Microsoft joins the game: What's all the hype about the Metaverse?

business-standard.com:

The term “metaverse” is everywhere.

On Tuesday, Microsoft cited the so-called metaverse as a reason for acquiring the game developer Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, saying the deal would provide “building blocks for the metaverse.” Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has also bet on the metaverse and renamed his social networking company Meta. Google has worked on metaverse-related technology for years. And Apple has its own related devices in the works.

But what does the metaverse really mean, and does it even exist? Here’s what you need to know.

What is the metaverse, anyway?

The metaverse is the convergence of two ideas that have been around for many years: virtual reality and a digital second life.

For decades, technologists have dreamed of an era when our virtual lives play as important a role as our physical realities. In theory, we would spend lots of time interacting with our friends and colleagues in virtual space. As a result, we would spend money there, too, on outfits and objects for our digital avatars.

In what techies like Mr. Zuckerberg call the metaverse, virtual reality serves as a computing platform for living a second life online. In virtual reality, you wear a headset that immerses you in a 3-D environment. You carry motion-sensing controllers to interact with virtual objects and use a microphone to communicate with others.

Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist who has written extensively about the topic, said the metaverse represented the fourth wave to computers, following mainframe computing, personal computing and mobile computing.

“It’s moving into what people call ambient computing,” he said about the metaverse. “It’s about being within the computer rather than accessing the computer.