Welcome to the 129th episode of iPadBlog.de − here at the SCHIMANSKI ZONE − Technology, Innovations and NEWS. Again, welcome to my own personal zone, the Schimanski zone, a special part here on iPadBlog.de. This is the next epsiode with which we like to create more reach and grow for our audience. Therefore, I decided to switch from German to english language and hope very much that you accept my decision and grow together to a wider community. The iPadBlog GetTogether, further tech events, demonstrations, concerts, weddings – more and more events are taking place in virtual space. How tech companies want to expand the metaverse into a new living and working environment – let’s analyse this question and deep with me into a world that only exists in binary code – The Matrix…
Is the Metaverse a cyberpunk utopia to be feared, a mere gimmick by tech companies, or is it the unstoppable future of the internet?
In our latest tech zone episode I like to ask you: Are we loosing our soul in the near future. If you listen to the song „Califormia Soul“ you may receive a feeling for a possible answer. The situation is weird.
Download the song
We have the following points discussing in our audio show:
- metaverse as hype or serious location on the internet?
- example of celebrities
- The real world versus the digital world at a glance
In the summer of 2022, soccer player Kevin-Prince Boateng married model Valentina Fradegrada. The couple chose two particularly exquisite locations for the wedding ceremony: sun-drenched Tuscany – and the Metaverse. While Boateng and Fradegrada exchanged vows in front of friends and family in Radicondoli, Italy, an online wedding took place at the same time on the Metaverse platform »OVER«. Her avatars stood there – she in a classic white dress with a train, he in a black dinner jacket – in a virtual lunar landscape with a romantic view of the earth.
The first wedding in our Metaverse!
Congratulations, @KPBofficial and Valentina!! 💕#metaverse #overthereality #comeonovrt #wedding #marriage pic.twitter.com/P5gctBK06Y
— Over the Reality 🌐 (@OVRtheReality) June 11, 2022
Guests were also allowed: for 50 dollars, the interested public could witness the ceremony. About 82 tickets are said to have actually been sold. The celebrity wedding made headlines around the world – not so much because of the protagonists, but mainly because of the setting.
There has been a huge hype surrounding the Metaverse. The famous live tech event iPadBlog GetTogether, Weddings, concerts and even demonstrations are already taking place in the digital parallel universe. Luxury brands such as Prada and Balenciaga are present there, as are auction houses, and stars such as rapper Snoop Dogg organize private parties with exclusive guest lists. The Metaverse is a gigantic promise—“the next big thing,” as Silicon Valley tech gurus like to say. After the triumph of the smartphone, the mobile Internet is to be given a three-dimensional successor that can be accessed with data glasses.
Series: Metaverse
The „Metaverse“ is considered a gigantic promise – as „the next big thing“, as the tech gurus in Silicon Valley say. This three-dimensional successor to the mobile Internet is designed to change our reality from the ground up. Fantasy and reality merge into a digital parallel universe. But is it more than a gimmick?
Cloud computing, social media and online retail could grow into a multi-billion dollar market in the Metaverse, where completely new immersive product experiences can be made thanks to augmented and virtual reality. It’s still a long way off, but there are already a number of platforms such as „Roblox“, „Fortnite“ or „Minecraft“ on which almost half a billion people are active. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has such high hopes for the technology that he even renamed his company Meta. Just like clicking a link on the web today, you will teleport through different rooms in the Metaverse in the future, Zuckerberg said at the Facebook Connect developer conference in 2021.
A repetition of old narratives
Although the incorporeal avatars that populate Facebook’s „Horizon Worlds“ platform have now got legs, the graphics still look comic-like and are more reminiscent of computer games from the noughties. But if Zuckerberg has his way, lectures, visits to museums and even time travel will be possible in this virtual space in the future.
The model for this vision of the future is Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel „Snow Crash“. In the story, the protagonist Hiro gathers information for the Secret Service in the Metaverse, a space that projects three-dimensional images onto his glasses. The parallel digital universe that Stephenson describes in his novel is a cyberpunk utopia, a mixture of a hippie dream and the Wild West: there are boulevards, residential areas, no-go areas where laws are ignored, and „free-fighting zones where… where people can hunt and kill each other“
„Most of the stories about the Metaverse are repeating old narratives and promises that we know from the early days of cyberspace.“
Anna-Verena Nosthoff, digital researcherThe scientist Anna-Verena Nosthoff fears that this will give digital corporations even more power.
„The stories about the Metaverse are, above all, the repetition of old narratives and promises that we still know from the early days of cyberspace: the dreams of virtual harmonies and maximum freedom in a supposedly post-political, digital space,“
says die Co-director of the Critical Data Lab at the Humboldt University in Berlin. The philosopher is currently researching digital capitalism at Princeton University and has written articles on the platform economy. For them, the hype surrounding the Metaverse is above all an “economic bet on a possible future”, in which the Facebook group “Meta” is primarily concerned with “expanding its own sphere of power and using its own VR glasses from to emancipate Android and iOS«
Nosthoff notes that Meta is primarily targeting the biometric data that can be collected with data glasses. The group recently applied for a patent for a technology that uses cameras and sensors to track body poses and eye movements. If the user’s avatar gets stuck in the shop window of a fashion label in the Metaverse, customized advertising can be displayed on the data glasses.
