Back in the day a good book was the way to transport yourself to another place when you wanted to step out of the mundane daily grind. Then over the years that switched to the movies, and in the past 20 years that has moved on even further to the world of video games. But until this point, the places your favorite medium would teleport you to had one thing in common, they were fake! Made up by you or someone else and what existed in that world, stayed in that world.
Well with the advent of the blockchain, that may be about to change. There have been a couple of developments at the end of this year that signal that blockchain may finally be what unlocks the doors to… the Metaverse.
The concept of a digital world isn’t necessarily something completely new. There have been huge online games with millions of players that have been around for years. The concept of spending real money in these games also isn’t new. I may have been guilty of shelling out some real pizza money for a fancy new Ferrari back in my online racing days.
The difference, however, between paying for additional content in a game and in the metaverse is that you would actually own it. You don’t just own it on the server for that video game, you own one in the metaverse, period. Right now, this is made possible by NFTs.
Nike made waves last month by filing patents and creating NFTs for its first digital shoe store in the Metaverse. Facebook changed its name to Meta and is investing $10 Billion into its vision of the metaverse just this year!
With the decentralized nature of blockchain, creators are envisioning a digital environment that can connect these different digital worlds and allow you to own unique digital assets in them secured by the blockchain. Why the heck would anyone want to own a digital pair of shoes for their imaginary person who doesn’t walk on real ground? That is a very good question. But, the concept of owning real things in a secure shared virtual reality is something that could see substantial investment in the coming years. Ford is also reportedly considering releasing an NFT car in the metaverse.
When cryptocurrency first came out, we got asked about it constantly. What is it? Should I buy some? Is it actually worth anything? And those were tough questions to answer. 7 short years later though we may be starting to see what those “currencies” really represented, a fundamental change in the function of the digital world. These blockchain creations married with the Virtual Reality technology necessary to actually experience them may be the gamechanger we were looking for.
Real digital spaces could have endless uses from workplaces to the DMV. It will be amazing to see where this goes. If you want a movie that pretty much depicts the metaverse interacting with real life, watch “Ready Player One”. Source material from the book for that movie is inspiring some of how creators view the metaverse today.
What a time we’re living in.