In 2007, approximately one million people went to Second Life mass, eager to experience the web -based alternative reality based on the web launched four years before. These users wandered as customizable and cartoon versions of themselves called avatars and enjoyed a wide range of activities. They could listen to Kurt Vonnegut give a live talk, dance in popular nightclubs such as Hot Licks and Angry Ant, buy virtual and real clothes at the Armani store, visit reconstructions from famous places such as Rockefeller Center, have virtual sex and, the most Famous is specular about digital real estate. After exchanging real green tickets for dollars Linden de Second Life, users spent 100 million dollars a year on virtual purchases, much in real estate. The first investors, such as the former school teacher Ailin Graef, briefly famous under her name Second Life, Anshe Chung, had Second Life real estate portfolios with a putative value of 1 million dollars or more as the prices of the prices of the properties.
Taking advantage of the boom, the founder of Second Life, Philip Rosedale, achieved an assessment of more than $ 100 million for its implementation and more than 30 million in financing, including the money of another man who thought intensely about the Internet potentialTo change the way we live: Jeff Bezos.Bezos liked to sit with Rosedale in real life, reflecting on what Second Life could become."We were thinking that we were going to spend half of our online time as avatars," says Rosedale.Creating a world like that "turned out to be much more difficult than he believed," he says.
For a while, Second Life made it seem that metavers, an idea for a 3D immersive world originally conceived in a science fiction novel in the 1990s, had finally reached our own world.It was not so.2007 marked the popularity peak of Second Life.After that, its user count stagnated, then constantly decreased, hindered by defective graphics, slow Internet connections and the emergence of a new popular place to congregate online: Facebook.While Second Life continues to advance today, as reported, with around 600,000 users, Facebook now has 2.9 billion.Roseedale took aside in 2008. As for Bezos, he quickly focused on dominating the main current of two -dimensional internet, and Amazon never established an official presence in Second Life.
Today, another multimillionaire of technology expects to evoke metoverso and, ironically, is the same person who helped provoke the ruin of Second Life: the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.Under siege on multiple fronts, Zuckerberg has set the future of his company of one billion dollars in the creation of a metach, and last week he changed the name of Facebook to "goal."(To simplify, we will continue to refer to the Zuck company as Facebook in this story).Zuckerberg has said that the concept will cost 10 billion dollars this year, and then more in future years, and he hopes that the metach will lose money in the predictable future.The figures are large, but Facebook can withstand those losses very well: it obtained 29.1 billion dollars in earnings about 86 billion dollars in sales last year.
Zuckerberg's project is not totally new.Fragments of him have been spinning for Silicon Valley for years, as the interest of Second Life and Bezos in metaverso makes clear.But Facebook has a couple of things in their favor that others in the past did not have.One is the ability to deploy more money in the next two or three years than the total of all dollars spent in metaverso during the previous 30 years.Another is the simple fact that we all feel much more comfortable with virtual communication now, after having worked from home for much of the last 20 months."Our goal is to help Metaverso reach one billion people and billions of dollars in commerce in the next decade," said Zuckerberg at a telephone conference with Wall Street analysts last week.Get there, he pointed out, "it will be a long road."
An unlimited 3D digital world that is accessed as easily as the Internet, where we do things like hanging out in a park, playing a game, seeing a concert or suffering a work conference.
A computer scientist called Jaron Lanier coined for the first time the term "virtual reality" in the 80s, and the first applications of virtual reality were airlines, car manufacturers, NASA and the army.They were the only ones who could afford technology.At that time, a virtual reality viewer could cost up to three million in current dollars, Lanier estimates."It was expensive and difficult to devise a business model to earn enough money with a game room," he says.
The real "metaverso" term comes from a 1992 supervent science fiction novel, Snow Crash.Its author, Neal Stephenson, imagined a dystopian world where the main character of the book, a pizzas hacker / distributor called Hiro protist, travels from one side to another of its gloomy reality to a 3D virtual urban landscape, the metaverse, which isExtend for more than 40,000 miles.Stephenson's work would later influence The Matrix and Ready Player One series, a 2018 Steven Spielberg movie based on a book by Ernest Cline seven years before.
Apart from Second Life, the best known examples of metavers come from video games.The most famous example of these persistent online games is World of Warcraft, which has been strengthened for 17 years and still has about five million payment subscribers.The place is a sword and sorcery geekdom with an undeniably large social component: people have met their spouses playing the game.It is also a financial monster.Activision Blizzard, the company behind the World of Warcraft, has won more than eight billion dlaes in life for life of the game.
Snap has also deepened space, but has focused its efforts on augmented reality, a slightly different concept from virtual reality.Increased reality revolves around the use of your smartphone or special glasses to increase the real world with virtual elements.Niantic's Pokémon Gom is the best known use of AR.The key difference is that RA does not completely block reality;A virtual reality viewer tied above the head does.Microsoft has also launched to the fray, announcing just one day that would develop a work -centered metovers, where its Teams collaboration software would have RV and digital avatars.
