This video is sponsored by Wondrium.
Stay tuned for a special offer for Arvin Ash viewers.
If you’re anything like me, on a particularly stressful day, you might have dreamed about
going on vacation to some exotic peaceful place, away from the rat race of reality,
or fantasized about teleporting instantly to Paris, or Sydney or some other faraway
place, to meet up with a friend or relative.
In an ideal world there would be no long expensive flights, no visa issues or other hassles holding
you back.
Sadly, physics rules out instant physical teleportation, and makes even transportation
near the speed of light unlikely in the near future.
But we live in an era of exponential technological progress, so even though physical teleportation
is impossible, there is another kind of teleportation that is within our technological grasp, pretty
much ready right now, and that is virtual teleportation.
I don’t have to tell you how more and more of our world is going virtual, and the pandemic
only served to accelerate this advance.
More and more of our people-to-people interactions are online than ever before.
A 2021 study by USwitch showed that Americans spend more than 3 hours per day on social
media, and that people in the U.K., spend more than 13 and a half hours per day in front
of a screen.
If you take 7 hours of sleep into account, that leaves only 3 and half hours a day that
people are not in front of a screen.
The statistics in other Western countries is probably similar.
If we extrapolate this virtual transformation of our lives, it’s not that difficult to
project where we might be headed.
The future of the human universe is probably the metaverse.
Now, what the heck is a metaverse?
Just like metaphysics is concepts beyond real physics,
the metaverse is a world beyond the physical universe.
And we are headed directly towards it.
What will be the nature of this new paradigm?
What will life be like in this strange new world?
What promise does it hold? and what new dangers will it create?
That’s coming up right now…
The world metaverse is not new.
It was coined about 30 years ago, by sci-fi author Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel "Snow
Crash," where he used the term to describe a three dimensional virtual world.
And today it’s meaning in simple terms is essentially the same, it means a virtual world.
It’s an extension of the real universe.
It’s a place you can be virtually, either through some kind of avatar, which is a computer generated
representation of yourself, or simply have a point-of-view or POV access to this virtual
world, all the while physically being anywhere you want, such as your living room.
And just like in sci-fi movies, which rely more and more on computer generated imagery
or CGI, if you can imagine it, it will be possible in the metaverse.
For example, in the metaverse, teleportation is possible.
We are allowed to bend the rules of physics there.
The platform second life which debuted in 2003 is often credited as the first metaverse.
In many ways it’s a simple video game.
It allows users to create avatars, or virtual presentation of themselves.
Users live their life vicariously through them.
They can travel to different worlds called sims, participate in role playing games.
They can buy and sell products, and socialize with other second life residents.
The goal of the game, if you want to call it a “goal,” is simply to be in a place
where you can meet up online, and essentially live a virtual fantasy life.
Now, what companies are envisioning today for the metaverse is something similar but
on steroids.
The gaming world has played an outsized role in creating a framework for metaverse technology.
Games often try to be as immersive as possible, to increase your level of engagement.
One way they achieve maximum immersion is through virtual reality or VR.
You are probably familiar with some VR hardware such as a headset with built-in goggles containing
a screen.
Usually there are some handheld controllers that can track the movement of your arms and
hands, with some buttons that allow you to interact with objects on the screen.
These are combined with sensors in the room so the VR system can track your actual movements
relative to virtual objects on your headset screen.
By wearing the VR headset, you can be completely immersed in the virtual reality world on your
screen.
The sensors around you translate your actual movement into the VR.
So, if you turn your head to the left, the sensors pick that up, and the screen on your headset
pans to the left, so you see what is to the left of you in the virtual world.
And all this happens in real time.
In Meta’s presentation with Mark Zuckerberg last year, we see him join some friends on
a fantasy spaceship.
This is not some far out future technology.
It’s available today.
So for example, if you had a VR headset, and this spaceship simulation was available from
Meta, you could participate as Mark Zuckerberg did in this VR spaceship, even though you
may physically be home in your living room.
Your friends could likewise sit in their living room with a VR headset and join you in the
virtual world.
And because of the sensors recording your movements, you could move around in this world
an interact virtually just as shown in the Meta video.
This is basically where we are today.
You can meet up in such virtual worlds using VR, or you can use it to make games or movies
more immersive.
This is a kind of virtual teleportation because you can use a VR headset to go anywhere in
a virtual world.
