Extract from Ioana Good’s article “Nice to Meta You: The Metaverse and Potential Impact on Legal”
The metaverse has become a hot topic. Companies like Facebook, Microsoft and Google are spending massive amounts of time and money developing tools and platforms that will create new digital worlds. But what exactly is the metaverse? How is it going to change our lives? What kinds of things can we be doing now to prepare for it? Read on …
What Is the Metaverse?
Simply put, the metaverse is a digital space where we will interact with other people and attend virtual events. We are represented in this space by a digital version of ourselves; an avatar is the most common. It’s been said that the metaverse is the next generation of the Internet, where our physical world meshes with the digital one to create a place where we can work and play much as we do in “real life.” Many describe it as Web 3.0.
Web 2.0 was shaped largely by the rise of social media. Now, people across the world instantly connect through the Internet, posting thoughts, videos, and lot of cat pictures! Web 2.0 was the birth of an interactive web experience where everyone got to participate if we wanted to by using devices ranging from computers to smartwatches.
The metaverse, or Web 3.0, will take the interaction of Web 2.0 into a virtual world that allows us to interact in new ways, often using virtual or augmented reality to merge our interactions with physical spaces. Think of an engineer in Mumbai collaborating with an engineer in Boston on the design of a new engine—the engine can be built in a virtual world, tested as if it were in the physical world by both engineers, and ultimately built in the physical world to be brought to market.