Not only Meta, but also corporations like Microsoft, Nvidia or Epic Games are working on their own online worlds and business models. Tim Sweeney, CEO and founder of Epic Games, told the Washington Post that car manufacturers will no longer need to advertise in the Metaverse, but simply unlock a virtual vehicle that customers can then take for a test drive. Digital researcher Nosthoff believes it is possible that digital service models could be expanded and users would have to pay an entrance fee to enter a virtual world – as was the case with Boateng’s dream wedding
Notarize digital ownership
The idea of monetizing content in three-dimensional worlds is not new. With »Second Life«, there has been a virtual world since 2003 in which players can gamble in casinos or buy virtual objects such as furniture or houses with their own digital currency, the Linden Dollar. The Chinese Ailin Gräf, who at one point owned ten percent of the available land and was described by CNN as the “Rockefeller of Second Life”, has also become a millionaire in real life thanks to her real estate deals. But between the metaverse of the first and second generation lies a technological innovation that has the potential to revolutionize the network world: Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs for short as we already have on OpenSea.
This cryptic abbreviation hides a digital certificate of authenticity and ownership that is stored on a blockchain. To put it simply, these documents make it possible to certify digital ownership claims. If the Internet has been a cheap copying machine up to now, there is now a lever to attach a price tag to virtual objects – for example to a Gucci bag or Adidas sneakers with which one decorates one’s avatar. The digital fashion start-up Fancurve, in which the German football world champions André Schürrle and Mario Götze have invested, offers fans virtual jerseys. And the cosmetics brand Clinique has even published its own beauty collection as NFT.
##BILD##
Metaverse | Shrill cyberpunk utopia or realistic living and working world?
Not only fashion accessories, but also real estate can be secured using the construct. In 2021, for example, a virtual plot of land was sold for $4.3 million in the online game The Sandbox. In the Metaverse, real estate prices are sometimes called up that can compete with the best locations in Munich or Hamburg. An investor put $450,000 on the table for the property next door to rapper Snoop Dogg, who built a luxury mansion in The Sandbox. The location also counts in virtual space, but the price level for virtual properties has now reached such dizzying heights that observers are warning of the virtual real estate bubble bursting on the market.
Analogous to physical buildings, however, the (construction) works that are created from programming code are not exactly environmentally friendly. Creating an NFT alone consumes 142 kilowatt hours of electricity and emits 57 kilograms of carbon dioxide. The Ethereum blockchain, on which NFTs are stored, was recently switched to a more energy-efficient process. However, graphically demanding 3D worlds are still dependent on energy-intensive cloud solutions. According to estimates by the US semiconductor manufacturer Intel, the Metaverse could require 1,000 times more computing power than is currently available. How this can be realized in view of a global shortage of raw materials and chips is uncertain. Data centers are already responsible for a good one percent of global electricity requirements.
„The regulation of the Metaverse is much more complex, as it is no longer just about the written word and hate speech, but about the regulation of all behavior, including movement.“
Anna-Verena Nosthoff, digital researcher
So how can the virtual worlds of tomorrow be built as sustainably and resource-efficiently as possible? Who writes the rules of the game for the Metaverse? Is there a building control authority? Digital researcher Nosthoff points out that the regulation of the metaverse is significantly more complex than that of social media platforms. „The reason for this is that it’s no longer just about the written word and hate speech, but about the regulation of all behavior, including movements.“
Several cases of sexual harassment of avatars became known on Facebook’s VR platform „Horizon Worlds“, one woman even reported „virtual rape“. These attacks felt very real for those affected, explains Nosthoff, because users in immersive environments can experience what is known as “avatar attachment”, i.e. a very strong feeling of physical presence. The researcher doesn’t think much of a „safe zone,“ a protective bubble like the one introduced by Meta to protect users. Rather, she fears »that security authorities will come up with the idea of continuously and comprehensively monitoring the rooms, and that the rooms of the metaverse will develop into virtual counterparts of those publicly monitored places that we know from the analogue world«
The Metaverse is more interactive than the internet
So is there a threat of mass surveillance and a total loss of privacy in the Metaverse? Media executive Matthew Ball, who recently published The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything, thinks this dystopian assumption is unfounded. In virtual worlds he primarily sees opportunities for development and participation, for example in the field of e-learning. So you could teleport from anywhere in the world to a classroom or lecture hall. The Internet is primarily designed for the exchange of static files such as e-mails or documents, but not for interactive experiences with multiple participants. The tedious and oddly two-dimensional video conferencing of the COVID-19 pandemic has shown the limitations of the World Wide Web – not only in terms of data capacity, but also the resilience of participants. There’s even a term for it: zoom fatigue. But even expert Ball does not believe that the Metaverse will replace real interactions.
The success of the Metaverse will ultimately depend on interoperability, i.e. the possibility of taking purchased objects – such as accessories that you buy for your avatar – onto other platforms. If you buy an expensive virtual Prada bag, you naturally want to show it off in other game worlds. “How much would someone pay for a Real Madrid shirt if it could only be worn at the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium?” Ball asks in his book. If it is possible to carry possessions like a kind of virtual household goods, purchases in the five-digit range are also possible, he is certain. Kevin-Prince Boateng could then wear his wedding suit again at other parties
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