What is a metaverse?

Choose language in the Google-box below. Some translations may be flawed or inaccurate.

After Facebook’s founder changed the name of the company, which is now called ‘Meta,’ many people started to talk about metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg posted a lengthy video in October 2021, in which he explains what metaverses will be like when the technology will come to a few steps further.

Zuckerberg is not the first to talk about metaverses. Probably it was writer Neal Stephenson who used the word metaverse first in the novel ‘Snow Crash’ that came out in 1994.

Some believe that the metaverses are already here. There are examples of children celebrating their birthdays inside the Roblox gaming platform. Then they show up there with their characters and chat and play together. Everything takes place digitally, and guests are sitting in separate homes. Concerts have also been held inside Roblox.

Metaverse is thus a more advanced version of internet communities that have been here for decades already.

In the video below, you see an example of how to meet colleagues in the form of avatars.

The arrangement chops and coughs a little, but it gives a hint of how it can be.

Below is another example, where the glasses are slightly lighter. If you have a digital guest in your office, it appears as if he or she is sitting in your guest chair. You don’t meet fully digitally, but reality and the artificial world merge.

The fact that merging of reality and the digital world can also be found in some children’s toys:

• A digital dinosaur can sit in your kitchen
• Drive a car in the living room, with a digital track
• Find digital fantasy animals along the sidewalk

A three-dimensional artificial reality

The idea of a metaverse is that it should feel more real than what the internet is giving us today (in 2021). Today’s internet is experienced on flat screens. Not only that, most of the screens are small mobile screens. Metaverse should, when technology has come far enough, be experienced as more three-dimensional, but then in the first place, you need VR glasses.

Instead of Zoom meetings and Teams flat-screen (2D), as we all got to know during the corona pandemic, you’ll get an experience of meeting in the same room (3D). Maybe the meeting participants have sensors on their bodies, maybe you’re participating with an avatar, maybe you’re wearing 3D glasses with a camera.

Some of these already exist, at least in part. In games, people can participate with their avatars and chat with each other. As I said, there are VR glasses, but it hasn’t hit on a large scale. There are things that are referred to as the ‘future’ when they are invented, but that does not necessarily become popular. 3D movies have been able to watch in cinemas for decades, but people usually choose 2D.

In a metaverse, you’ll be able to lift a digital marker in the meeting room and get up and walk to the board and write something. And the other meeting participants will be able to see that you’re doing exactly that. Instead of using a physical keyboard, you’ll be able to tap your fingers right on the table when typing. Well, part of this you can already do when you put on VR glasses and create your own digital office.

Here’s an example of a digital office from 2020, a man sitting at home during the corona pandemic testing VR glasses:

Below is a clip from August 2021. A man is testing Facebook’s (Meta) virtual office meeting space Workrooms, where one participates as an avatar. You can also use your physical keyboard inside the digital world. Notice the small picture at the bottom left corner of the film. It shows what’s going on in real life.

In this video,  you can see Zuckerberg, and his avatar, attending a meeting for journalists.

For now, the word metaverse mostly seems like hype, but Facebook, or Meta as the company is now called, will spend large sums of money on developing new technology and new meeting places. And many other companies will probably do the same because it’s often a matter of being the first to come up with new technology to get a lot of users.

People buy buildings and properties that don’t exist

Today, there are sites that have posted 3D maps, for example, of New York. And people can buy properties on the map. Even when you played the board game Monopoly at a forest house, you could buy properties that exist in real life. But in some metaverses, you have to spend real money. What you buy is the digital version of the property. People can come to visit the digital city and look at the house that you have bought.

Here there is a man who shows how to buy such properties in different metaverses:

Why would you be interested in buying a property in a digital city? Well, it may be that the area is popular to visit digitally and that you want to start a store in the building because there are many digital customers nearby.

Or maybe a celebrity has bought the property next door and you’d like to talk to the celebrity? Every morning you sit down on the stairs and wait for the celebrity to go out to walk the dog in the neighborhood, and then you have the chance to have a chat.

Or maybe the celebrity will walk his/her elephant? Yes, in an artificial world anything is possible. The celebrity is real in real life and may have spent a lot of money to buy the artificial elephant found in a limited luxury edition. It is no longer enough to show off with expensive clothes, cars, and watches in the real world, it is a matter of impressing also in the metaverses when walking around with his/her avatar.

And here, too, you can create and hang digital products that others want to buy. Or you can have a digital store that sells physical products inside the metaverse. Many of today’s online stores may need to create copy shops that they place inside the metaverses, if that’s where people are staying.

When a website sells digital properties in an artificial version of Trondheim city, another site can also do the same. A digital version of your house can be sold many times in the metaverses. It doesn’t help to say, «Hello! Stop, it’s my house!», because it’s only in the real world that you own your house. In the artificial world, it is the website owner who owns the whole city and can sell house after house, whether the site owner copies a real city or just uses his imagination.

