The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Metaverse

Facebook recently changed its name to 'Meta' in order to position itself at the forefront of a new digital frontier called the metaverse. But what the heck is the metaverse, and what can it offer us mere mortals who do not inhabit the shiny Silicon Valley bubble?

- By Dr Aleks Krotoski. Photographs Shutterstock, Alamy, AKG Images, Linden Labs and Roblox

WELCOME TO THE METAVERSE

In the beginning the metaverse was created. And to borrow from Douglas Adams this has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move”. In truth the metaverse was neither good nor bad and ever since its creation it's been imagined as place of extremes - either a utopian horn of plenty, brimming with creative expression and untold wealth, or a dystopian cyber surveillance state, leaning in to systemic abuses of power and inequality. When you start to dig in, it becomes clear that most of the people making these claims have never actually been in a metaverse. If you do go there yourself, you'll find the answer lies somewhere in between. Let's take a look inside...

WHAT EXACTLY IS THE METAVERSE?

Put simply, the metaverse is a whole lot of digital stuff that runs parallel to our physical life. That might sound like the internet, and that's because the metaverse is a bit like the internet, only with more dancing. Bear with us.

The metaverse is essentially a collection of virtual worlds, where users can meet, play games, chat and buy stuff. Mark Zuckerberg recently made the term famous when he changed his company's name from Facebook to Meta. At the same time, he showed off a new vision for the metaverse where you could be thrown into a virtual video call at any moment. Terrifying. This universe was accessed via virtual reality goggles, but today some ‘metaverses' already exist in video games like Roblox, Minecraft or Fortnite. A metaverse can even take hold in augmented reality spaces, where objects from the virtual world are projected into the real world via our screens. In short, metaverses are virtual spaces that we coexist in, free from the constraints of our fleshy meatsuits.