What is the metaverse and how does it work?

Many blockchain-based metaverse platforms continue to develop Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technology that will allow users to fully interact in the space. Stephenson's metaverse is presented to its users as an urban environment, developed along a single 100-metre-wide road, the street, which runs the entire 65536km (216km) circumference of a featureless, black and perfectly spherical planet. Heyning, 45, has joined with volunteers to form the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group, which aims to establish technology standards for "linking virtual worlds, in the hope that metaverse players will adopt them". Roblox, a platform where independent developers create games popular with children, may be the closest and most expansive vision of the metaverse.

Since many massively multiplayer online games share features with the metaverse, but only provide access to non-persistent instances, which are shared by up to several dozen players, the concept of multiverse virtual games has been used to distinguish them from the metaverse. The metaverse has no single creator (or definition), so it is not something that Facebook owns or is solely responsible for developing.

Brianna Buttrey
Brianna Buttrey

Unapologetic twitter scholar. Infuriatingly humble food specialist. Incurable bacon scholar. Unapologetic internet buff. Friendly web practitioner. Infuriatingly humble web buff.