METAVERSE: A TRANSITIONING
INTO A FULLY DIGITAL WORLD
By Shayan Alam Khan
We all have witnessed “high humans”, who blew all day and envisioned their journey in their minds. However, they get serious health issues after consuming it at a certain point, along with money wasted and addiction to that drug as well.
How about a world that is beyond the future, animated, fun, and highly addictive with only a trivial sum of money? Where you can do anything, you wish. Sounds great?
What’s Metaverse
“The metaverse is a massively scalable, persistent network of interconnected virtual worlds focused on real-time interaction where people can work, socially interact, transact, play and even create. It uses advanced virtualization and technologies (AR, VR, Haptic Sensors, etc.) to fully immerse the user into the virtual world” (Xu & Tao, ASSSD 2022).
Meh! Man, these book definitions bore me to tears whenever I read or try to memorize them. Allow me to explain, so as not to bore you, Lol!
The Metaverse is the place where imagination becomes reality, whether through animation or not, and where technology and people interact in a myriad of ways.
See! That’s how a concept is defined, rather than in nerdy and boring terms.
Example
We have all seen in movies, like, “The Matrix”, “Free Guy”.
The Free Guy movie depicts gaming as a reality. I know, that’s a little hard to comprehend. Consider playing GTA, the world-famous game in which you are free to roam, and complete missions etc., Metaverse gives you the ability to be a character in the game, so you can feel the character that represents you! Nothing can stop you from killing anyone, stealing a luxury car, stealing a bike, being on a private jet, enjoying the bar, whatever you want, and how you want.
In the movie, players are free to do whatever they want to do. Through the metaverse, the character can live an ACTUAL LIFE as though they are living it in the real world!
The Support System
In the above image, the character is wearing sunglasses, yet the sun or solar eclipse isn’t really in front of him. In any case, before your question arises, let me tell you, sunglasses are basically the Metaverse Transport thing. You got it correct. There would be some things that are needed to support the entire process so you can enjoy your desires through metaverse. That would be a super-fast internet connection, massive and strong storage, and handsets like Oculus or gloves which support.
How Do You Pay
Up till now, we have paid through cash, PayPal, or through banks. BUT! There is a big question mark in the metaverse world, how do we pay for features or anything in the metaverse world?
The world is practicing digital currency nowadays, some countries allow to do the transaction in digital currency AKA Cryptocurrency. The biggest cryptocurrency up till now is Bitcoin and then the list drops down like grocery bills. Recently the market has crashed severely but it will recover soon. Cryptocurrency will play a major role in the payment system of the world in upcoming years, especially in the metaverse world. In fact, the world has started this thing and it’s playing its major role in the field.
Professional Life
Well, everyone likes to work from home, except extroverts. If all the institutions allow their employees to work from home or take advantage of the technology, they would happily do it by availing services of the metaverse. How?
You are sitting at home, lying in your bed in pajamas and suddenly the CEO or your boss called a meeting, you would immediately get up, dressed up etc., but here you would simply do, create your avatar, and suit him up and put him in a virtual conference and done. You are attending a meeting while lying in a bed. LOL!
But they cannot see you, they only can see your real avatar which is exactly spitting image of yours. It also moves, dances, and normal hand gestures like in the reality you use to do.
Facebook in Metaverse
When Facebook rebranded itself, after some time, they arranged their meetings in a metaverse world, where all their participants including Mark Zuckerberg, presented themselves as normal avatars like we have on Snapchat, and conducted their meetings, while enjoying nature also.
You have to wear the oculus and remote to control yourselves.
Well, you are thinking this OCULUS thing and its remote was innovated a few years ago, you might be wrong. It was invented in July 2012.
The Negativity with Positivity
Okay! The future is beyond us, so let’s come back from it, don’t be a voyager, how are we going to pay taxes, look for a job, get married, and have kids since everything is going to become digital?
You can’t have kids digitally? The battery limit can be set in order to get a notification. The headset would turn off after a certain amount of time, or when a certain percentage of the battery has been depleted to live your life in reality.
The Web-Series
You can better grasp this concept by watching the TV series called “Black Mirror”.
