Author: Ming Xi
Produced by: Benz Finance
When we look up, we always feel that the stars are far away, but in fact, the atoms formed in the Big Bang are the atoms that form our bodies, so the stars are not far away, because we are the stars themselves.
— Carl Sagan
In the warm sunny afternoon, I was a little sleepy and my mind was a little tired. Suddenly, a colleague asked: What do you think of the Metaverse?
It is a very magical and refreshing thing to travel through nearly 30 years of words and keep saying them from colleagues and partners around you.
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Image source: unsplash.com
This is my Metaverse
You, a salaryman, clock in at work, occasionally work overtime, blue sky and white clouds, beautiful and ordinary.
When I got home, I put on my VR glasses, entered my private key, entered a metaverse program called "Yaocheng", and became a "professional hero". Here you have the top equipment in this space, the land under your feet is created by you, and you guard your empire and glory.
The largest trading platform in this empire is called "Uniswap". "Virtual currencies" of different "regions" and "countries" can be exchanged and circulated here. You have pledged your "money" in the largest pool here, and today is another bumper harvest day. Just exchange some "circulation currency", go to the entertainment center to buy a movie ticket called "Sky Castle", and invite a community friend or Miss AI to watch the movie together. At the end of the movie, she was given an NFT of "Sky Castle" worth 10,000 "circulation coins" through "OpenSea". The heartbeat index is another value-added system of the empire.
As night falls, stand on the highest point of the empire and overlook your city. The order, rules, ethics, and economic system here are different from those of the outside world. You are the king here, only under a pair of glasses.
Take off the VR glasses, at 2 o'clock in the morning, your account has an additional profit, and the value of encrypted assets has increased again.
So, what about the metaverse?
My imagination is like this, your imagination is like that, but the metaverse is not a space of imagination, the metaverse should be the parallel time and space of human society created by digital technology, you may be the founder, creator, or participant, metaverse You in the universe are your digital twin.
What is the Metaverse?
Why do I describe the metaverse through imagination, because at this stage its concept and form are not finalized, and all products and services involving the metaverse are explorations and attempts.
Metaverse is the Chinese translation of Metaverse. This word comes from Stephenson's "Avalanche" in the 1990s.
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The real world continues to be digitized, and we are no strangers to virtual identities (≈digital avatars). Social platforms such as WeChat and QQ have avatars with social attributes; entertainment platforms such as Douyin and Weibo have images with special personalities; Taobao and JD.com have consumer avatars. , digital records of shopping; these may have duplicate identity attributes, or may have nothing to do with the personal settings of each platform.
However, the digital avatar in the Metaverse is not an image or persona with a single attribute, but a different self in the virtual digital world.
The action in this virtual world parallels the real world and is always online. Most people agree that the "Oasis" in "Ready Player One" is the form of the Metaverse. There are fully operational economies, commodities, social networks, and IPs that compete with or even replace the real world.
In the final analysis, the form and vision of the metaverse are just a summary of the characteristics at this stage and expectations for the future. Anything that cannot be clearly defined and becomes popular is bound to cause controversy.
Carnival in the Metaverse?
Regarding the metaverse under the banner of the ultimate form of the Internet, some people believe that this is a purposeful marketing by some capital. Regardless of the original intention and purpose, where the eyes gather, there must be money.
It is understood that on March 10, 2021, Roblox Corp (NYSE: RBLX), the world's largest multiplayer online creation sandbox game platform, was listed on the New York Stock Exchange and became the first share of Metaverse. The opening price was US$45, with an increase of 54.44% on the first day, and the company's market value was valued at more than US$40 billion. A year ago, Roblox was valued at just $4 billion.
Tencent invested US$150 million in Roblox’s G round of financing, and was the exclusive agent for Roblox’s product distribution in China; ByteDance invested nearly 100 million yuan for the “Chinese version of Roblox” Code Universe.
Considered to best fit the definition of the Metaverse, Roblox connects the world through games, allowing anyone to explore the tens of millions of immersive 3D games built by a global community of developers. At the same time, Roblox has a stable economic system. Players can use Robux virtual currency to buy games and props, and creators can also earn Robux to exchange for real currency.
But what Roblox is most complained about is the poor sense of experience. It can be said that "it has nothing to do with the immersion of the Metaverse." Even so, Roblox's user numbers are pretty staggering. According to statistics, by 2020, there will already be 20 million games on Roblox, with users playing for more than 30 billion hours, and 1.5 million developers gaining benefits.
At present, Roblox, the game closest to the metaverse concept on the market, if it is defined as 100, then the "Oasis" in "Ready Player One" is 1000 or even more. Other metaverse concept games on the market may be 30, 20, or even single digits.
In addition to the UGC platform like Roblox, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. have made multi-faceted layouts and efforts in software and hardware. In 2014, Facebook acquired virtual reality company Oculus for $2 billion. Zuckerberg said: Oculus VR will first change the game, then it will change the digital society, and then it will change the whole world.
With the release of NFT, the exploration of the metaverse is proceeding at a rapid pace.
Image source: TokenInsight
According to TokenInsight data, in the second quarter of 2021, Metaverse has become one of the hottest tracks, with a total sales of $38.81 million in the second quarter, an increase of 56.05% compared to the first quarter. Among them, the average daily sales of The Sandbox among the head projects of Metaverse exceeded 100,000 U.S. dollars, and the average daily sales of Decentraland was nearly 100,000 U.S. dollars. Decentraland, as a virtual social space based on Ethereum, is an earlier metaverse positioning project in 2017. The MANA issued has become the token for player transactions. After Q2 in 2021, the addresses of currency holders have experienced a steep increase.
Recently, the project of Metaverse + NFT is even more mixed, which not only set off a heated exploration of ideas, stimulated the integration and development of digital technologies such as VR, blockchain, artificial intelligence, but also a frenzy of capital.
Postscript·Thinking
From the birth of the concept of the metaverse to the present, no matter what direction the exploration and progress are in, it can be summed up as a glimpse of the leopard. What does the leopard look like? All participants who enter the track set up and implement according to the parts they spy on, act under the banner of "Metaverse", and then continue to lay the foundation for the industry in order to survive.
Let's think about the metaverse itself first. The author wrote out the fantasy at the beginning of the article. Is that, or isn't it? No one has an answer.
However, the time and space of the metaverse must be an existence where all chains are unified. There is no "high speed" that is parallel and never intersects. , OEC, BSC, they must be interconnected and easy to operate). Obviously, this is not possible with our existing technology. Immersive experience depends on the highest possible technical standards and picture quality, especially the iteration of VR technology, and the ability of creators to provide high-quality and diverse content, which cannot be achieved by existing technology and manpower.
At the same time, if the metaverse is a virtual world parallel to human society, then the space of the metaverse also needs a set of order, rules, ethics and corresponding economic systems that resemble human society. Human society is constantly accumulating and transforming from the long history of development, so how does the metaverse build its operating mechanism? How does the "brave new world" law of the jungle advance and evolve? Do human beings really have the energy and time to build another virtual space after struggling in the real world? Is that world what humans say?
Furthermore, how does the metaverse coexist with the real world? Can they go their own way amidst mutual interference?
……
All questions and thinking are the way to go for future development.
2021 is called the first year of the metaverse. Looking back at the road ahead, in recent years we have experienced the first year of big data, the first year of blockchain, the first year of VR, and the first year of artificial intelligence... How many projects and companies that seized the fortune track have long since closed down, and there are New explorers take the lead.
The beautiful vision of "Yuan Nian" is yearning and obsessed. The beginning of every industry may originate from "idiots' dreams", and only the latecomers can find a new way at a chaotic pace.
