Extended Reality with Facebook Metaverse

Facebook would like to help shape the future of the market for extended reality and is planning numerous new jobs in Europe. As the graphic below shows, the consumer revenues of this promising technology could also grow strongly in the coming years – around 30 percent per year. The forecast includes both sales with content and hardware. Experts expect that the new and particularly fast 5G infrastructures Extended Reality could receive a thrust in particular. High bandwidths in combination with short delay times could enable a number of data -intensive applications.

Extended Reality includes the three forms of technology: Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR). is a computer-created, virtual environment. The first mass-market application of virtual reality is in the area of ​​video games. So-called virtual reality glasses (head-mounted displays) are intended to enable players to dive deeper into computer-animated game worlds. Augmented reality is defined as the projection of information and holograms in our immediate surroundings. Mixed reality is similar to augmented reality, but interaction between the real and the virtual is also possible.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced back in July that Facebook would become a metaverse company in the next five years. The online event Facebook Connect (formerly Oculus Connect) will take place on October 28th and 29th and is a virtual online event that aims to help shape the future of augmented and virtual reality. At the keynote, Zuckerberg is expected to explain in more detail what he imagines the Metaverse to be and announce the first concrete steps in this direction. “We will explore what it takes to bring the Metaverse to life,” says the XR conference website.

Suitable for:

• Facebook name change: Meta

The word “metaverse” consists of the pre -iling “Meta” (beyond) and the word stem “verses” (a regression of “universe”); The term is usually used to describe the concept of a future iteration of the Internet, which consists of permanent, shared, virtual 3D rooms that are connected to a perceived virtual universe. The meta verse in the broader sense can not only refer to virtual worlds, but also to the Internet as a whole, including the entire spectrum of expanded reality.

In contrast, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game consists of a single world. In the Metaverse, users can help shape the worlds and “live, learn, work, celebrate” there.

The term metaverse was popularized by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash. In the epilogue he claims that he invented the term for this book as a marketing gimmick, just like "Avatar".

Since the 2020s, the metaverse has experienced a new hype through the sale of virtual land (Decentraland, The Sandbox). There are also projects such as NEOS VR and Dual Universe that aim to create huge worlds that will ultimately grow into a metaverse.

Tim Sweeny, the founder of the Fortnite studio Epic Games, had repeatedly confirmed that he wanted to work on a metaverse. In April 2021, Epic Games officially confirmed plans for a metaverse project.

In July 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he wanted to convert Facebook into the metaverse.

Contributions from Matthew Ball have a particular influence on the debate about the Metaverse. His essay The Metaverse: What It Is, Where to Find it, Who Will Build It, and Fortnite[10] and articles based on it were written by Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg declared compulsory reading for his employees.

The term was coined in Neal Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, in which people interact with each other and with software agents as avatars in a three-dimensional virtual space that uses the metaphor of the real world. Stephenson used the term to describe a virtual reality-based successor to the Internet. Concepts similar to the Metaverse appeared in the cyberpunk genre under various names as early as 1981 in the novella True Names. Stephenson explained in the afterword to Snow Crash that after completing the novel, he learned of Habitat, an early MMORPG similar to the Metaverse.

The concept of cyberspace, which first appeared in the short story “Burning Chrome” by William Gibson (Omni, July 1982), was a central theme in his groundbreaking novel Neuromancer in 1984. The entirety of the common online space across all dimensions of the representation ”. In contrast to the fictional concept presented in neuromans, which was characterized by a Kartesian separation of body and mind, metavers enables its users access to its surroundings while they are still aware of their world. This is demonstrated in a technology called Invisible to Visible (I2V) developed by Nissan, which overlaps the windshield of a car with virtual information and, among other things, offers the opportunity to bring a 3D avatar into the vehicle.

Because many massively multiplayer online games have similar features to the Metaverse but only provide access to non-persistent instances shared by up to several dozen players, the concept of virtual multiverse games has been used to distinguish them from the Metaverse .

The elements of the meta verse include “video conferences, games such as Minecraft or Roblox, cryptocurrencies, email, virtual reality, social media and live streaming”. The Cyberspace above has constantly developed and encompasses various computer -mediated virtual environments. Such an expanding cyberspace indicates a digital “Big Bang”, which is powered by various technologies and ecosystems. Technologies such as the extended reality, user interaction (human-computer interaction), artificial intelligence, blockchain, computer vision, edge and cloud computing and future mobile phone networks enable the current Internet to the meta verse. The Meta-Verse ecosystem enables human users to live and play in a self-preserved, permanent and common world. Therefore, the Metaverse ecosystem takes into account user-centered elements such as avatar, content creation, virtual economy, social acceptance, security and data protection as well as trust and responsibility.

