will see in detail later, that is, virtual copies of real objects. Virtual transformation will not be limited only to the fields we have indicated, but will probably extend to the whole of everyday life for the most varied purposes.

Web 3.0 is the evolution of the Internet, aiming to involve and make users interact at a higher and immersive level, so it is closely related to the concept of the Metaverse. It can be based on a decentralized system, where consumers own sections of the internet without having to seek permission from central authorities or companies to access services, unlike Web 2.0 which was exclusively centralized.

To enter the Metaverse, we need an avatar, our own virtual representation, which we can customize according to our own tastes. It can be changed at any time, can interact and communicate within the virtual world together with others in a completely innovative way, different from what we have known so far.

It is essential to know what you can see within the Metaverse: we are talking about Digital Twin. If we wanted to bring an element of any kind into the virtual world, we could show it to our customers and/or visitors in detail and they could interact with the object in question, also discovering additional information.

We can’t talk about Metaverse without talking about Environment: according to our own business needs and adapting it to our brand, we can create customized environments. In Meta Presence®, the Metaverse platform from TechStar, people can reproduce an exact copy of the office, a beach or a mountain, or a totally non-existent scenario, born from our imagination.

Another very important term to define is virtual reality. It was born in the 1980s and is very often confused with the Metaverse, but the two are distinguished by the fact that in the first case, one is completely projected into a new world thanks to the use of visors and accessories (as in the case of gloves and joypads), in an isolated manner. In the second case, on the other hand, in addition to the immersive experience, we can use flat devices, but above all, our presence in the Metaverse will be characterized by interaction with other people and the permanence of the consequences of our actions. In fact, unlike the Metaverse, once one decides to leave, the experience will end and will cease, whereas the Metaverse will continue to exist, will always be active and will never stop.

We have mentioned the virtual reality headset but let us try to understand more about what we are talking about. It is a multisensory device that relies on both binocular vision and binaural audio. It is mainly used because it facilitates the control of movements and with it one can have a fully immersive experience, so much so that users will really think they are in a three-dimensional space.

Artificial Intelligence was born in 1956 and it is a concept of enormous relevance for the implementation of the Metaverse in its most advanced and disruptive version. It can be defined as the study of intelligent software systems and has gradually become a part of our everyday life for quite some time now. The support of artificial intelligence is the basis for the development of technology, but also for the analysis of the enormous amount of data we obtain from our 3D environments.

When we are in the Metaverse, we will be dealing with spatial audio. This is a technology that allows us to simulate surround sound and the particularity is that, depending on the distance between the people in the room, the volume of voices may be higher or lower. If there are two people inside the room and they are at opposite ends, they might not even be heard at all.