Metaverse - Stages of Digital Convergence
The metaverse is depicted as the arrival of the future. The term is derived from ‘meta‘ as an implication of transcendence and the realm beyond, with the word ‘universe‘ referring to the spatial reality unfolding in three dimensions, carrying out our existence.
The metaverse is a virtual environment in the synthetic layer of reality that exists as a parallel to the physical world. The infrastructures of physical reality are being extended into the synthetic realm — creating Extended Reality — in order to create an informational sphere of operations that is beyond matter. Its concept evolved as computer-generated simulation defined through diverse concepts of collective virtual spaces, life-logging, 3D embodied Internet or spatial Internet, mirrored world, multiverse and omniverse. All are venues of simulation and collective existence inhabited by extended versions of people — their digital selves as avatars.
Currently a prevalent belief that the metaverse is a domain of online gaming is slowly coming to an end. What used to be a world of tech-savvy gamers enjoying simulated experiences, is becoming a domain of everything. The metaverse is a novel ecosystem revolutionizing service provisions in all walks of life, giving the opportunity of space-time transcendence to those who wish to apply it in their life. Will everyone adopt the metaverse? No, not everyone has the capability and willingness to release their ties to the matter, and not everyone should. Will some people get addicted, abandon their physical reality completely to feed on virtual experiences? Yes, many already do. Every person has their own reasons to join or not join and choose the purpose of joining, just like with any other previous evolutionary stages of the Web. In the end, it is just a decision and a resulting experience, no rights or wrongs.
As we speak of evolutionary stages, let’s speak of the current one. As the current convergence of realities takes place, Extended Reality is created as an extra dimension to operate in and from.
Fostering convergence between physical and virtual world will happen in three stages:
Digital Twinning
Digital Natives
Physical-Virtual Coexistence
Digital Twins
Process of digital twinning creates large-scale, high-fidelity digital models and entity duplicates of objects existing in the physical environment and re-created in the synthetic/virtual environment. They mirror the properties of their physical counterparts in design, motion and/or function. They are created by CAD (computer-aided design) applications and are bounded by a common data set that is tied to both, the physical and virtual object.
Digital Natives
The second stage will be dedicated to the native content creation. After the phase of establishing digital copies of existing objects from the physical reality, architects of the digital realm will create objects that are linked to their counterparts in the physical reality or only exist in the virtual realm. What is crucial for this phase is to create the ecosystem to accommodate the digital objects, which provides an operative foundation of an environment that allows the objects to interconnect and exist within a larger ‘digital organism‘ in Virtual Reality. How to create such ecosystems is currently a subject to research and practically still in early stages. At this point we don’t have the exact know-how that would allow us to circumnavigate the necessity of mistakes being made. The progress will be done by input techniques and gradual content creation that will author the meta-system and thus the ecosystem that is necessary to sustain the activity of Virtual Reality.
Physical-Virtual Convergence
Upon a successful establishment of a virtual ecosystem, the metaverse can evolve into a self-sustaining virtual world with a persistent and continuous reality that interacts with the physical with a high level of autonomy. This will lead to greater interoperability between VR and the physical world, but among individual metaverse platforms as well. Eventually, this will result in one open metaverse that is interoperable with all systems of physical reality — business, healthcare, education, finances and any other transferable aspect of human operations.
The impact of the metaverse on human society will be immense, with the prospects to be leading social technology of the future. Providing new avenues of self-expression, limitless interaction, not having to be tied to space and time for work or education-related activities, it will be a fertile ground for creating communities across the globe.
Obviously, the main drivers of the recent metaverse boom were the restrictions in the physical realm of space. The necessity of virtual connectivity increased rapidly, giving birth to new ways of perceiving interconnectivity and its ties to physical presence and particular locations. The demand for Virtual Reality tools, applications and communicators demonstrated just how much space-related system dependency humanity exercises — and how necessary it is to work towards a greater alternative to transcend these limitations.
These outline an approximate timeline of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, of which we currently experience the infant stages. To reach full convergence, within each stage humanity will go through several substages of cognitive convergence that will match the stages of technological development.
A gradual convergence of multiple systems will become multidimensional: physical with virtual, different layers of human consciousness into one and finally, human consciousness with technology.