What is the Metaverse - origins, opportunities, dangers
what is the metaverse it's a term that you've probably heard quite a lot lately we've even seen facebook change their name from facebook to meta but like cryptocurrency or nft it's a term that a lot of people are using but sometimes it can be a little hard to understand exactly what is it so in this video we're going to take a look at the metaverse how it relates to virtual reality augmented reality some of the opportunities and potentials that we can take advantage of that are going to be part of being in the metaverse and we're going to look at some of the very real dangers of the metaverse and there are quite a few so by watching this video i hope that you will get a good overview of what the metaverse is and how you can participate and protect yourself when you're in the metaverse or meta verses way to describe the metaverse is that it is a digital reality that exists outside of but is connected to the physical reality that we live in and we're not going to get super philosophical in this video where we talk about are we living in a simulation or is somebody pulling all the strings those things are very easy to answer when it comes to the metaverse one it is a simulation and two there are people pulling the strings in fact if we create content in the metaverse we can be the ones pulling the strings now that's one of the dangers of the metaverse we'll talk about that a little later in the video but what it does mean is that we are freed from the physical world that we live in to create completely different and completely unique worlds in a digital realm this is pretty exciting it can be really tempting to think of things like digital worlds and the metaverse as being something new and revolutionary when in fact they're built upon existing technologies and existing ideas it's just the time is right for us to start participating in those digital worlds because the technology has reached the point where it synthesizes and it has reached the point where the the devices used to access those worlds have come down in price so more people can afford them but the idea even of a digital world is not new back in the 90s during the cyberpunk movement in science fiction authors such as william gibson wrote neuromancer and count zero which were books that talked about going into cyberspace authors such as neil stephenson wrote books like snow crash which actually coined the phrase the metaverse more recently books by by ernest cline such as ready player one ready player two those are books that take place in a dystopian future where people are immersed in this digital world in this digital realm and other people scientists have actually built virtual reality solutions before geron lanier for example is a scientist that started a company called vpl research i think and they actually sold virtual reality goggles long before the metaverse came out it's just now we have a lot of physical products that have been digitized the ability to digitize a lot of things the tools to build virtual worlds and the tools and devices to access those virtual worlds it's technology coming together and forming new opportunities to take advantage of those ideas that have been around for a while let's take a look at some of the devices we can use to access these virtual worlds and go into the metaverse here are two headsets that i can use to access a metaverse or a digital reality now it is important to note i can go to different digital realities in fact there's really quite a lot of competition right now as to what digital reality will be dominant in the future will it just be one digital reality owned by one company or will we have preferred networks that we go to that remains to be seen this here is an hp reverb g2 you'll notice that with this particular headset i'm actually going to be covering my eyes there are some cameras on the front so you can actually get a video input of the outside world but on here i've got audio i've got the ability to speak and be heard i've got the ability to listen to audio i've got the ability to immerse myself in a three-dimensional world 360. and what i'm able to do here is i'm able to put this on my head immerse myself and this one in particular will connect up to a computer through this rather long cable and rather thick cable because that's what we need you'll also interact with that world by having a couple of hand controllers so you'll use these in that digital world to point at things to if you're playing a game to shoot at things to grab things or whatever the case may be some virtual reality headsets now will use the front cameras to detect your your hands so there is some hand motion being tracked as well but things i won't feel here are things like heat i won't feel things like uh you know vibrations so there is although you can have vibrations in the hand controllers but you're not going to get a fully immersive physical world experience yet that's where we'd be looking at things like a haptic suit that you know actually has everything there or even potentially a neural implant now that's getting really future futuristic here and i'm not sure that i'd want to be a version one neural implant myself you know could you imagine if you went to a party oh you saw version one everyone here is version two it would not be cool now this here is another headset which is very popular this is the oculus quest 2. now this particular headset is very nice because i can attach it with an optional cord to a computer which gives me the bandwidth i might need but i can download content on here and this can really act as a standalone headset that i can sort of just wear by itself i'll go in i'll use again my hand controllers in order to control the environment around me to grab things to move things and such but this three-dimensional world will be provided to me by a couple of lenses on here that'll create the stereoscopic view the 360 environment and then i can be in a fully immersive world a metaverse let's go take a look into the metaverse for this video i'm going to use my oculus quest 2 headset and i'm going to go into the actual world that i have set up for myself so you there's a lot of slick marketing demos out there but let's have a look at what it really looks like so i've gone to my main control panel you can see i have like alt space horizon venues meeting rooms these are all places i can go in the metaverse if you have a look there's horizon workrooms there's some immersed here's one called the multiverse so if i go into the multiverse now what i'm seeing in my headset is a full 360 view but what will happen is when i go into this multiverse environment it'll first ask me if i'm standing or sitting down i'm sitting down while i do this demo and if i go through you'll notice it'll take me to my own private lounge so i've got my own area in the multiverse nobody else can get in here so i'm i'm safe in this area if you would it gives me some promo materials and such but on my