What ethical or financial challenges this will create is not easy to guess.

There may arise some unfortunate overlap between the metaverse and the physical reality. When Pokémon Go launched, people climbed over hedges and fences and walked into private gardens to catch up on some points from the digital world.

The same may happen with the metaverses. If a building becomes popular in a metaverse, perhaps people will flock to the building where it is located in our physical world.

The problem already exists today, without it being linked to any metaverse. In a book with suggestions for walking in nature, there shows a mountain farm with a nice view, and the authors suggest for readers to head there. But the farm is a resort where the owners do not want visits by tourists. The owners have filed a lawsuit against the publisher.

The police, already patrolling in our physical world and on social media, will have even more to do when the metaverses arrive.

Will the metaverses be run by dictators?

Photo: Today’s social media and tomorrow’s metaverse are controlled by corporations that can quite freely set rules of conduct and punishment on their platforms. Photo: Shutterstock / Peyker.

Whoever owns the metaverse can make their own rules for the inhabitants. That’s the way it is in games today. In games, other participants can kill your game character and you’re out of the game. In metaverses, it’s more serious, because you may not only participate with a game character but as yourself in an artificial version.

You might be joining as an avatar that looks just like you. With sensors on the body, people can see the body language that you are expressing right now at home in the living room. If you shake your head now, your avatar will shake your head in the artificial metaverse city. Your voice is real because you have a microphone on your glasses, and your avatar’s mouth moves and shapes according to the words you utter. Everything looks very real on screen for the others; it is as if you are present in the city or the job meeting with your body. Maybe it shakes your game controller when you shake hands with someone in the metaverse.

Then you take a walk in the digital streets and look for some friends. You go into a shop and buy a poorer version of the celebrity elephant and rush on to a concert where you wriggle your ass and throw your hair so that the person ten digital meters away sends you long glances.

Many people might get super engaged in this. Imagine having such real-life experiences while actually working overtime in the office or alone in the dorm. You don’t even have to go out to shovel snow off the stairs.

But to a greater extent than in games, several ethical questions may arise in the metaverse landscape:

Ethical questions about metaverses

• What rules can the metaverse owner set that everyone must follow, whether they are digital citizens, concert visitors, or visitors as guests in the social arenas of the metaverse?
• How much new personal sensitive information will be collected?
• To what extent can one be scammed, stalked, bullied, and abused?
• What rights will you be granted?

For example, the metaverse owner may decide that if you spray digital graffiti on the neighboring wall or say something ugly to someone, you need to stand in a pillory in the square for a week. Well, actually you are sitting at home in the apartment in Bergen, but all your friends and many strangers will see that your artificial self is standing in a pillory in the square in the metaverse. They’re going to scold you as you did in the old days. And the scolding is real, you’re going to hear people’s voices and what they say. And when you meet your colleagues in the physical world the next day, they might want to stare at you and sit down at another table in the canteen, because you behaved so badly or stupidly in the metaverse.

Well, this was just a fantasy. But some of this we already have today with social media. When you wrote yesterday that the Prime Minister is an idiot, you wrote it in a kind of simple artificial world. Already today there is a certain combination of the physical and the artificial world.

And already today, the owners are a form of a dictator. Facebook and other major social media sites can freeze or delete your account at any time. You have few rights because you have joined for free. The dictators have also made themselves inaccessible, you can’t call Facebook and ask why on earth your account is closed. You don’t get help from Norwegian supervisory authorities either because you haven’t bought anything, you’re not a consumer.

What civil rights will you get in the metaverses?

The owner of a metaverse can set the rules. The metaverse owner may copy China’s points system of social behavior or the old caste system from India. Presumably, that won’t happen because it will attract fewer citizens and less money to the metaverse. Nevertheless, there will be some rules and frameworks such as in today’s social media that, for example, have filters that remove swear words and decide what you’ll see in the feed.

Time will tell what the algorithms can be used for in the metaverses. Maybe your dancing at the concert is interpreted so that you are offered dance lessons because artificial intelligence discovered that you were dancing awkward and old-fashioned?

Will collect even more personal data

What kind of information should it be allowed to collect in the metaverses? In the future, your boss might call you into the office and say that the metaverse has reported that you seemed somewhat distracted in the last customer meeting, you only got six out of ten possible points according to the artificial intelligence that follows you every single second. Well, this is just an imaginative example. But still, where does the line go?

Should it be allowed to copy your body language so that anyone can buy the way you move and use it on their own avatars? What do you really own? Do you own your voice and your appearance? Do you own information about who you flirt with in the metaverse?

