12/30/2023 0 Comments Cross dj free download cnet![]() ![]() "But," he says, "it's not that easy to see exactly what the alternative is right now." Since Zuck rebranded Facebook, many people have begun to see the metaverse as an extension of the social network, Chalmers says, an association that comes with a history of troubling privacy and societal baggage. "Community is really important for building meaningful social worlds, actually building communities where people feel invested, like we're building something here," says Chalmers, who doesn't see these types of meaningful connections yet in recent open-world social metaverse apps like Decentraland or Horizon Worlds.īehind those connections, of course, are big companies. "Where the old metaverse was like a platform on the internet, the new metaverse is more like the internet as a whole, just the immersive internet."Ĭreating the metaverse - Chalmers sees just one - requires connecting these virtual worlds in a meaningful way. It's the entire system of virtual and augmented worlds," Chalmers tells me over Zoom. "The metaverse is no longer a single virtual world or even a cluster of virtual worlds. It seemed like old roads being repaved.Ĭhalmers sees the meaning of the term metaverse having shifted since he started writing his book. I wasn't sure if it was simply a new way to refer to virtual worlds, which have been around for years. I wasn't sure if there was one metaverse or many. Still, I paused when CNET's copy chief asked me for a definition of the metaverse. All these technologies get cited when companies discuss the metaverse. Now it's waxing again.Ī host of new technologies are converging: VR, AR, high-speed networks, blockchain technologies and wearables. I've watched the hype cycle around the metaverse wax and wane. I've followed as the term metaverse was stretched to peddle crypto and NFTs, market games and promote entertainment. I've covered VR and its close relative AR, or augmented reality, for a decade at CNET. I wrote another in 1998 about MMORPGs, or massively multiplayer online role-playing games. In 1996, I wrote a play about chat rooms and virtual worlds, called Utopia Parkway, in which a doctor spent his time online creating virtual replicas of his family. I've been exploring virtual spaces for years. Searches for the term "metaverse" barely registered on Google Trends before Zuck's October pitch, but soared to peak popularity shortly after. Rebranding, of course, doesn't ensure success. This story is part of CNET's exploration of the internet's next iteration. "We're at a moment in time where the things that I've been personally talking about for 23 years since I started in VR in 1999, we can do it now," he told me after I put on an Oculus Quest 2 headset and joined his class via Engage, an app for creating virtual worlds. ![]() But irrespective of what it's called, he acknowledges it's here. His avatar gliding, he explained how these playbacks will produce insights into what social life will mean in the " metaverse." Of course, he doesn't know what he'll discover, just like the many companies that are now busily touting this much hyped but as-yet-unformed next evolution of the internet.īailenson doesn't like the word metaverse. The professor and I stood as living avatars among ghosts.īailenson, who founded Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, then paused the recording and walked through the class. Except his students weren't "there." The discussion was a recording. After donning VR headsets, Stanford University Professor Jeremy Bailenson and I "stood" in front of his students in a virtual classroom, our avatars watching theirs discuss the nature of virtual existence.
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