COMMUNITY OWNED metaverse

Solution To Addiction

Edited by Edith Xu and Hongjin Yang

Substance

Metaverse

Context

The topic of Metaverse has become ever popular as the technologies of AR/VR/ MR/XR are introduced to our lives, and with many Big Techs investing hundreds of billions of dollars in this digital realm, the impacts of Metaverse will change our lives from all aspects. Zuckerberg explained how the metaverse could make us “feel like” we are “right there in the moment”, without really being “there”. Essentially, it is a virtual environment of mixed reality that offers immersive experiences without the law of physics.

From 2020 to 2022, Metaverse market worth rolled up from 500 million to almost 180 billion. Employing technologies like blockchains/NFT/cryptocurrency, that aims to support a decentralized society (DeSoc); however, many metaverse platforms invested and developed at this stages are still considered centralized as they are owned by big corporations and wealthy individuals

Generating interaction with medical students

The most significant benefit of the metaverse is that it allows people to engage with one another while pursuing online practical medical courses, unlike the current one-way schooling. Healthcare will utilize it in medical education for simulation training rather than knowledge dissemination. For example, advanced hand skills and interactions need extra technology in the metaverse-based medical training, which is more successful.

(Excerpt from “The Role of Metaverse in Revolutionizing Medical Education,” published on Our Planet Dec. 10, 2021.)

AR Surgery

AR-assisted surgeries have already been performed with much success, but you often don’t hear about those in contrast to news about this or that new Metaverse platform. Being able to see where to drill inside a bone or where to put a screw can make procedures faster and safer. Of course, you’ll need better AR glasses to make that happen because the current consumer models we have just won’t cut it on the operating table, pun intended.

(Excerpt from “THE METAVERSE HAS THE POWER TO IMPROVE HEALTHCARE, AND IT HAS ALREADY BEGUN,” by JC Torres, published on Yanko Design May 15, 2022.)

Designer: Augmedics (via John Hopkins Medicine)

Digital Twins

The phrase might conjure up horrific images, particularly of scenes from iconic horror films in the 80s, but digital twins are less frightening or even less dramatic than they sound. In essence, a digital twin is pretty much an exact replica of a physical thing, in this case, a person, based on real-world data. This replica can undergo hundreds of simulated changes in just minutes or even seconds that would normally take hundreds of years in real-time.

(Excerpt from “THE METAVERSE HAS THE POWER TO IMPROVE HEALTHCARE, AND IT HAS ALREADY BEGUN,” by JC Torres, published on Yanko Design May 15, 2022.)

Designer: Arch Virtual

Designer: Philips

Reading back through a transcript from Facebook’s investor-disappointing fourth-quarter earnings call has solidified my perspective that we need a third-party, benevolent central entity for the metaverse. A sort of central digital clearinghouse that can transport me from place to place, inclusive of the platformlocked areas that will inevitably come to constitute a portion of our online selves.

The concept of the metaverse is flexible, with companies, individuals and dreamers coming up with differing exact formulations of the idea.

Still, we need somewhere to meet, so after reading a host of shots at this particular goal, I think it’s fair to say that the metaverse is a connected digital environment that is inherently social and based around individual identity.

Digging into that definition, the metaverse will be connected in that it’s online and likely dynamic, digital in that it is purely synthetic, inherently social in that it revolves more around human-to-human interaction than solo activities, and based around individual identity as it seems generally agreed that folks are going to have some form of self in the mix. Avatars, NFTs, pick your poison.

Facebook parent company

Meta is all-in on the concept, with new hardware and software for the metaverse costing the social networking giant a mint. You can understand why Meta wants to win the metaverse, with its core apps seemingly late in their maturity cycles and younger, more nimble foes in the social space doing to Facebook what Facebook did to a prior generation of consumer networking applications.

Meta needs to win the next cycle to maintain its growth, especially in light of privacy changes on iOS that are showing up in its business results. So, metaverse.

From a corporate perspective, Meta’s drive to win the nascent if not-really-new concept of the metaverse makes sense.

From a consumer perspective, I’m not stoked about Facebook winning.

Profits, centralization and the metaverse

The story of Facebook’s progression to Meta is — compressing mightily — this: It’s a social network that added more users over time from an artificially constrained genesis (college students) before morphing into a collection of major social applications built through acquisitions, then to a shared data-core with different social apps positioned on top.

Today, it’s a mega-corp with slowing core business and big hopes about the future.

Meta’s metaverse plans are, from that timeline, not small. They matter in that the company’s future growth is predicated on their success. This means that whatever Meta builds will have a strong monetization angle. Which, thanks to the company’s DNA, is fair to presume will center around advertising and a unique identity likely tied to the company’s existing account system.

Not to bang the blockchain drum this early in the day, but Meta’s metaverse plans are a bit too centralized for my tastes. Even more, I don’t want to participate in more ad-driven activities, which Meta would likely include in its metaverse future. I am already suffering from advertising poisoning, in which seeing an advert for your company in a multimedia environment makes me hate your brand, regardless of how well-targeted the promotion may be. Leave me alone.

(Excerpt from “How to ruin the metaverse? Build it around profit and centralization,” by Alex Wilhelm, published on TechCrunch February 9, 2022.)

Decentraland’s Ice Poker Parlor.

Decentraland’s casino - Ice Poker Parlor made $7.5 million in three months, attracted a third of the users to Decentraland.

The race to the metaverse is on, featuring runners and riders, including tech giants like Meta, Microsoft, and Epic, to blockchain old-schoolers like Decentraland and Somnium Space.

The only problem is that it looks suspiciously like a repeat of the “format wars” we’ve seen play out time and time again. Just look at the current video streaming fiasco. We now need to subscribe to ten different streaming services to watch the shows we actually want to watch. It’s the same old cycle we’ve seen play out in decades of centralized tech, from VHS versus Betamax in the 1980s to Facebook versus MySpace a decade ago. Now, Microsoft and Meta are squaring up in their bid to dominate the virtual space.

A dystopian vision?

Tech stock investors can look away now, but these attempts are doomed to fail. Meta’s bid to compete with Microsoft by penetrating the enterprise workspace metaverse has already landed badly. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a centralized Facebook-style social metaverse has been dubbed “dystopian” by one of the firm’s earliest supporters.

Meanwhile, Microsoft itself appears to have a zigzag approach to realizing its metaverse ambitions. Following Meta’s renaming last year, Microsoft was quick to jump in with its announcement that Teams was to be developed into the workspace metaverse of choice, leveraging its vast base of enterprise users.

Within a matter of weeks, the firm also announced it had made its biggest-ever acquisition in a takeover of gaming firm Activision Blizzard, with CEO Satya Nadella going on to tell the FT in an interview that he believes the future of the metaverse is in gaming.

So under this centralized vision, we’re going to have AR-enabled PowerPoint presentations by day and 3D social networks aimed at harvesting yet more data by night. It’s hardly surprising that people aren’t getting excited.

While big tech firms slug it out to realize their vision of what we want, decentralized metaverses and Web3 initiatives are currently attracting record investment, pulling in around $30 billion in venture capital last year. What can these investors see that Meta and Microsoft are missing? That the potential of Web3 as the digital infrastructure of the future cannot be overlooked when envisioning a metaverse.

The power of DAOs

The ideal metaverse should not only break technological barriers by offering an unparalleled user experience, but this is an opportunity to