wrist i'm going to have a control center that's going to allow me to choose rooms and such to go to so there's some promo material here and i'll go to my wrist and i can find people there's emojis what i'm going to do is i'm going to go into different rooms there is a safe mode that can prevent other people from talking to me and such but look at all the different rooms i have so there's a whole bunch of different rooms including large public rooms there's a campus that i can go to so if i go to this campus it's basically vr in education an area that i've created a video on before but this is a fantastic area where i can go and learn about astronomy and i can do all sorts of interesting things the idea is to create an entire environment where we can learn in this vr world as i said earlier you know it really is going to depend on the content we create if it doesn't add value if it doesn't make learning easier and better and if it's not accessible then i'm not completely sold on this being the solution we'll wait and see but you can see there's some inspiring pictures and such and we can go around and take a look there's the big main screen down at the end here and i've silenced the audio in this demo because there may be other people that could you could hear but here i go in and what's happening right now is there'd be a big narration about the sun and would be able to go in learn about the solar system that's really the featured content there and i'll go back to my wrist here let's go to a public space so this is a public space where there could be a sort of grand central station if you would so i can go in here now immediately when i entered this environment i was already starting to get harassed so i've gone through and i've closed the audio i've silenced the audio but people saw me enter this space and they started uh talking to me and making jokes they weren't particularly harmful they were like you know are you basically said are you joe biden are you joe biden and i'm like whatever you know but the point is that there's no policing there's no way to edit it out i could go into safe mode which would make me invisible going back to my rooms here i can go back to my main room and i can explore different parts of the metaverse in this case here it's the multiverse version of the metaverse so there are many different metaverses out there there's horizon there's the multiverse there's different types of rooms and such it's not just one big monolithic place and if i use my oculus 2 headset to to visit these different places i can have different experiences some which are educational some which are entertainment all sorts of cool places here i am on my main page again now there's other value ads in there as well for example there's youtube so you can actually go into youtube vr and if you go to learning and technology with frank actually i have not only videos here on the main youtube channel but you can see all my videos there you can watch them in big screen but here is an example of a 360 video that i created as well so if you had an oculus headset or if you were working with a g2 headset and you had a full 360. you could visit my channel on youtube vr and you could watch me we have to ask ourselves the question now what are the opportunities in the metaverse and is it even worth it first of all there could be multiple metaverses out there different companies are going to try to create a metaverse that will attract you to their services because there's a purpose for that we'll talk about that when we talk about the dangers of the metaverse but when we talk about opportunity or we talk about using the metaverse right now it is fun it is fun to go into the metaverse and to play a game or to experience uh you know speaking with somebody from across the world or even to wear the headset and watch a movie as if you were in a movie theater it's a lot of fun entertainment hands down metaverse is fun it's fun to explore but what about uses such as work or education work are we really going to meet with our co-workers dressed as a wizard is our avatar going to be reflective of who we are is it going to be somewhat unprofessional if our avatar is cartoonish are we going to have realistic avatars and is that going to be off-putting those are questions that need to be answered we need to see how that's all going to work out now if it's something where we're getting together to collaborate on a simulation or a model and that model would be very difficult to replicate in the physical world then this could be an excellent use for something like a metaverse environment is it going to be something that we can use in education years ago there was a product called second life and in second life i could go into that world and interact with other people and there was a lot of talk about using second life in education and personally i was never really sold on it because i felt what does it benefit my students to learn from me if i'm dressed in a toga i don't think it adds a valuable experience for that student if i can take that student to a model and demonstrate something like a concept in physics or i can demonstrate something that would require a lot of equipment or would be challenging to demonstrate remotely through a webcam or through the tools we have today the things i talk about on this channel if for some reason it was difficult to do that then yeah maybe the metaverse would be an excellent place to teach them that but it also means that all of my students are going to have to have some mechanism to participate in that metaverse and i'm not even talking about any type of accessibility issues which are actually going to be a huge issue if the way that we interact with the metaverse is simply through vision and audio we're going to have to have other ways to be able to interact with the metaverse if it's going to be a tool for all people to use now it might sound like i'm actually getting a little negative on the metaverse it is cool it's an emerging technology like any emerging technology it's going to have to mature it's going to have to have architects it's going to have to have people that build value into the platform and that's where we can come in that's the opportunity of the metaverse learning how it works learning how to build within it learning how to create value for others within that metaverse environment i think that is the opportunity that could lead to a metaverse environment that will be valuable in the future we have to ask ourselves what are the dangers of the metaverse and there will be and there are dangers to the metaverse that we need to address back in the early days when the internet was first going i was super optimistic i even have my old modem here that i used to use on the internet i was super optimistic i thought what a great thing we can communicate with people all over the world we can exchange ideas we can collaborate on projects does it sound familiar that sounds a lot like the metaverse being advertised today