Another more educational use would be in virtual lab lessons.
One can virtually create a chemistry or physics lab and try to explore science in a safe environment.
If something explodes, no problem because it’s just an explosion on your screen, not
in real life.
This, of course, would rely on VR programming with scientifically accurate coding that realistically
simulates chemical reactions and physics phenomena.
This is not fantasy because we know these scientific fields quite well, so as long as
we are not trying to simulate groundbreaking chemical reactions or quantum mechanics phenomena,
we should be able to make realistic simulations that make learning safer, more engaging, more
accessible and less expensive, since constructing real labs and acquiring chemicals can be very
expensive.
This could be particularly impactful in poorer countries or less privileged school districts.
For medical education it’s already proving useful as aspiring doctors can get experience
by performing virtual surgery before trying it in the real world on a real person.
This is already helping to improve healthcare.
But we can go even further to take advantage of a potential metaverse being and extension
of the real universe.
We can bend the laws of physics.
So, for example we could scale ourselves down to the size of ants to explore for example
what life could be like for insects, or even simulate the movements and forces on a mote
of dust.
In an astronomy class, we could fly around in the solar system, or just pull the planets
towards us for closer inspection.
In chemistry we could zoom into molecules to look at their structure.
Learning could be much more engaging.
Now in order to give you the full picture of the VR industry and the forces driving
the technology behind the metaverse, we can’t avoid talking about pornography.
Currently the use of VR in education is limited.
It takes money and market demand for entrepreneurs to create these kinds of applications.
We have to face the fact that the porn industry has been a major driving force and source
of income for companies selling VR technology.
This was the same during the early years of the internet, when porn drove much its growth.
New technologies often tend to be expensive and unreliable.
The porn industry has served as early adopters that not only pushed innovation, but helped
the technology become cheaper and more reliable.
For example, not only did the adult industry find early consumers to broaden the Internet,
but it also pioneered technologies we take for granted today such as streaming video
and online credit card transactions.
Similarly, there are likely to be metaverse technologies driven by the porn industry.
Some of the innovations that this industry is tinkering with are things like haptic feedback
where viewers can feel the sensation of touch by wearing computer controlled sex toys, and
creation of more realistic-looking avatars.
Porn has had a big impact on current technology.
And this trend is likely to continue in the future.
But the industry is usually not talked about or given much credit largely due to ideology.
Now, the metaverse is not just about putting on a VR headset and then being in whatever
fantasy world you want to be in.
There is perhaps an even more high-tech way we can combine the fantasy world with the
real world.
I’m talking about augmented reality or AR.
What is AR?
It’s like a combination of the real and virtual worlds.
It’s a seamless integration of the two.
So for example, you could show data on top of some real object, or you could put a virtual
3D object on top of a real object.
The latter is something like the game Pokemon Go, where players tried to locate a CGI character
by pointing their cameras to certain real world locations.
The character would show if the camera was in predetermined GPS coordinates.
Virtual content added into your real world can add a whole new dimension to reality.
Your smartphone can already do this in simple ways as demonstrated by the Pokemon game.
There are more practical uses for this as well.
For example, an app called IKEA Places puts virtual CGI IKEA furniture onto your room
as you view it from your camera phone.
This allows you to see what it would look like in the room before you buy it.
This are simple examples, but this AR technology could prove very powerful with even more sophisticated
applications.
You might remember when Alphabet Inc launched Google glass.
Their vision, pardon the pun, was to make glasses that have a screen built into them
along with a small camera.
These glasses could then add virtual objects into the real world around you.
So for example, you could work on an empty desk typing away in the air.
On your AR glasses, you would see two floating screens.
As you typed into nothing, sensors on your hands interpret the motions of your fingers
and translates them into actual typed letters.
With hand gestures you could open, close, and move apps on your virtual screen.
Or say you want to play a game of chess with a friend who lives far away.
If you both have glasses that are synchronized to the same metaverse, you could have a virtual
game in front of you and play as if you were in the same room.
Your hand gestures would move virtual pieces on the virtual chess board
Such technology could also be used in a working environment for meetings and collaborations.
With such technology a lot of meetings and even business travel could be reduced by moving
them online.
With the onset of the recent global pandemic, and travel restrictions, we saw the world
take steps towards this already.
Some of this is also good for earth.
Studies show that Global pollution levels were reduced 20% during the pandemic.
