2022 in technology

The year of the metaverse

The year 2022 has been marking what could be great future changes in the world of technology: a before and after in a sector that never stops evolving.

This year, one of the things that have been making a commotion on social media is the metaverse.

According to Google Trends, the word “metaverse” has maintained a constant presence in search engines throughout the year, with an increase especially in Asian countries.

Considering the importance that the metaverse has now and will have in the future, it is important to know everything about it, and how the IoT will play an important role in its operation.

A man at a desk with a laptop wears a virtual reality headset and reaches out with both hands
Virtual reality (VR), one of the technologies the metaverse is built on. fauxels / Pexels

Metaverse isn't a thing a company builds. It's the next chapter of the internet overall.

Mark Zuckerberg CEO of Meta

Definition

What is the metaverse?

The term itself appeared in 1992.

It was in Snow Crash, a novel by the famous writer Neal Stephenson, that a collective virtual environment, convergent and compatible with reality, was described for the first time.

A metaverse, therefore, would represent a three-dimensional space where human beings have the possibility to interact in different ways (social, economic…) in a decentralized way, from avatars created in cyberspace, without any physical limitation.

A popular belief is that the metaverse is only being developed by Meta (a pioneer company in the development of this space), which is not completely true, since several companies are developing their own.

Characteristics

What are its characteristics?

According to Edward Castronova, a researcher of virtual worlds and video games, there are three basic rules that are necessary for a virtual environment to be considered a metaverse.

Interactivity

The user has to have the possibility to communicate with other users and with the metaverse itself.

Corporeality

There should be no physical barriers, and the closest thing to corporeality would be our own avatar.

Persistence

Thanks to the union of different virtual immersion technologies, the user's life will have continuity.

Technology

What kind of technology does the metaverse use?

In order to be as immersive as possible, companies are using blockchain technology, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), 3D reconstruction, artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Illustration of a glowing wireframe hand reaching towards a panel marked AI
Technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) are already shaping the future of humanity.

The IoT

The relationship between the metaverse and the IoT

The IoT plays an important, if not the main, role in the metaverse, as it will be in charge of mapping real-time data from things.

In other words, its role will be to bring the “real” world into the digital world.

The IoT will also make it possible to shorten the physical barrier between “user” and “person”, since the aim of this technology is to create a digital twin of people within the metaverse, also known as an “avatar”.

All this will be made possible by cloud technology that will connect the metaverse and the IoT. The current pioneering cloud providers (Microsoft and AWS) will enable limitless scalable access that will allow data processing and collection.

Of course, that will not be the end of the road. Companies are currently working on scalable infrastructures and perfecting everything so that the metaverse will be completed as soon as possible.

Because access to these technologies is relatively new, the metaverse is expected to be fully ready within 10 to 15 years, according to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (formerly known as Facebook).

Thinger.io was created to facilitate the use of IoT by companies. While offering an outstanding service for its customers, the company also works hard to stay up to date with trends.