Metaverse: An Introduction

7 min
Metaverse: An Introduction

Adshares and Metaverse

As blockchain technology and the whole world changes, Adshares project is also evolving by being up to date with the newest trends. This time will not be different.

Adshares competes with GoogleAds in order to decentralise the advertising market. Lately we have announced that Adshare’s goal is to utilize NFTs in order to help projects with marketing in the Metaverse. With Facebook’s rebranding to Meta, we now see that the Metaverse trend will only get bigger.

It’s quite possible that Facebook will also display ads in its Metaverse. Well, then our job is to display ads or even art everywhere else, in all different kinds of Metaverses. Naturally, in a decentralized way to eliminate 3rd parties which collect a tremendous amount of fee from Publishers and Advertisers.

Starting in 2017, the team delivered a protocol that is now highly scalable. Adshares is an umbrella project, maintaining a decentralized network. The idea behind the ADS protocol is to give the network to the community with DAO-style governance. In Adshares, anyone can make their own Adserver by implementing open-source blockchain tools in more and more areas. This breakthrough concept allows $ADS holders to take profit from monetization of the protocol. Crypto projects can advertise using a 100% decentralized marketplace.

Coins are deflationary due to the native burning and dividend mechanisms.

$ADS has its own ultra-fast dPoS blockchain, being also cross-chain to Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and Polygon.

Metaverse intro

Technology has always surprised us. Someone living in the stone age would have hardly thought that the current trends like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, nuclear power, virtual reality, and augmented reality would ever become a reality. Nevertheless, technological breakthroughs are often anticipated as early as decades in advance, only that it is hard to predict how everything will fall into place. This has been true for technological developments in virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and the metaverse. The idea of AR and VR existed as early as 1838, only that it had to wait until the world had the technical capacity (graphics and computing) to produce the kinds we have today. Similarly, the idea of metaverse existed by the late 1970s, but then it was only an imagination of a successor or evolution of the Internet.

In the early 1980s, many technologists had already imagined a better future state or even a possible replacement of the Internet–metaverse. The speculation of the time posited that the metaverse would revolutionize the digital and physical worlds alike, which extends to all the associated services. Hopes are that metaverse will change how digital and physical services work, which implies a significant impact on cultural, social, economic, and political aspects of life, making it a lucrative invention in areas like gaming and communication. While much of the speculation surrounding the metaverse is still fantastical today, many of the universe’s tech moguls like Epic Games and Facebook have shown special interest, which means we can wait with hope. Actually, various pieces of the metaverse are already becoming a reality and have been applied in games like Roblox and Fortnite and Animal Crossing, a remarkable step towards a reality that is seemingly decades away.

Definition of Metaverse

The origin of the metaverse has been traced to Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel Snow Crash, referring to a digital world way above the current analog world. Metaverse emanates from a portmanteau of two words, “meta”, which refers to “beyond”, and “verse”, which denotes “universe.” In layman’s language, metaverse would translate to a universe beyond the physical world. In technology, metaverse is a term that describes a computer-mediated universe, free from the limits of the metaphysical and spiritual domains of the physical world. Metaverse is described as a future Internet technology that transcends the current technological limits, which takes the interaction of the next generation’s users to another level. Metaverse allows users to interact among themselves and with software applications in a 3-dimensional space (3D) using avatars. Metaverse combines multiple aspects of digital reality, including social media, AR, VR, online gaming, and cryptocurrencies, to facilitate virtual interaction.

Basically, metaverse is a “shared virtual environment that people access via the Internet”. The technology creates a set of virtual spaces where people can immerse themselves through holograms/avatars to make it feel like they are in the same physical space. A metaverse will rely on multiple technologies, including fully immersive 3D spaces, VR, and AR, to create this sense of presence. The overall goal is to tap the opportunities that the Internet offers to give users an experience of interacting in person. This will be a great milestone in using the persistence of virtual worlds to offer multiple users in different physical locations a platform to interact in real time for varied purposes.

Avatars/Holograms

Avatars/holograms will be central elements in metaverse. “The avatar is the appearance, incarnation, or manifestation of an individual in virtual or computer-mediated spaces.” They can take many forms, including “character-like representations” that complement the identity of a user in the physical world and the virtual space. One can create/use different avatars for different purposes; for instance, an avatar for gaming, one for professional/business activities, and others for social interactions, which can further be different between family and other interactions. Through avatars, users will be able to make and maintain their presence in the metaverse through well-developed social network profiles. The avatars can make conscious and strategic actions in a controlled yet extensive immersive space of interlinked spaces and sites. With time, individuals and avatars build experiences and expectations through immersion in spaces, which can be used to define the spaces and processes in future technological advances.

The growth of the metaverse is expected to revolutionize the way people interact. The current Internet has already underpinned many aspects of our lives, from the way we interact and experience each other to doing business and everything in between. With the much we can do with the Internet currently, one only wonders how much more and better it will be if we transform from the current 2-dimensional medium to a 3D space. Creating a multidimensional space where the current Internet use will occur is what the metaverse is all about– allowing people to immerse themselves in a 3D space where digital and physical worlds merge.

On 28 October, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, speaking at Connect 2021, described metaverse as a technology that will enable us to achieve what is impossible in the physical world. The set of virtual spaces that will come with Metaverse will enable users to create and explore with others as if they are in the same physical space when, in reality, they are all in different physical spaces. This will reshape the way people socialize, work, learn, shop and play. “In this future, you will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room to catch up,” reads part of the statement that Zuckerberg wrote in a letter released on the same day. Facebook is already moving into this future, as evidenced by the giant tech firm’s creation of Oculus VR headsets and investment in AR glasses and wristband technologies.

Generally, the proponents of metaverse describe it as an evolution of the Internet. The concept is vivid in sci-fi books, television series, and movies, drawing attention to and interest in the possibility of applying the concept in real life. Metaverse follows from the continued technological development and evolution of the Internet. Recently, immersive and multidimensional space became a reality and is already redefining our professional and social lives. The effort to create and apply metaverse are more than likely to go further as remarkable advancements keep characterizing augmented reality, social media platforms, virtual worlds, online gaming, and the 3D Internet space, resulting in communication technologies and virtual spaces that offer an immersive experience so real that the virtual and the physical are hardly differentiable.

It is also important to note that metaverse is not a single product that can be developed by one company. As already said, the metaverse is an evolution of the Internet, which means it will exist with or without the presence of Facebook. Also, just like the Internet, building metaverse will take years, with an expectation that many metaverse products will be available in the next 10–15 years. This time will cater to not only creating the products but also addressing the various concerns that have consistently accompanied technological evolutions.

For instance, and generally, society is concerned that technological evolutions like metaverse leave people no option except to join the masses to migrate to the computer-mediated interactions. Online interactions must follow a set of rules and structures, necessitating us to abide by networking policies that are imposed on us and even terms of service that necessitate ceding ownership and control of private/personal information. Besides, as is already evident in the current virtual spaces, avatars perform scripted stages whose tight definition and structure limit the freedom of movement and expression. Also, while much part of the performance script reflects real-world conventions, there are still many social, political, and cultural conventions that can discourage immersion as they connote censorship and restrictions. Nevertheless, it is believed that the immersive Internet–metaverse–will open opportunities that are impossible in the physical world.

Adshares.net as a web3 marketing protocol also aims for metaverse ads. Metaverse creates endless possibilities for the advertising market as well and we want to seize this opportunity.

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