8 January 2022 | New Scientist | 41hang out with friends, go to nightclubs, and
buy and sell items. A large amount of ink was
spilled on the dawn of a new world that would
in time supplant our regular one. In time,
it just... didn’t. At its peak in 2006, Second
Life had a gross domestic product (GDP)
of $64 million and a million users. But it
quickly petered out, and is now inhabited
only by a diehard few.Reality plays catch-up
Why so? “The infrastructure just wasn’t there,”
says Steve Benford, co-founder of the Mixed
Reality Laboratory at the University of
Nottingham, UK. “The vision was a long way
ahead of what could be done.” In the UK in
2002, there were just over a million broadband
connections, compared with 27 million now.
The most powerful commercially available
computer microchips had some 220 million
transistors; the figure today is 40 billion.
“Now the infrastructure is beginning to
catch up – and perhaps parts of the metaverse
can be delivered,” says Benford.
Perhaps. “There are many different
technologies that enable this greater vision
of the metaverse as a convergence of physical
and digital – or our digital lifestyles catching
up to our physical lives,” says Cathy Hackl at
the Futures Intelligence Group consultancy.
Some, such as virtual reality goggles and the
blockchain, already exist. Others, such as
haptic technologies to make virtual touch
experiences feel “real”, are in development
(see “Keystones of the metaverse”, page 42).
That doesn’t mean the technology to make
a full-fat version of the metaverse is anywhere
near ready, though. For a start, internet speeds,
while vastly improved, still lag behind what is
needed. “There’s a lot of data to ship around
in the metaverse, and it has to get to a lot of
people globally,” says Benford. “You’re going
to need amazing levels of connectivity, 5G
and beyond,” says Hackl. That will require
equipment such as edge computing, which
aims to distribute the computation done on
cloud servers more widely and bring it closer to
individual users, as well as machine-learning
algorithms that are capable of responding inFor the company now known as Meta,
you can see the attraction in the metaverse.
The firm currently makes its money selling
advertising based on our interactions with
Facebook, its core app. But that only gives
the firm visibility over the parts of our
lives that we choose to put on Facebook.
If our entire lives – or at least a far greater
proportion of them – are conducted online,
the opportunity to make big bucks selling
advertising becomes that much greater.
Facebook’s metamorphosis certainly amped
up the metaverse hype. Almost 160 companies
mentioned the metaverse in their earnings
statements in 2021, according to financial
research firm Sentieo, 93 of them after the
Facebook rebrand. “It’s a lot like when the
‘internet of things’ was first coming about,
and the phrase started to be on everybody’s
lips,” says Nick Kelly, who researches
interaction design at Queensland
University of Technology in Australia.
For Kelly, the metaverse is just the latest in
a continuum of technological development
that includes the gramophone bringing
the sound of live music into people’s living
rooms and televisions pumping out alternative
audiovisual realities. “It’s about this trend we
have of designing new experiences,” he says.
The core vision in this case is to reimagine
the internet and all the services as a physical,
three-dimensional thing with a spatial reality
that we – or rather our digital avatars – can
navigate. “In this future, you will be able
to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at
the office without a commute, at a concert
with friends, or in your parents’ living
room to catch up,” wrote Zuckerberg when
announcing Facebook’s rebranding. That
virtual life could seamlessly blend with a
“real” one: you might “walk” along to your
favourite virtual ice-cream parlour, say,
interact with a virtual assistant to pick your
flavours – then see it arrive at your real door,
couriered by a real person.
That detail might be novel, but there is
nothing particularly new about the basic idea.
Back in 2002, before Facebook even existed,
games studio Linden Lab brought out Second
Life, an immersive 3D world where you could >
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