The 4 types of Metaverses

Last year, “Metaverse” was one of the biggest buzz words around. The hype was so much that we should have been living in the Metaverse by now. Every company jumped onto the bandwagon and seemed to have a future offering or solution. Facebook changed its name to Meta.

It seems like a Grade 1 disaster today. We are all still where we were at that point. Meta’s stocks tanked and they’ve had to fire a record number of employees. It seems like the Metaverse is far away.

Maybe one of the reasons for this is: What type of Metaverse will we live in? What type do we want? What type is going suit the human race? Once clarity on that front is achieved, we may be able to go forward.

Here are the various kinds of Metaverses that we could go in for:

MetaMatrix: This one is for couch potatoes. Those who would want to do nothing and sit or lie down all day. All you need is a comfortable augmented reality headset, and you are set for the day. The best example of this is the Matrix, where you can enter a virtual world and do absolutely nothing without moving anywhere. James Bond film Die Another Day had a similar machine where dreams are induced in the waking state.

In Strange Days, “memories and physical sensations” of one person can be played directly into the brain of another person. Philip K. Dick adaption Total Recall can implant all kinds of fake memories altogether. You could spend your whole life living in an Inception kind of world.

MetaReadyPlayerOne: This one is for the fitness freaks. Here your actual physical movements would match the ones in the virtual world. You would need an augmented reality glove or haptic suit along with maybe a treadmill and enough space to move around. This has been explored in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One.

Ninetendo Wii experimented with something like this and had games where your physical movements matched the virtual one. The original game in Shah Rukh Khan’s Ra.One was something along those lines.

MetaAR: This one is for the outdoors, where you can carry your virtual world with you. Google Glass tried starting this but was abandoned due to privacy issues. Meta and Ray Ban have got together to create AR glasses. In the Sci-Fi film They Live, when you put on special glasses, you can see who all the aliens are and what is the propaganda message behind the real-world offline message. You may have seen its myriad memes.

MetaHolo: This one will require holographic projections all over to create a virtual world outside, which will be the physical Metaverse. In Back to the Future, a holographic shark from Jaws 19 frightens our hero. In Minority Report, a virtual computer screen pops up which is faster than the original. Imagine if everything went holographic inside your home office and the outside world.

Brain in a vat: If you could spend all your day in a Metaverse, will you even need your own body? If there was a way to separate your brain and put it in a vat connected to the Metaverse, you could gain immortality. This simulation could go on forever.

Certain proponents of the Simulation Theory (Silicon Valley maverick Elon Musk, podcaster Joe Rogan and Dilbert creator Scott Adams being some of them) say that has already happened and you are in fact living in a Matrix!