While many aspects of these technologies have a positive impact, I would be remiss not to
mention some of their negative impacts.
To make the metaverse a reality, it not only requires scientists, programmers, and artists
to create the virtual worlds and applications that we need, but it also requires a lot of
hardware, servers, devices and more to run the virtual environments that would be part
of the metaverse.
Nearly all hardware requires energy in the form of electricity to run.
Manufacturing the hardware itself will also takes up a portion of earth’s resources
including energy consumed in the production process.
It’s not clear whether the positive will outweigh the negatives.
Time will tell.
We also need to be prepared for the profound societal, economic and psychological impacts
that this technology will likely have.
For example, while social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have supposedly helped
bring people together, not all aspects have been healthy for our social wellbeing.
There are just as many or more lonely people today than there were 20 years ago when these
sites were not around.
A global study by Kaspersky Lab found that face-to-face interactions have decreased since
the advent of social media, probably because many find it easier to communicate online
than in person.
This leads to reduced real life communication and social skills.
So ironically, social media tends to kill social skills.
There is also a growing concern regarding mental health of social media users with an
increasing number of people getting depressed.
Suicide rates have increased among younger people who tend to be the most voracious consumers
of social media.
So perhaps there is a link.
Because of its impersonal and often anonymous nature, It opens up opportunities for nefarious
social activities such as bullying and threats.
I see this firsthand in the comments section of my own videos.
Another big issue with the metaverse is privacy.
If we start living more of our lives inside a metaverse with an avatar, how do we know
that other avatars we are interacting with really are who we think they are?
Maybe someone you think is a woman living in America is really a man in Belarus who
has a false or stolen avatar of someone else.
These technologies could be magnets for scammers.
Protecting privacy presents challenges for companies like Facebook.
They make money by selling your data.
But now you live in a metaverse created by them?
They can see how you look, how you behave, and what you like to do.
They will have even more information about you than ever before, that they could sell.
Do you really want to give away access to such private and often intimate data?
Just like any new technology, there are pros and cons, profound benefits and new and unforeseen
drawbacks that we will discover over time.
Is this really all worth is?
I don’t have all the answers, but if history is any predictor, society has tended to enthusiastically
embrace any technology that has allowed us to communicate more widely, save us time,
or give us pleasure.
Our relatively fast adoption of personal computers, the internet, smart phones and social media
attest to this idea.
Given that the metaverse will probably check all the boxes necessary for success, I have
little doubt that we will embrace it.
It’s hard to resist the pleasure of living out your wildest fantasy, or virtually teleporting
to a beach in Hawaii after a tough day at work.
The metaverse will have some huge benefits.
We just need to make sure it doesn’t end up plundering our real universe.
If you’re interested in learning more about the human impact of the metaverse, I think
you’ll enjoy watching a fascinating lecture series on Wondrium called, “How Digital
Technology Shapes Us” – it’s a 24-part in depth college level exploration of how AI, online gaming
and computer technology is reshaping humanity, from the alterations caused in our brains
to changes in our memory capacity, to psychological changes to our personalities, and effects
on the very fabric of our democracy.
It’s taught by Professor Indre Viskontas, of the University of California, San Francisco.
She is a gifted educator with a knack for keeping your attention.
You’ll find many other lecturers like her on Wondrium which has some of the best educators
in the world.
What I really love about the courses available on Wondrium is that they do not cover any
subject superficially. They are in depth, covering many different aspects of a given
subject.
This is just the way I like to learn, and that’s why I have been a member of Wondrium
for a long time.
I can’t recommend them enough.
You’ll even see my testimonial at the bottom of Wondrium’s home page.
It’s really easy to sign up right now because they are offering a free trial, and you can cancel
at anytime, so you have nothing to lose, and possibly a whole lot to gain.
So if you want in-depth knowledge about the subjects you want to study, then be sure to click
the special link in the description to take advantage of the free offer.
That link is Wondrium.com/arvin.
That’s wondrium.com/arvin.
And you’ll be supporting this channel when you sign up.
So I thank you for that.
And if you enjoy content like this and want more, then be sure to hit the subscribe button
so you can be informed the minute we post a new video.
And if you have any questions or comments for me or other viewers, please leave them
in the comment section.
I try to answer all interesting questions.
I’ll see you in the next video my friend.
Many thanks to ARTI.ar for helping us create the augmented reality clips used in this video.