A Beginner’s Guide to Metaverse

I’ll admit, when I first started hearing about the metaverse I was sceptical. Partially through lack of understanding I’m sure, and partially through virtual fatigue. Having just come through a time where we lived, worked and socialised from the comfort of our living rooms, I couldn’t imagine ever doing those things by choice (I assume not many of us are missing the “virtual pub”?). So when Mark Zuckerberg spoke about pretty much never having to go outside again, I wasn’t keen. However over the past few months, this topic has come up again and again, and I have come to realise it might actually be a very exciting topic, and an exciting time. I’ve put together the following as a beginner’s guide for anyone who like me a few months ago, keeps hearing the buzzwords, but doesn’t really get it yet. We’re all going to be part of defining the metaverse, but first we need to understand what it is.

Important concepts:

Web3/Web3.0: Web 1.0 was the original incarnation of the internet: static webpages lived on servers, and users pulled them down to a device (probably a desktop computer) to read. Web 2.0 was an abstraction of this - with more user friendly interfaces like the App Store, and mobile apps allowing users to access and contribute content in a more simplified way with much less/no understanding of the technicalities. Social media platforms, wide-spread internet access and camera phones meant that the interaction became much more 2-way and user-generated content became king. In this era large tech companies like Google, Meta etc control much of the internet and this user information. Web 3.0 is the next step in the journey - a decentralised internet where data lives securely across multiple places and centralised control is taken away.

Blockchain: a distributed ledger where once a record is added it can never be changed and everyone can see every record. So it’s a way of storing information (such as transactions or asset information) which effectively cannot be tampered with.

NFT: a non-fungible token. Fungible essentially means something is interchangeable - a good example is a 10 pound note - if I swap you one 10 pound note for another it really doesn’t matter, what you now have is essentially the exact same thing as you started with. Most cryptocurrencies (e.g. Bitcoin), are fungible. Non-fungible on the otherhand, means something is completely non-interchangeable or unique. An example of this in real life would be the Mona Lisa. A non-fungible token is a non-interchangeable digital asset which cannot be switched for another token of equal value. In the metaverse, NFTs can be used to certify authenticity or assign ownership of virtual objects (e.g. digital art, videos, music, items in videogames etc). These records of authenticity or ownership are stored in a blockchain such as Ethereum.

Ethereum: currently the most widely used blockchain to support NFTs.

Physical/digital item: it could be said that some of the things people have started minting as NFTs have no intrinsic value and are more of a gimmick (e.g. selling a tweet as an NFT). There’s also the issue that “owning” digital art doesn’t give you the copyright or stop anyone else from having an exact copy of it. But sometimes we might link a digital token to something which already has real-life intrinsic value. For example art, property or a case of wine - anything you could invest in in the physical world. One reason we might want to do this is to allow people to invest in an item or to share “ownership” of it. In some cases people might have the option to either sell on the NFT or choose to trade it in for the real life object (e.g. swap their NFT for a real case of wine).

The metaverse: the reason I said earlier that now is an exciting time, is that metaverse hasn’t got a proper definition yet - it’s still being defined. So to start, here is a list of things I have discovered the metaverse is not:

• Fortnite/Roblox/Club Penguin: these are all virtual spaces that will exist within the metaverse - saying they are the metaverse is a bit like saying Facebook is the internet.
• Teams meeting/Webex/Skype - see above, but switch facebook for hotmail.com.
• An exact copy of the physical world: the metaverse gives us an opportunity to completely reimagine experiences without the physical and economical constraints of the real world. Rather than recreating mundane physical world experiences precisely, we should use this opportunity to innovate. Grocery shopping as an example - is there really value in me putting on a VR headset and walking down a virtual Sainsbury’s aisle, picking up shopping to put in my trolley? No. But what could I experience instead?
• Virtual Reality: this is a medium through which the metaverse might be experienced, but we should also be able to experience it through other mediums, in both 2D and 3D - mobile devices, screens etc and Augmented Reality too. The metaverse won’t work if it can only be accessed through a specific brand of hardware.

The early stage we are at now means that we all get to participate in deciding what the metaverse turns out to be. At the moment it’s a technology concept that isn't really accessible to a wide audience - that should change. And as the concept evolves, everyone needs to be involved in it’s design to make sure that the metaverse we end up with works for everyone, and is inclusive. A metaverse where some essential everyday processes become trapped behind a high technical barrier of entry could exclude elderly people for example. A metaverse which can only be experienced through specific very expensive hardware would exclude large portions of society. A metaverse designed without women involved might end up excluding us or even being unsafe for us. And so on. Therefore a metaverse which is not designed for everyone will never become mainstream, and will end up staying the exclusive domain of technology enthusiasts, gamers and crypto-bros - all valuable audiences, but not fulfilling the promise of a metaverse which could be ubiquitous.

We’re still building some of the foundational technologies that will make the metaverse work, so now is an exciting time to explore and play with the emerging tech - maybe check out an NFT auction, try VR travel or experience augmented reality (I went to vice’s awesome unfiltered history tour at the British Museum last week). I hope this brief intro has been helpful!