it was going to be a great place where people could get together and as the internet became more pervasive social networks came out we thought what a great thing i can i can connect with people that share the same interests and hobbies as i do and this is wonderful well we all know what's happened in these environments they have provided all those good things but at the same time there are bad players there's bad actors in the environment there are criminals there are predators there are people that are insincere in the information that they're providing or manipulative in the information that they're providing and that's the people that participate we also have who owns the metaverse the question could be who owns the internet well it is a distributed hierarchy there are certain sites on the internet that clearly do have owners so for example the googles the microsoft's the facebook's now meta of the world these companies exist and they control a lot of the environments that we participate in and for many of these companies they are a for-profit company and there's nothing wrong with that and for many of these companies they do have a sense of ethical governance and that's a good thing however the reality is that sometimes the for-profit model and the application of your ethics can mix and cause issues what i mean by that is all the stuff you've heard in the news we could have a situation where they manipulate the information we're receiving we could have a situation where we divulge information about ourselves that are then used to provide us with services or as some people would say cause us to be exposed to a purchasing or consumer pattern that may not ultimately be healthy for us this is a large discussion about the value of technology in general but we're not just talking about a technology that we buy and use we're talking about all of the digital lifestyle products we use all being put together in one universe so instead of say meta knowing what i'm doing when i'm posting on a facebook wall or knowing what i'm doing when i'm posting instagram posts they're now going to know what movies i'm watching what music i'm listening to the people i'm interacting with on a much much more uh comprehensive level so it's not just going to be collecting data about me when i choose to participate with their products they're going to be collecting data in an entire digital world that i'm participating in and this is one of the reasons why they're racing to to get land in the in the meta space so the idea is that if they build the first space and the biggest space like they did with facebook the first social network that really took off it wasn't the first social network but it's the first one that's billions of users when they grew that network that gave them a lot of power because they had a lot of data and this is actually an area of my specialties what actually this is my day job is working with data so the idea that data can allow us to make decisions and have a lot of power over the decisions that others make is very real so this is the biggest danger that we're going to have in the metaverse which meta verses do we trust which metaverses do we participate in but don't necessarily trust and therefore limit the information that we share with them this is going to be the danger zone of the metaverse and one that i think we're going to have to look at very seriously in my video that i also put on this channel on using the metaverse in education i talk about some of the great things we can do with the metaverse to help students learn and and succeed in the things that they're trying to do to reach their full potential but it's also very aware that a lot of people under the age of 13 cannot even go legally into the metaverse at this point and that's probably to protect them and also to make sure that the sa checks and balances and safety features are there before we allow younger participants in that metaverse environment there are those dangers if there's a metaverse there will be a dark metaverse and if there is crime on the internet there will be crime in the metaverse as well now before i go i do want to talk about one quick technology that i think is actually pretty important and i i want to make sure i included in this video it's not directly related to the metaverse but it's called augmented reality with augmented reality i take a device such as this microsoft hololens 2 and this device is a little bit different than the virtual headset that you saw for the metaverse for virtual reality this headset you wear it it's actually a little bit lighter than the other headsets but you'll notice that i still remain in the physical world i can still see what's going on around me because i have two lenses here that incorporate digital elements and overlay them on top of the real world one of the challenges with the metaverse is that if i'm wearing a complete headset i can't see the physical world around me as easily as just looking around so i have to set up a parameter a guardian boundary or i have to have somebody watch me or i might get that sense of being isolated from my physical world being just in the metaverse here i still um see the physical world around me but i can do digital overlays to that physical world this is very powerful so what i can do is i can for example go on to the flight deck of a aircraft and i can look around the flight deck and then this can sense where i am and it can actually project information about the gauges and dials of that aircraft onto my eye so i can basically see sort of digital assets that are connected to that physical world these are very useful in industry today and these are very good for research as well the challenge that we have with these is that they are a bit of a pricier headset so it would be nice to see some of these augmented reality headsets come down and there is an alternative to the headset and that is using something like your phone so for example iphones have augmented reality features in them the classic example of that would be pokemon go which is the game where you go around and then based upon a geographic location you have little pokemon monsters that you fight and you get points and that sort of thing that would be an example of augmented reality that was quite a popular game and if we start building more solutions like that where we're overlaying digital and combining it with the physical i think this actually has more immediate potential than perhaps the metaverse that being said there's a lot of work being done to promote the metaverse tell me what you think comment down below do you understand the metaverse a little bit better now do you have any more questions i'd be happy to answer those for you are you planning on using the metaverse are you already there what are your thoughts comment down below like and subscribe if you want content like this and other content on how to learn and teach and be more productive with technology thank you so much for watching
2022-02-25 16:30
