The term "Metaverse" is the latest buzzword (流行语) to capture the tech industry's imagination — so much so that one of the best-known internet platforms is rebranding to signal is embrace of the futuristic idea.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's announcement that he's changing his company's name to Meta Platforms Inc. might be the biggest thing to happen to the metaverse since science fiction writer Neal Stephenson coined the term for his 1992 novel "Snow Crash". But Zuckerberg and his team are hardly the only tech visionaries with ideas on how the metaverse, which will employ a mix of virtual reality and other technologies, should take shape.
What is the metaverse? Zuckerberg has described it as a "virtual environment" you can go inside of — instead of just looking at on a screen. Essentially, it's a world of endless, interconnected virtual communities where people can meet, work and play, using virtual reality headsets and glasses, smartphone or other devices. The metaverse also could be a game -changer for the work-from-home shift amid the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of seeing co-workers on a video call, employees could join them in a virtual office.
Zuckerberg's embrace of the metaverse in some ways goes against a central tenet (信条) of its biggest enthusiasts(狂热粉丝). They consider the metaverse as online culture's liberation from tech platforms like Facebook that assumed ownership of people's accounts, photos, posts and traded off what they collected from that data. "We want to be able to move around the Internet with ease, but we also want to be able to move around the Internet in a way we're not tracked and monitored," said Steve Jang, who focuses on cryptocurrency (数字货币) technology. There is a growing concern about Facebook trying to lead the way into a virtual world that could require even more personal data and offer greater potential for abuse and misinformation when it hasn't fixed those problems in its current platforms.