Notable platforms and developments:

• 1993 – The metaverse was a MOO (a text -based virtual reality system with a small bandwidth), which Steve Jackson Games operated as part of her BBS, Illuminati online.
• 1995 – Active Worlds, which is based entirely on Snow Crash, sells virtual reality worlds, which at least implement the concept of meta verse.
• 1998 – There is founded in which the users appear as avatars and with the virtual currency Therebucks, which can be bought with money from the real world, can make contacts and acquire objects and services. There was a shot on March 2, 2010, but reappeared in 2011 when a world only for invited users from the age of 18.
• 1998 – Blaxxun created virtual 3D communities that used VRML technology. Cybertown was an example of this.
• 2003 – Second Life was launched by Linden Lab. The declared goal of the project was to create a custom world like the metaverse, interact, play, do business and to communicate otherwise.
• 2004 – X3D is recognized by ISO as the successor to the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) as an open standard for interactive real-time 3D (Web3D). Today X3D is the standard that defines the open meta verse for 3D-web and mixed reality by combining virtual, mirrored and expanded realities with the web.
• 2004 – IMVU, Inc. is founded by Will Harvey, Matt Danzig and Eric Ries. It started as an instant messenger with 3D-avatars.
• 2005 – The University of Michigan starts in response to the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States as a fundamental judgment on positive discrimination (Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger) in order to make their campus more accessible from minorities from minorities. Vmerse was described as a revolutionary innovation to increase diversity on campus. This metaverse was provided on computers on the Internet as a combination of video, forms, embedded in a mirror world by virtual reality, and was also used for alumni relationships, donor campaigns and for emergency training. Vmerse technology was also used by the Louisiana State University, Iowa State University, Columbia University, Stanford University, Western Illinois University and others. The United States Ministry of Foreign Affairs used Vmerse as “Your 5 Steps to Us Study” to support international students in applying to US universities and was used by over 1 billion users around the world. Vmerse was founded and invented by Bhargav Sri Prakash in 2004 and is now the proprietary platform, which was adapted by Friendslearn for use in medicine.
• 2005 – Solipsis is launched, a free open source system that is intended to provide the infrastructure for a meta-severse-like public virtual area.
• 2005 – The Croquet project was started as an open source software development environment for the “creation and provision of online applications for the cooperation of several users on various operating systems and devices” with the aim of being less proprietary than second life. After the Croquet SDK was published in 2007, the project was converted into the Open Cobalt project.
• 2006 – Entropia Universe, the world's first MMORPG with real money economy.
• 2006 – Roblox is published.
• 2007 – Several social networks offer profiles and networking options for metaversse-avatars, including Koinup, Myrl, Avatarsunited. These projects were faced with many challenges that were related to the lack of transferability of the Avatar to other virtual worlds, and tried to tackle the possibility of managing several accounts via a single dashboard. (Avatarsunited was later bought by Linden Lab and then discontinued when some social network functions were added to Second Life).
• 2007 – OpenSimulator appears and develops free open source software for virtual worlds, which is a protocol compatible with second life and at the same time enables the user movement between otherwise independent installations. It is based on the client viewer of Second Life and serves as a platform for building a virtual world.
• 2008 – Google Lively was presented by Google via Google Labs on July 8, 2008. The service was discontinued at the end of December.
• 2013 – The K-Pop girls group Girls' Generation organizes one of the first virtual concerts in which the life-sized holograms of the members are projected onto a stage.
• 2013 – High Fidelity Inc. is founded as an open source platform on which users can create and use virtual worlds and explore and interact together.
• 2014 – VRChat starts as a social VR platform (SVRP), which enables users to publish 3D rooms and avatars developed with external tools.
• 2015 – Start of AlspacevR as SVRP, which enables users to publish 3D rooms developed with external tools.
• 2016 – Sinespace was started as SVRP, which enables users to publish 3D rooms and content that were developed with external tools. Rec Room was introduced as a social VR game, which was expanded to support user-generated rooms in 2017. Anyland and Modbox were introduced as social VR games that enable users to publish 3D rooms developed with integrated tools.
• 2017 – Sansar started on July 31, 2017. The platform enables 3D rooms created by users as social rooms. The avatars include language -controlled facial animations and movement -controlled body animations.
• 2018 – NEOSVR Metaverse started by Solirax. Cryptovoxels started in 2018 as a user meta-verses using the Ethereum blockchain.
• 2019 – Facebook Horizon was announced as a social VR world of Facebook.
• 2020 – Decentraland starts as a decentralized virtual platform, which is owned by its users and is operated by them. The Sandbox, a Voxel meta verse, is started by Animoca. Core is launched by Manticore Games.
• 2020 – Rival Peak, a cloud-based reality show with AI candidate in a virtual environment, is presented on Facebook Watch. Individuals or groups of spectators were able to contribute directly to the progress of an AI candidate on the show by watching or interacting via Facebook.
• 2020 – Beyond Live, a platform for online concerts, is introduced.
• 2020 – SM Entertainment, a KPOP agency, works with one of its groups, AESPA, to create a virtual universe called SM Culture Universe as a platform for your artists.
• 2021 – Epic Games initiates the procurement of funds to expand Fortnite into a meta verse.
• 2021 – Microsoft Mesh, mixed reality software that enables virtual presence via Microsoft devices such as the Hololens 2.
• 2021 – South Korea announces the establishment of a national meta-verse alliance with the aim of building up a uniform national VR and AR platform.

The Matrix is ​​a film series depicting a dystopian future in which humanity is unknowingly trapped in a metaverse called the Matrix, created by intelligent machines to distract humans and use their bodies as a source of energy.