What’s Next
The development of metaverses is still in its infancy but with accelerating developments, billions being invested into this space and given a huge push due to COVID, it will soon be an integral part of our life. Even Bill Gates estimates that in just a couple of years, most of the work and meetings will be done in the metaverse instead of physical meeting rooms and business trips.
Social Media Ethics
By Shayan Alam Khan
We all have seen in movies and heard from parents, grandparents or great parents that 20th century was considered as the simplest era. The life afterwards was so simple, but expenditure was big for a family, because majorly all families had 5-10 children, so you can think of the expenditure. But there was absence of social and family ethics. Anyone could easily interfere in anyone else’s life specially the elders, like they had a right to interfere.
Technological Revolution
That era has taught us many things, for example, how to respect elders and not to disobey them etc. But! There is a border in human beings also. We need to learn and teach others respectfully, no matter they are our elders or not, that human beings do have some borders in their life. You cannot impose your irrelevant decision on your priors whether they are your children or your blood relatives.
OK! In 1994, the smartphones came into being in the world. The very first app for social media platform was invented in 1997 named as ‘SixDegrees.com”, which allowed its user to set up the profile, creation of friend lists and to send message just like Facebook (which wasn’t there at that time).
The cell phone wasn’t enough common in sub-continent at that time, so the people didn’t know how to react or how to swallow the start of technology revolution, not even the younger generation at that time. The Nokia 3310 was the biggest hit at that time but was too much simple, even the janitor or farm people knew how to operate it.
With the advent of 21st century, the revolution has begun and goes on till end of the world. The tech giants, like, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google, LinkedIn and many more have given the world more and more comfort and ease but created the black hole and heaven for cyber criminals at the same time.
The study makes its way like a water, it got spacious and created many more opportunities especially in technology. The technological revolution goes on, the black hole is expanding more and more in the form of social media. WhatsApp, majorly public messaging and calling app has taken place of various application worldwide, for example skype. Skype use to be great at the moment, but since the acceleration kept increasing the various apps lagged behind.
Attention Concerns
Following are some areas of concerns that need discussion for increasing awareness and implementing country-wise cyber laws and personal privacy governing use of social media apps.
- Data privacy
- Transparency
- Ethics in Communication
Data Privacy
Since we all got invaded by our elders in our personal life privacy still in 2022 just like in 20 centuries, same happens but digitally. In today’s era, as we discussed earlier, the criminals like hackers are roaming freely and are much more talented than gov IT ministry professionals. They can easily put their nose in our main accounts like Facebook and easily can hack. One of the techniques I heard is that, they can put the “sheet which obviously disguised in our like, for example, on google, and once we login, they can easily know what password email and verification question we did, just like in movies, they put plastic transparent sheets on passcode machine to get the passcode and once the guard moves here and there, they can easily pull it out. But still, we can deal with the hackers whether they are black hat or white hat by learning the skill of cyber security or by contacting the authorities.
* Reference: Escape Plan movie.
Transparency
Transparency is one of the most important things in business or in routine formal or informal conversation or assignments. If it is missing, there would be a major flaw or disappointment in near future. Number 1 rule is considered to be transparent in business for success.
Ethics in Communication
As we take care of feelings for other opposite persons in the daily life while we meet them physically, we should take it with care, also when we meet them digitally. Now, in these current days, there is a vast technology which can help us physically represent in front of others like in “Metaverse”. We and other people have to learn the art of conversation to be straight forward, we cannot allow the people to deliver the bad news and throw it straight away, instead, it has to be the good and positive and rephrased in a way that it becomes professionally deliverable. Personally speaking, if emoji’s haven’t been invented, it always feels like we or opposite person is shouting or scolding or being rude with us. The emoji’s helped us too much to share our facial expressions in chat “written format”.
For example:
- You are fired, no need to come from tomorrow! (bad straight forward way)
- You can find more good and professional environment rather than the one here. You can find the more ways and be able to unlock your brain gates and can explore your talent and potential by switching to new place and by meeting new people and working in more professional environment which may be flexible, and comfortable (Good straight forward way).