Ready Player One In Real Life?

Wouldn’t you like to live in a video game? To be able to do whatever you want whenever you want without it affectin your real life? Earlier this year Mark Zuckerberg thought the same thing when he announced the next step to cyberspace through Facebook; The Metaverse.

Zuckerberg explained that the Metaverse is “an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it” and has since dubbed it “the successor to the mobile internet.”

The Metaverse sounds like a sci-fi movie brought to life. Imitating reality, through a virtual reality headset. Not only would the software have a fully functioning economy and a never-ending list of possible activities, but people would be able to work, play and talk together in this Web 3.0.

However, while the idea is all looking very promising, past conceptual explorations of Metaverses, like those seen in ‘The Matrix’ or ‘Ready Player One’, have been imagined to only end in disaster. So who’s to say that Facebook’s Metaverse won’t as well?

‘Cost’ and ‘Time’ are the primary issues surrounding the idea of a Metaverse. On January 13th, 2021, Facebook announced that to develop the Metaverse the company would need to spend 10 billion dollars in 2021 alone. The entire project will take no less than half a decade to complete, and cost 60 billion dollars, or more- excluding the cost of safety, and paying over 10,000 employees. A massive sum of money and investment of time to create something that many don't consider the world’s top priority at the moment.

While the idea of the Metaverse requires a considerable amount of time the project has good aspects as well. The pursuit of the project would be a huge step forward in regards to the evolution of social media as a whole. The Metaverse would introduce ideas that haven’t yet been done with technology, such as uploading a virtual version of yourself into a piece of artificial intelligence and having access to a wide range of simulated data.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse will be a platform that anyone can use, upload themselves onto, and play with. Of course, it will take a great amount of time and money to develop, but humanity is still taking a step forward technology-wise, so it may be a good thing. Let’s just hope it’s not the end of the world waiting to happen.