22 October 2022 by Mondo2.0

Let’s start again from … the “Metaverse to come”

One year after the announcement of “Meta”, Zuckerberg retraces his steps and tells us about the “Metaverse to come”. Integration with one of the best-selling headsets on the market, the creation of Meta Quest Pro, makes the debate about immersive experiences and the future of the Internet topical again.

Zuckerberg once again puts his face on it (literally… presenting a video in which his digital projection appears), anticipating some characteristics of our avatars, which may (always in the future) be created in our likeness and capture, through eye-movement tracking, our facial expressions.

Zuckerberg’s attempt to attract attention and anticipate the times is evident: from his point of view, it is necessary to stop the diaspora from “traditional” Social Networks; it is necessary to overcome the limits of using the Internet in only two dimensions, a use that, as stated in our previous article, is producing significant distortions in terms of use and interaction among users.

The virtual acceleration described is a true, extraordinary leap forward: the “Metaverse to come” will provide endless opportunities for education, online meetings, encounters and virtual tourism, shopping, live events, …

The “Metaverse to come” will revolutionize our concept of entertainment, event, experience and interaction.

We may decide whether to be “here” or to be, completely, “elsewhere”.

The enormous opportunities—perhaps not for everyone, perhaps no longer and not always free—provided by the new Internet will place each of us at a crossroads: choosing how many hours to spend in the “real world” and how many in the “virtual world”.

The Metaverse as an escape route from the difficulties of the real world?
A place where we can bring our dreams to life?

If we think about it, the Internet itself, as it is today, is the consequence of our need to communicate, to state our opinion, to escape from our daily life, to move beyond the passive inputs provided by traditional media.

But today the Internet has lost much of its unpredictability; it often maintains a high degree of interest and participation from users through polarized opinions and attitudes.
Written text, photographs, short videos are no longer sufficient…

Like a large amusement park, the Internet needs new attractions to draw visitors.

Perhaps the second level of the Internet, the Metaverse, just like the second level of a video game, will be an Eden capable of offering emotions in a virtual context so realistic that it appears real to our eyes and at the same time accommodating toward our personal needs and fantasies.

A multimedia, all-encompassing and engaging context.

Furthermore, our constant, absorbed, emotional presence in virtual spaces will make it possible to collect much more information about us, Big Data that will facilitate engagement, interaction and, above all, the sale of services and emotions to our avatar.

We have no doubt that, as Zuckerberg announces, the “Metaverse to come” will further, once again, change our habits, affect our mobility, our ability to interact in the real world, our dynamism, the physicality of relationships, and completely revolutionize the world of work.

At the same time, however, we are convinced that the “Metaverse” is not just around the corner. This is demonstrated by the fact that, one year after the first announcement, people are still talking about experimentation and beta testers; we see the first images in short videos, but nothing has yet been presented. The main virtual social metacommunities are still experimental in nature and capture the attention only of a specific type of public, often very young and willing to experiment.

Using a trendy term such as “Metaverse” and launching a global web trend is not enough to begin a new era of the Internet.

Conversely, looking around us, we think of immersive reality and the Metaverse as a tangible destination: we see increasingly realistic and engaging video games, immersive user experiences in tourism and culture, sometimes characterized by the use of headsets, more efficient and cheaper hardware, extraordinary new experiments in medicine and, in general, we perceive greater digital awareness.

The die is cast, the destination is well defined, the path is still uncertain: the new Internet will be multimedia, the “Metaverse to come” will change our relationship with the virtual world and will irreversibly affect our behavior in the real world.

We just have to be patient; after that, we will no longer be able to do without it.

Mondoduepuntozero