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The famous global news website quartz defines metaverse as an immersive next-generation version of the internet, rendered by virtual or augmented reality technology (Nover, S., 2021.). Internet has evolved over the years, having transitioned from internet on desktop to web and now on mobile phones. Information transfer has also evolved from text to sharing photos to watching video content, with Web 1.0 - read only, Web 2.0 focused on person-to-person connection, Web 3.0 will be decentralized and focused on user interaction and will limit and control users' content (Nath, K., Dhar, S. and Basishtha, S., 2014). The next frontier in internet evolution is the metaverse, where you feel virtually present. While virtual reality has been classified for a while now, as one of the emerging technology trends used for gaming and virtual experiences, it differs from metaverse, since metaverse will be more immersive, embodied internet where you are in the experience, be it getting together with family, play, work or at shopping. The recent entry of some of the biggest technology firms into metaverse has sparked the debate among the tech world and the general public on the relevance, risks, and benefits of such online platforms, after the moderately successful earlier attempts to create such platforms eg: Second life (Heath, Dan & Chip., 2011).
18 years after the first release of Second life in 2003, technology firms are reinvesting in virtual reality platforms. What has changed since then? It can be argued that technology has made great progress, especially average internet speed has increased from 64 Kbps to over 1 Gbps with the 5G networks (Vora, L.J., 2015.). There have been significant advances in supporting technologies such as 5G/6G networks, artificial intelligence, IoT, graphics and robotics. Also about 60% of the world’s population now have access to internet (Johnson, Joseph, 2021). All these advances have made it much more conducive for the emergence of such virtual platforms, which is promised to be much more realistic and present than earlier. Research is still ongoing to better some of the components of metaverse for eg: VR supporting infrastructure including hardware such as VR headsets that have sensors to allow avatars to mimic real-world movements, which would make the VR experience much more lifelike. The metaverse would feature a marketplace for goods both physical and virtual items owned by avatars and implemented as NFT’s (non-fungible tokens). Metaverse would have other multitude of applications which is described in section 1.3.
The venture capitalist Matthew Ball, whose writing on the metaverse has influenced Mark Zuckerberg, describes in his article on the metaverse that “future solutions are often understood and, in a sense, agreed upon well in advance of the technical capacity to produce them. Still, it’s often impossible to predict how they’ll fall into place, which features matter more or less, what sort of governance models or competitive dynamics will drive them, or what new experiences will be produced” (Ball, M.,2020). As Matthew described, there are still many issues relating to metaverse which needs to be discussed and one of them is the security and privacy risk as well as perceived risks to this platform and a control governance model to mitigate these risks. These are researched and discussed in the following sections.