Metaverse – Reading Practice with Vocabulary in Context

Practice reading and listening comprehension on Metaverse and expand your academic vocabulary in context. Watch the embedded video as a documentary on the Metaverse. You can also select any text and listen to the selected text to improve your listening comprehension.

Listening practice

Reading practice

What is the metaverse?

It’s a combination of multiple elements of technology, including virtual reality, augmented reality and video where users “live” within a digital universe. Supporters of the metaverse envision its users working, playing and staying connected with friends through everything from concerts and conferences to virtual trips around the world.

“Right now, we are on the cusp of the next internet,” said Matthew Ball, managing partner of venture capital firm Epyllion Industries, in a February 2021 essay on his website.

Source: https://www.usatoday.com/

Facebook’s CEO on why the social networks are becoming ‘a metaverse company’

As June came to an end, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his employees about an ambitious new initiative. The future of the company would go far beyond its current project of building a set of connected social apps and some hardware to support them. Instead, he said, Facebook would strive to build a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi — a world known as the metaverse.

The metaverse is having a moment. Coined in Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel, the term refers to a convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality in a shared online space. Earlier this month, The New York Times explored how companies and products including Epic Games’ Fortnite, Roblox, and even Animal Crossing: New Horizons increasingly had metaverse-like elements. (Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has been discussing his desire to contribute to a metaverse for many months now.)

Source: https://www.theverge.com/

Using avatars in metaverse

We also have the hardware to render realistic virtual environments and avatars in 3D. Meta owns the leading producer of virtual reality headsets, Oculus. Microsoft has been supporting various enterprise use cases with its HoloLens mixed reality smart glasses since its first release in 2016. In addition, Apple is rumored to release its AR and VR headsets in 2022. HTC, Pico, MagicLeap, and other manufacturers are rapidly advancing various hardware platforms, while cascade technology architectures are shifting various computational loads across back-end server infrastructures to edge devices.

Unity’s Furioos is a prime example of streaming fully interactive real-time 3D environments where the heavy lift of rendering the environments is handled by their automatically scaling GPU server infrastructure. The metaverse will be a ubiquitous computing experience where users can leverage traditional devices like computers and mobile devices while also enhancing the experience with emerging immersive AR and VR wearables.

Source: https://www.td.org/

Why Does the Metaverse Involve Holograms?

When the internet first arrived, it started with a series of technological innovations, like the ability to let computers talk to each other over great distances or the ability to hyperlink from one web page to another. These technical features were the building blocks that were then used to make the abstract structures we know the internet for: websites, apps, social networks, and everything else that relies on those core elements. And that’s to say nothing of the convergence of the interface innovations that aren’t strictly part of the internet but are still necessary to make it work, such as displays, keyboards, mice, and touchscreens.

With the metaverse, there are some new building blocks in place, like the ability to host hundreds of people in a single instance of a server (ideally future versions of a metaverse will be able to handle thousands or even millions of people at once), or motion-tracking tools that can distinguish where a person is looking or where their hands are. These new technologies can be very exciting and feel futuristic.

If VR and AR headsets become comfortable and cheap enough for people to wear on a daily basis—a substantial “if”—then perhaps the idea of a virtual poker game where your friends are robots and holograms and floating in space could be somewhat close to reality. If not, well you could always play Tabletop Simulator on a Discord video call.

Source: https://www.wired.com/

The metaverse will have even more of your personal data

Digital companies already track vast amounts of data about us for their own gain. This dynamic, as the journalist Franklin Foer writes in World Without Mind, “provides the basis for invisible discrimination; it is used to influence our choices, both our habits of consumption and our intellectual habits.”

Wang says that the data collection in a 3D world could be even more dangerous. Virtual platforms might rely on users having high-quality cameras and microphones in their rooms, and could theoretically track all of movements and purchases across virtual worlds. “The volume of PII, or personal identifiable information, a platform can collect is staggering,” she says. “It’s an issue that keeps me awake.” So later this year, Wang says that OASIS will launch a separate privacy board to deal specifically with this issue and devise guidelines for metaverse platforms.

Source: https://time.com/