Fortnite of Epic Games, which debuted in 2017, has probably closer to a snow crash metovers than anything else.Fortnite players see their real battle game online as a place to socialize;Catean through audio and video functions integrated in desktop computers and games consoles or through third -party applications, such as Discord.And the virtual concerts of artists such as Marshmello, Travis Scott and Arianna Grande have further expanded their universe.
The most important thing: Zuckerberg seems to expect people to access their virtual world through a virtual reality viewer, as Hiro did in Snow Crash.It is a relevant distinction.Fortnite, Second Life and most other multiplayer online games are usually shown in a PC or TV monitor connected to games consoles such as Xbox or a PlayStation.The rest of the idea of Zuckerberg's metaversus seems like a job in progress.But he has shared images of a virtual reality office called Horizon, which would take advantage of the change of pandemic to virtual work.
Zuckerberg began to lay the foundations for this in 2014 when he bought Oculus from Palmer Luckey, a virtual reality helmet manufacturer, for two billion dollars.Since then, Facebook has acquired more than half a dozen new companies focused on virtual reality, including the purchase of last week, a boutique game developer based in Los Angeles, committing more than one billion dollars for theShopping shopping ongoing.
Shortly after Facebook launched its first Oculus viewers in 2016, Vanity Fair asked Stephenson what he thought about the possibility that Facebook moved to virtual reality."There is no fixed process to predict the results and control what happens," said Stephenson, who could not be contacted for this story."At some level, it is reduced to the ability of people to act as ethical and socially responsible individuals."
Facebook, que no quiso comentar esta historia, ha perdido terreno entre los usuarios más jóvenes frente a YouTube, TikTok y Snapchat. Si bien Instagram sigue siendo popular entre los adolescentes, la aplicación original de Facebook no lo es. Una mayor atención en torno a los problemas antimonopolio significa que es probable que Facebook no pueda comprar nuevos competidores. Si quiere una aplicación para reconquistar a los jóvenes, tendrá que crearla ella misma, y Zuckerberg parece sentir que un metaverso centrado en la realidad virtual hará esto. «Estamos reestructurando nuestro equipo para convertir a los adultos jóvenes en nuestra estrella del norte», dijo en la conferencia telefónica de Wall Street de la semana pasada. Además, hablar sobre el metaverso proporciona una distracción oportuna de un escándalo de denunciantes que consume gran parte de la atención de los medios en Facebook.
The newest and most powerful microchips have improved virtual reality graphics, largely eliminating a problem that dates back to the first consumption headphones in the 1990s: their delayed images caused some people to feel nausea.But even the most sophisticated headphones of today only follow a limited part of the movements of your body.As a result, avatars within virtual reality are still uncomfortable, particularly their faces, the so -called disturbing valley effect.If we are all going to live in metaverso, it is likely that our digital self will be more attractive.
There is also what Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of the Stanford Human Interaction Virtual Laboratory, who has advised Zuckerberg, describes as his "30 -minute rule."That is the maximum amount of time he believes that someone should happen in virtual reality today."In my laboratory, after 30 minutes, everyone has to take off the headphones and take a drink of water, touch a wall, talk to a real human being, do something to reconnect with the real world," he says.But half an hour will not be enough for Facebook.Compete with social media platforms that attract people up to 60 minutes a day.And if you intend that metaverso replace all our time online today, that is more like three hours and more a day, according to data consumption of statista, a statistics investigation firm.
The price is something else.The second version of the Oculus VR glasses on Facebook, launched in September 2020, is sold for $ 299, half of what cost its initial oculus.But Facebook probably needs to continue down that price for metovers to reach a mass audience.Remember, Zuckerberg is pointing to more than one billion users by 2030 and arriving at that brand probably requires even cheaper devices.
And Zuckerberg still needs to give a reason for people to turn on the headphones.No one has yet managed to do for virtual reality what Space Invaders did for Atari and Halo by Xbox: dream of a game or some other type of content popular enough to make a virtual reality viewer feel like a necessary purchase.At the same time, Facebook must decide what type of content allow in metaverso.Considering this, Jaron Lanier, the computer accredited as the father of virtual reality, offers some dark words on the subject."If you execute [the metaverso] in a business model that is similar to that used by Facebook, it will destroy humanity," says Lanier, currently Microsoft researcher.«I am not saying that rhetorically.That is a literal and specific prediction that humanity could not survive that.
Let's say we avoid fire and sulfur.However, Zuckerberg's journey to Metaverso seems to end with a future struggle for moderation of the content that could make the current Facebook seem picturesque compared.
