In 2021, we began to hear more and more about the so-called metaverse, a term reflecting a somewhat new vision for technology. Since then, there have been wide and varying views on what the metaverse is and what it could be.
For a vision of a world that doesn’t yet exist, we need to look back at where we have come from, to understand where we might be going. And if we are moving towards a version of the Internet called Web 3, what are Web 1.0 and Web 2.0?
Web 1.0
Early versions of the commercial Internet date back to the end of the last century. During the 1990s, the Internet had come into being after many decades of networks joining together. The ‘World Wide Web’ became a network of millions of computers linked to each other. What soon evolved was a web, based on a repository of information: a content-focused Internet, based largely on words and text.
Initially, we would see Wikipedia as a sort of poster child for the era. But the so-called ‘big tech’ companies we are familiar with today - Google, Amazon, Facebook - took advantage of the decentralised structure of the Internet to take us to the next era.
Web 2.0
Arguably, the problems we see today with technology taking over our lives have been architected by ‘big tech’ - but this era has also had many accomplishments: communicating with large groups of friends on social networks across the world; streaming videos on any subject you can think of; and cross-platform gaming and wholescale e-commerce from virtually anywhere in the world.
Web 2.0 was a move from consuming content to allowing interaction between users. Throw in the advent of smartphones, tablet computers, and connected devices, and you have the version of the Internet that we are familiar with today, with lots of video content and messages flowing around the world. And that’s where we can start to examine what web3 is.
Web3
The evolving Internet marries the decentralised nature of Web 1.0 with the community elements of Web 2.0, but Web3 goes further. Services are increasingly built on a decentralised blockchain, which sets the scene for a number of newer technologies and applications. These include non-fungible tokens (NFTs), cryptocurrencies, and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs).
The key word here is decentralisation. Rather than data and information being controlled by corporations and governments — as is the case today — users will own and control what happens to their data and content in Web3, leading to improved security and privacy compared with the current iteration. This could eventually lead to, some say, a middleman-free digital economy.
Web3 is therefore a natural evolution of the Internet. It shouldn't matter much for you and me, except that the power of control, in theory, moves away from the larger companies and shifts more to us as individuals, so we can invest in how we want the Internet to look and feel. A prime example of this might be in gaming, where gamers themselves can invest in virtual worlds to evolve the game they love playing. While Web3 is still in its infancy, it heralds a new era for the Internet.
The metaverse
And that takes us nicely onto the metaverse - what exactly is it? The issue with the metaverse is that it does not actually exist yet. Well, not fully. There is some confusion that web3 and the metaverse are the same. In fact, they are very different. It’s just that they are being defined at the same time. Some define the metaverse as a virtual space that becomes, for its inhabitants, almost as real as the world that we live in.
We could envisage this new virtual space through a combination of three areas. Firstly, imagine creative gaming worlds like Roblox, Fortnite, or Minecraft: areas where you build and trade. Secondly, think of virtual reality environments that replicate worlds, perhaps while wearing headsets like the Oculus Quest that can transport you to different worlds or situations such as visiting another time in history, a holiday destination, or a training emulation for your job.
The final area, which perhaps has the most potential, includes overlays on your real life, or Augmented Reality (AR). There are already existing examples of this with games such as Pokemon Go, where you search for virtual objects that exist at real locations. There are also non-gaming uses - housing and furniture apps, like Ikea’s, showing what a sofa might look like in your living room, for example.
This may seem like a mashup of a number of sci-fi films - Ready Player One with the Matrix with Dune and Avatar - but it’s very much an evolving vision of where we might be moving towards in the coming years. There will be new economies built in this new era: the building of these virtual worlds, creative industries within these worlds, new types of transactions, and access to the opportunities in this metaverse or metaverses. A metaverse type experience would cover a multitude of virtual worlds with real-life AR experiences and interactions where we would simultaneously exist in an equivalent digital reality.
What could this mean for you and me? Well, you might end up in virtual team meetings that actually feel real, and there could be job opportunities to be part of this movement. Yet, some of us might be sceptical about it all, and that’s completely natural.
Whatever you think of the metaverse, it’s an evolving future state of technology and a world that doesn’t quite exist just yet. Imagine life before the Internet, or life before electricity - that scale of change could lie ahead, but we’re not 100 per cent sure what it will be like. Whatever it might become, it will be an unfolding journey, and we will one day look back and realise that we have moved to a new era.
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Rahim Hirji works in the ever-changing world surrounding education, consumer Internet, and technology. He previously founded the edtech business EtonX and now leads international growth for Quizlet, the popular global learning platform used by over 60 million people per month. Rahim also curates Box of Amazing, a newsletter covering how technology affects our lives.
