Metaverse 2.0: Where the metaverse meets hyper-reality and infinite possibilities
Mainstream adoption of the metaverse will require more than a dead-eyed avatar and high-quality graphics. The world met the first metaverse in 1992 when Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash depicted an online world that users could only access via virtual reality (VR) goggles. Stephenson described this universe as a place where users could receive computer-generated bodies, hang out with friends and attend events like concerts. The 2018 film Ready Player One revisited this theme, emphasizing that the metaverse would overtake the real world and become the place where people spend most of their time. Currently, however, the metaverse and VR experiences are a far cry from how they were imagined in science-fiction media. Today’s graphics on metaverse and VR platforms don’t provide the realism that many would expect from a digital immersion experience. According to an article in Fast Company, the dead eyes of Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse avatar in Meta’s latest release suggest a graphical qua...