The Metaverse is the latest evolutionary step of Internet. Metaverse is a new immersive universe where you can have different experiences, including watching films, attending to concerts, fairs and business meetings, doing shopping, playing your favourite sports, having lunches and dinners, chatting with friends, playing games, more in general, everything that can be transferred into a digital form. Now, you can experience all this, directly from your living room, thanks this new 3D environment.
From Snow Crash to Ready Player One
Metaverse is a term coined in the science fiction novel Snow Crash, published in 1992, by Neal Stephenson, exponent of the“cyberpunk”, which is a narrative genre inspired by the criticism of a dangerous, without limits, development of technology.
Neal Stephenson created the word Metaverse to describe the virtual environment where the digital avatar of the protagonist of the book lives. Since then, science fiction films employed the Metaverse as a dystopian environment (e.g., the American science fiction adventure Ready Player One, where people spend much of their time in a virtual world, looking for rewards). Stephenson describes the Metaverse as an immense black sphere characterized by a 65,536 km circumference where everyone can do whatever he/she wants.
Metaverse, today
The Metaverse is the latest evolution, but not a replacement, of Internet. It is the union between physical and virtual reality, suited to support enhanced immersive experiences. It is a collective, shared, realistic, interactive and persistent virtual space, which cannot be reset or simply deleted. Metaverse provides a digital representation (i.e., an avatar) of the people, in order to make them interacting each other in a variety of contexts. The idea is very simple: using a smartphone, a console or a personal computer, together with technologies for virtual and augmented reality (like AR/VR headsets), you find yourself (i.e., your avatar) immersed in a gigantic virtual city where you can do whatever you want.
Metaverse, beyond the hype
In a recent report entitled “The Potential Global Economic Impact of the Metaverse” published by Analysis Group, an international consulting firm, the potential opportunities offered by Metaverse for the next ten years look endless. The rise of the Metaverse is associated by the researchers with the spreading of mobile technologies, due to common effort in combining existing with emerging innovations (i.e., phone & internet for the mobile technologies, game & web for the Metaverse). This comparison is very interesting, It suffices to think that in 2007, when the first iPhone was launched on the market, most of us could do without mobile phones; now, 10 years later only, we depend on our smartphone to do essentially everything, to work, to travel, to do shopping, to stay in touch with the world.
Globally, the study estimates that the Metaverse will generate $ 3.01 trillion income in 2032, representing more than 2% world GDP! This growth will happen only if Metaverse has “far-reaching applications, with the potential to transform a wide range of economic sectors such as education, healthcare, manufacturing, vocational training, communications, entertainment and commerce. “
If we think about the Metaverse we know today, it is difficult for us to imagine all this. The truth is that we are just at the beginning: it is a continuous experimentation, quickly evolving; on the table, we have an effective tool to radically change the global technological and economic landscape.
Talks on the Metaverse have been ubiquitous during the past several months. In 2021, internet searches for the term Metaverse increased by 7,200%. In December 2021, Facebook rebranded itself as Meta, and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, declared his ambition to “help bring the Metaverse to life.” A month later, Microsoft said that the proposed acquisition of the gaming giant Activision provided “building blocks for the Metaverse.”
Phenomenology of the Metaverse
Matthew Ball, a media analyst, tried to describe the main attributes characterizing the Metaverse, in a synthetic way. The Metaverse should:
- be persistent, that is, should operate without end and without the possibility of being paused or turned off;
- be synchronous and live, that is, should be an experience that exists for everyone in real time, even if, in turn, it may contain specific events with a start and an end time;
- have no limits of competing participants, so that anyone, at any time, could enter and stay at its leisure;
- be a fully functioning economy, or a world where individuals and companies may be able to create, own, invest, sell and earn;
- be an inclusive experience, involving the digital and physical world, public and private networks, open and closed platforms;
- offer the interoperability of data, digital objects, content between all hosted experiences;
- become a platform of contents and experiences created and managed by a broad spectrum of individuals and companies.
Why entering the Metaverse?
There are several reasons that can push you to enter the Metaverse. A Statista survey of global internet users found that overcoming obstacles that prevent people from doing something in real life is perceived as the Metaverse’s biggest benefit (39% survey respondents). The improvement of creativity and imagination is ranked second, with 37% respondents. The Metaverse is also promising for the improvement of technological skills (34%), education (29%) and the exploration of new career opportunities (30%).
But is all really so easy and obvious?
Creating immersive experiences
Creating immersive experiences in the Metaverse can be challenging, in particular, due to an intrinsic limit (10k) on the number of polygons that can be used on each virtual land to describe the Metaverse reality. Polygons are the basic elements to define any three-dimensional scene and to create virtual objects reproducing a real scenario. Thus, if a large number of polygons improves the rendering quality of an object, it overburdens the graphic processor of the machine and consumes the 10k budget of each virtual land in the Metaverse.
Now, there is a solution to this kind of issue. It is represented by the AMAZ3D cloud platform, launched by ADAPTA studio, a recently founded spin-off of the Politecnico di Milano.
The AMAZ3D cloud service allows you to optimize 3D graphic objects by exploiting remote computational resources. Thanks to the employment of advanced mathematical algorithms, AMAZ3D software reduces the number of polygons describing 3D graphic objects (i.e., the weight in memory), while maintaining a high rendering quality, so that highly immersive virtual worlds can be created.
Your lands in Metaverse will be very crowded thanks to ADAPTA studio. What are you waiting for to try AMAZ3D products?
Do you want to know more? Click here: https://adapta.studio/try_it/