NFTs, the Metaverse, and Everything Web 3.0

Chapter 7. To the Metaverse and Beyond!

Web 3.0 is not the metaverse. Web 3.0 is a way to access the metaverse. When people hear the term metaverse, they often think of virtual reality, such as OASIS in the movie Ready Player One. OASIS was a virtual world in which a game was being played. The players did not impact that world (at least not until the very end when they won the game). The world was created for them to play a game, and they had no control, authority, governance, or ownership of that world. It was centrally controlled by its creator.

First described in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 landmark book Snow Crash, the metaverse can be thought of as a digital reality that follows or is consistent with many of the principles of Web 3.0. People (users) can interact in a variety of ways in real time, such as with their avatars as they would in a virtual reality game. In fact, this avatar technology has been around since the late 1990s. The late Michael Crichton wrote about it in his 1994 book Disclosure (also turned into a movie), and I saw a prototype for a VR system called T-presence (short for Telepresence) on a visit to Carnegie Mellon University in 1999.

The metaverse, unlike a virtual reality game, allows for the building of communities and ecosystems, but centralized control and ownership are no longer part of the equation. The term meta implies introspection and self-reflection. For example, metacognition means thinking about your own thinking. The metaverse, therefore, ...