Can you give me directions to the Metaverse?

Can you tell me how to get.

How to get to the Metaverse?  The Metaverse.

    In 2003 a company Linden Lab had been successful after diligently working for several years to role out a new virtual world called Second Life.   One year before we could slaughter goblins and do dungeon raids in the worlds of Azeroth (WOW), we could create a new identity and explore an almost complete world that we could alter.  Flying was supposed to be the big thing and it was.  You could build, buy, sell, craft things, art, properties.  An astounding eight years before our children were building roller coasters in Mine Craft we could build our own properties and sell them for real cash.  We could meet people around the world.  We could create a secondary space here as our purview into the possible.  It was an ideal thought, except it kinda sucked.  I tried it for a week.  I kept thinking this is alike an AOL chat room with a game element.  I've never met anyone that was a long timer but I hear they're coming back.  Wouldn't be surprised if there's an acquisition in the future.

    

    

    One glaringly obvious problem is the health factor.  We already know sitting in a couch can make you week and plump.  We know that our lives are generally becoming more sedentary with the advent of computers and automated industry.  In those dawn days of the 21st century we envisioned it would start with screens and move to a VR headset.  Here's some important terms.  

• Virtual Reality (VR): A whole created artificial environment that you experience with a headset
• Augmented Reality (AR): An enhancement of the real world viewed through a phone and maybe someday with smart eyewear.  Think Pokemon Go.  Or if you're older than 40, terminator's red screen.
• Integrated Reality (IR): This is not a term, I just made it up.  This could be when we finally get to having game elements in our sight during real world times.  Could be as simple as a virtual assistant or a fake girlfriend.  This is often conceptualized as an end game for AR.  
• Real Life (RL) : That's just you in your normal life.  The real world.

    Since we are not spending massive amounts of time in VR now, we just have to get up off our fat behinds and go for a walk.  What if some company could pull off the stunt that created a space that many had to work in, live in, and maybe go to concerts and places they could never really afford to go.  It might start out an hour or three a day.  Then maybe climb up from there.  There's two schools of thought on how this might go.  Ready Player One tried to solve this issue by installing a multi directional treadmill beneath the players.  The basic package was a floor platform, a headset, and hand gloves.  Different glove models, player skills, response times, ect.  There was an enhanced package that had a body suit that made the whole thing feel real.  It was a nice warm vision contrasted to the lower poor areas that people in the movie had to live in.  Think smallish inner city apartments.  When the fake world is way better than the real world, where you gonna go for a reasonable price?  The more dystopian vision seen in the unincorporated man by Donny & Eytan Kollin is what collapsed the later 21st century world, a fully immersive VR experience.  They jack into your brain.  Society created a new unifying factor, the new social contract where everyone was owned and owned others like a corporation.  

    So far the dream has been elusive.  I thought Google Glass might take off but kind of fizzled after a huge buzz.  There's a local VR place in town.  It's getting there.  I saw my son playing a game making hamburgers.  Why can't he do that at home?  Do they have a cleaning game?  For me personally I'll never get over the idea that someone is watching me wig out while I have a headset on.  

    Which brings us to today.  Facebook the largest social media platform is now taking a dive and changing it's name to Meta.  What is the Metaverse according to Facebook?  It starts as something we are familiar with virtual spaces of our own custom design and VR meeting rooms.  

'Zoom in a Room.'  

It then goes on to combining the real world interactions with vr interactions.  You can project from there to here (via a smart device) and from here to there.  It's the very first baby steps of projecting or injecting two different realities.  One that really exists and one that is artificial.  

    Will this succeed where others have failed?  Based on the size and pocketbook that Facebook has it has the best shot to succeed.  Not only development budget and resources but also through acquisition they can grow this seedling.  Can they sell it to the general public?  That remains to be seen.  Can it be as indispensable as our smartphone?  

    Let's stop asking the pedestrian questions of markets and PowerPoint presentations and project what this platform can or will likely become.  It's not easy, telling the future.  When I saw Facebook for the first time I thought this is the MySpace that I really wanted.  There was a golden age where it was all about connecting with your family and sharing photos and well wishes and reconnected with disconnected family or those in other countries.  Then we came back down to Earth with the petty fights, the cancel culture, disseminating an unconstrained amount of propaganda and conspiracy theory, affecting elections and honing algos to elicit the most base emotions humans are capable of.   

    One thing people should understand that these platforms are not free.  You are paying for them with your data. It's your data that's valuable and that will surely translate into the Meta Verse.  In the HBO show Westworld there was a huge theme park created with robots that looked like people and followed scripts of story lines from the old west.  Paying visitors could stay in this fake work embedded in the real world.  After the first season you learn that the real value is the data.  They have cerebral monitors to take in brain data from the users.  The users were helping the creators create more realistic artificial personalities.  

    

    This new universe could be the new AI training ground.  Interacting with real people in an intelligent way.  Will you be paid for training the AI's that might rule your life someday.  Surely not, you might not even be aware of them.  It's also a time machine.  With a digital world you can go forward and go backwards.  You can't change any of the decisions of the human controlled avatars but you can make guesses as to how they would act and then replay the tape and see if it's true.  Once you have someone's predicted responses to stimuli down pat you really can go forwards and backwards and then use that to understand, predict, and manipulate the real world.  Or maybe it's not about the real world any more.  What if the Metaverse becomes bigger than the Realverse  Which reality is leading which reality?  If this all makes your head hurt, mine too.

    What we are seeing possible here is the fixed wire telephone or the wright brothers aircraft.  What it will become is left up to your wildest imagination.  Or darkest nightmares.  Sweet Dreams!