Step into the Metaverse

Chapter 3Be Who You Want to Be

The Rise of the Avatars

The ARPANET was not only crucial for creating the internet, but it was also used to play a first-person shooter maze game between multiple universities that included the world's first avatar. In the early 1970s, three NASA employees—Steve Colley, Howard Palmer, and Greg Thompson—created the multiplayer game MazeWar, where a graphical eyeball moved around the maze, pointing its cyclops gaze at wherever it was going.⁷⁶ It was the first visual representation of a digital character. Since then, avatars have evolved significantly to represent real and nonexisting users in a virtual world. In the not-too-distant future, avatars will also enter the physical world using augmented reality or holographic projections.

An avatar can be anything from a 2D pixelated image such as CryptoPunks or a character of the Bored Ape Yacht Club to a character in games like Fortnite or Minecraft to hyper-realistic 3D digital representations of humans, called digital humans. Above anything else, an avatar is a visual representation of an identity. This identity can be of a real person who needs a representation in a virtual world, or it can be a representation of a nonexisting digital user, a digital agent, also known as nonplayer characters (NPCs), which a computer instead of a person controls. Avatars are crucial to the metaverse as they enable us to bring our identity to the virtual world, interact with others, and take our virtual identity into ...