Following the change of Mark Zuckerberg’s company from Facebook to Meta, the Metaverse has become the big topic of discussion. This new focus on online virtual growth and avatar-based connection has significantly grown in interest.
However, as pointed out by Philip Rosedale of Linden Lab, this medium has been available for almost 20 years when Second Life was launched in 2003.
Rosedale’s vision for the Metaverse is a direct contrast to what Zuckerberg has in mind. In an interview with NikkeiAsia, he shared his beliefs.
When asked about his opinion on Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse plans, he expressed his lack of enthusiasm.
have two observations. One is that we are not technologically ready yet for the 3D metaverse for virtual reality headsets. [The] technology does not yet exist. The second thing I would say, more specifically about Meta, is that the business model Facebook has historically used, based on a very sophisticated kind of advertising involving behavioral targeting with a lot of surveillance and personal data, is not a safe model to apply to the metaverse.”
Furthermore “One thing that sets a metaverse apart from the conventional internet is that it always has other people there. When you go to a conventional website to do shopping or to read news, there is nobody else there with you. You cannot look to your left or right and see other people. In a metaverse, experiences that we would like to realize there, like a college classroom or a live music event, require us to enable hundreds or even thousands of people to be there near each other with sight and sound of each other. And that is very difficult technology.”
He also believes that screens are currently the way for people to enjoy the metaverse and that VR headsets are not quite developed or accessible enough. He also believes that social media has torn apart the element of trust in online communication, something he found to be extremely important to users of Second Life.
To read the interview in full, click here.
By Daniel Croft
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