At the moment, there’s not one unambiguous definition of the word. Rather, there are discussions about what the metaverse could be, what it’s not, what it should be, what it has to be, and what comes along with it. If you ask Matthew Ball, whose essays about the metaverse made big waves in 2020, the metaverse is a “massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds which can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data
, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments”. (Source: www.matthewball.vc/all/forwardtothemetaverseprimer)
Even though big tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), and Jen-Hsun Huang (Nvidia) are investing billions into it, the metaverse is still just a thought experiment. Nevertheless, it has a couple of distinguishing features that set it apart from the Internet and technologies like augmented reality, extended reality
, and virtual reality. Matthew Ball emphasizes that it’s not just an extension of the Internet but a completely new form of computing. In the metaverse, digital spaces don’t exist parallel to “reality” - instead, they are a fusion of cyberspace, virtual reality, and the physical world. Mark Zuckerberg calls it the “embodied internet”, which users don’t just look at on a screen but actually inhabit. (Source: www.bbc.com/news/technology-57942909)