It’s not just Google, Facebook, and the other global players that collect data. In Norway, there is something called legal deposit (avleveringsplikt), which means that the State should have some copies of all books that are published, in addition to postcards, price lists, and much more.  Will today’s legal deposit will be extended to speeches that you give in the square in the metaverses?

The dictator earns the most

One may discuss how much in a society should be left to democracy and how much should be left to private or public petty kings. With the metaverses, even more artificial communities and meeting places will emerge. One should have a debate about how much dictate it should be allowed to.

When the blogs arrived, the blog owners were solely in charge and decided for themselves which comments to delete or not. And I guess most people agree that’s perfectly fine. Newspaper owners could do the same over a hundred years earlier – the newspapers decided which reader-posts to print. And a store owner can today evict troublesome customers. You decide a good deal about your property. I’m sure most people think this is just fine. But a metaverse is much more extensive and can intervene more in people’s lives, and there is a need for a larger debate about the framework.

On the one hand, it’s nice that the platform owners remove accounts belonging to criminals or others who violate the policy. But on the other hand, the owners of social media have made themselves inaccessible to honest people. They can close your account at any time just because an algorithm has cracked and misunderstood your post. You don’t get a proper explanation and have little chance of complaining. Is this how it’s going to be in the metaverses too?

You may think it’s completely voluntary to join a metaverse, so people don’t have the right to complain, it’s just opting out. But it’s not that simple. You may have put in a lot of work and money when the conditions were favorable, and then everything is turned upside down when the dictator changes the rules in a heartbeat.

There’s a lot of good things about metaverses. For example, in the events arranged in the metaverses, you’ll be able to virtually meet experts who never come to Norway. It will be like participating as a guest in today’s webinars. You’ll meet friends and colleagues and have fun. And for the most part, I guess people will act like in real life. But problems may arise because you have fewer rights.

Non-profit metaverses

The communication app Signal is created by a nonprofit organization. The program codes are open and no personal information is collected.

There are also groups that offer something similar to Facebook and other social media but are run as non-profit organizations, or where power is spread over many (decentralized). For example, Mastodon and  Diaspora.

Non-profit metaverses will also be created, not just non-profit social media. But maybe they’ll come a year or two after the metaverses established by the global data companies. Often it is those with the most money who comes out first.

The question that you may ask yourself is whether to throw yourself into the first metaverses to come or to wait until there is a metaverse that advocates better fundamental values such as the least amount of personal data collection and where the rules cannot be changed from one day to the next.

Metaverses will provide people new opportunities to make money

But what will entice many to participate in the first metaverses without reading the small print in the terms and conditions is that it is fun and exciting and that it not least provides unprecedented opportunities to influence or make money. You can sell game skins, have an online store, run a digital museum, or arrange concerts and standups. Or sell advertising space at the expensive home you bought in there. Or be an influencer.

Surely, the owners of the metaverses will take their share of all turnover, as Apple does in its online app store, yet there will be great opportunities to make money for many.

Do you dare to trust the promises of the big companies that have time and time again been fined billions of dollars for privacy violations? Will your eagerness for experiences and income once again trump your privacy and consumer rights?

What about the children in the metaverses?

Kids, for example, love Snapchat that offers a lot of fun movie effects. Children will surely find it super fun to be an avatar that looks like themselves and that shows the movements they make with their bodies there and then. Many of the advice you give children in real life can also be given for trips into the artificial world. «Don’t go home with strangers,» «Don’t talk bad about others.»

Already today, the children appear like themselves on social media. They post selfies and share footage of their dance moves. Older children share clips from parties. Either way, these are just glimpses, a matter of a few seconds from a 24 hour day. In the metaverses, people may film the avatars, absolutely anything you say in there can be recorded, and these recordings can be spread openly or in enclosed rooms.

One of the reasons schools ban cellphones in the classroom is that students are unable to control themselves, they film each other without permission. When screen meetings became common during the corona pandemic, new cases of filming appeared, and these were much more difficult to regulate because the teacher did not see what was going on. Some students had apps that could film the screen all through the homeschooling class. Others turned off their webcam and took out their cellphones and filmed the screen with that.

This will also be the case in the metaverses. Everywhere you go, there may be someone filming you, and you might not be able to discover it. The only places in the metaverse where you can lower your shoulders are in the rooms where you meet a few friends that you trust.

What is the problem with filming? Well, if you make a mistake or make a promise, such recordings can be used against you.

Today, there are filming in many places in the physical world, for example, there are cameras inside stores, but they are never used to make voice recordings when, for example, you complain about an item. The metaverses will suddenly provide greater opportunities for filmmaking in general. What exactly did you say inside that store three months ago?

Read more English articles here.

(Written on 21 November 2021 and translated by Ratan)

(Main image at the top: Photo: Shutterstock / SOK Studio / Peshkova / Barnevakten.)