Recently with my friends. They are excited about a concert with Swedish singer Zara Larsson on the video game platform Roblox. They bought virtual Zara Larsson sunglasses for their avatars and took a selfie with the artist or her avatar, with their own avatars already wearing the new sunglasses.
The virtual concert is the future of event culture, I discover. Overall, the Metaverse is the future. say my friends. They want to buy a property on Sandbox, another virtual platform where at the end of 2021 someone paid the equivalent of $450,000 for a virtual property next to American rapper Snoop Dogg’s virtual property.
That is now worth at least half a million, she says. Oh, over 600,000, he says. But I wonder if the future now unfolds without me.
Code stinks as little as money
Sure, the metaverse. I kind of know what they’re talking about. It’s been on everyone’s lips since Facebook changed its name to Meta last October.
So my friends want to buy land there and build a house on it. Of course, everything costs just like in the real world, except that in the virtual nothing smells like mortar because nothing is built on stone. All code, and it stinks as little as money.
If you want more than a simple ceiling lamp in your virtual house on your virtual property, but don’t have time to build a detailed chandelier, you can also buy one. In the platform’s own shop. Time is also money in the Metaverse.
It doesn’t matter how you get to the chandelier, the main thing is that it hangs from the ceiling when you offer virtual drinks to your avatar friends in your virtual house. Because that’s what the Metaverse is about, just like the world “outside”: that you can show what you’ve got.
come visit us
I look around my friends’ apartment, which is rather spartan; at least without the chandelier. Want to visit us on the Metaverse? Ask them and fill up my wine glass. Sure, I say hesitantly. Then I ask if we can meet here or at our favorite pub. Please, they say, if necessary.
I suddenly feel very old. Should I reconcile the idea of stuffing my face into sweaty 3D glasses for most of the day to explore the Metaverse?
It’s the future, I hear as we toast. You can reinvent yourself. You can create your avatar according to your wishes: body type, age, gender, clothes, eye, hair and skin color. whatever you want And then you meet many other avatars, from all over the world, because in the Metaverse, spatial distance doesn’t matter anymore.
I think it’s great, foreign countries, cultures and people have always interested me. Don’t worry, say my friends, who can notice my skepticism: the sweaty 3D glasses are just a technical problem, it will disappear in time and then the screen on the face will be ten times more attractive than the smartphone in the hand. You’ll never want to leave the Metaverse.
No idea about the future
As I say goodbye to my friends, it was late and I still had a long bike ride ahead of me, and I wish I could just beam myself from A to B like in the Metaverse. But it didn’t work. So I drove through the warm night, past the bars that were still open, wondering if I should stop and sit down at each one.
I did not do it. I wanted to go home and learn more about the Metaverse. I wanted to know under what conditions real estate can be bought there.
I suddenly had the feeling that all the people who were still in the pubs had no idea about the future. I really wanted to avoid being one of them.