The Metaverse has been the talk of the town for months with many excited to witness and experience the virtual space.
Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, believes that while major corporations are building towards the establishment of their own Metaverse, many will be unsuccessful.
Vitalik Buterin’s Sentiment
According to Buterin, Facebook’s parent company Meta’s attempt at cornering the Metaverse will “misfire” because of the lack of understanding of the term.
On Twitter, he discussed how the Metaverse might look, saying that corporate projects in the works don’t look promising, especially Meta.
“My critique is deeper than “Metaverse Wikipedia will beat Metaverse Encyclopedia Brittanica,” Buterin tweeted, replying to user Venkatesh Rao.
“It’s that we don’t really know the definition of “the metaverse” yet, it’s far too early to know what people actually want. So anything Facebook creates now will misfire.”
Read also: Playboy Becomes the Latest Brand to Join the Metaverse with the Playboy MetaMansion
The Metaverse
The Metaverse is described as an evolution of the internet that revolves around immersive 3D worlds.
The digital space welcomes online communities that allows them to interact via virtual reality headsets within augmented forms of reality.
Despite how critical he is about how corporations envision the Metaverse, Buterin describes its establishment as an inevitable step in today’s technology.
“The ‘metaverse’ is going to happen but I don’t think any of the existing corporate attempts to intentionally create the metaverse are going anywhere,” said Buterin.
A divide
Regarding how the Metaverse will be shaped, there is an air of tension between the decentralized forms of ownership that blockchain technology affords and the centralized authority of corporations.
A group of Web3 companies banded with the goal of establishing standards for the Metaverse as companies, including Microsoft, Meta, and Sony announced a separate alliance.
The Sandbox is one of the leading Web3 Metaverse projects that has virtual plots of land tied to the ownership of NFTs.
Yuga Labs, the startup that created the Bored Ape Yacht Club, is currently in the early development of its own Metaverse gaming project.
The project, dubbed the Otherside, recently hosted a first-look tech demo of the virtual world.
Read also: Meta to Shift Metaverse Development Plans by Reducing Number of Engineers Hired
Metaverse origins
The term Metaverse applied to a “computer-generated universe” that users could access with a set of goggles and earphones.
It first appeared in a 1992 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson called “Snow Crash.”
Meta
Last year, Meta rebranded, changing its name from Facebook to Meta.
The rebranding followed the company’s $2 billion 2014 acquisition of Oculus, the company that produces VR headsets designed for gaming.
With the change in October, Meta made an official bid for the Metaverse.
“I believe the Metaverse is the next chapter for the internet,” shared Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“Today, we’re seen as a social media company, but in our DNA, we are a company that builds technology to connect people, and the Metaverse is the next frontier.”
Meta shared its latest earnings report from the Metaverse division, Facebook Reality Labs – the division lost $2.81 billion in the second quarter.
Last year, Meta lost $10.2 billion while developing software, technology, and content for the Metaverse.
“This is obviously a very expensive undertaking over the next several years,” said Zuckerberg.
“But as the Metaverse becomes more important in every part of how we live… I’m confident that we’re going to be glad we played an important role in building this.”
References:
Vitalik: Metaverse ‘is going to happen’ but Meta’s ‘will misfire’
