Metaverse Quotes

Other virtual worlds soon followed suit, from the Metaverse to the Matrix. The Firefly universe was anchored in a sector adjacent to the Star Wars galaxy, with a detailed re-creation of the Star Trek universe in the sector adjacent to that. Users could now teleport back and forth between their favorite fictional worlds. Middle Earth. Vulcan. Pern. Arrakis. Magrathea. Discworld, Mid-World, Riverworld, Ringworld. Worlds upon worlds.

What is inevitable is not death but change. Change is the only abiding reality. The metaverse evolves, fractally and forever. Saints become sinners, sinners become saints. Dust becomes men, men become gods, gods become dust.

In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.

in the Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince.

Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 lives in a pleasant black-and-white Metaverse where porterhouse steaks grow on trees, dangling at head level from low branches, and blood-drenched Frisbees fly through the crisp, cool air for no reason at all, until you catch them.

A speech with magical force. Nowadays, people don't believe in these kinds of things. Except in the Metaverse, that is, where magic is possible. The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is just a form of speech—the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub, enacting itself on L. Bob Rife's fiber-optic network.

When new things emerge in our world, its best to put some time into researching them and trying to gain an understanding. With that understanding, you're then able to think about and plan for the new business applications for those things and the new ways in which your business may profit from them.

The average person doesn’t even notice a synchronization issue unless the audio is more than 45 ms early, or over 125 ms late (170 ms total variance).

The metaverse is not something to believe in. It’s not a religion; it’s simply a tool. I don’t “believe” in my refrigerator. I use it when I want a cold soda.

The Metaverse is the ideal playground in which the AI can let off steam. The more humans lose themselves in it, the more the AI will take control. That much is certain.

BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm is the anti-Metaverse. Why live in a fake world, when a real one already exists? Bill Gates talks about The Metaverse to obscure the fact that (s)he is now America's largest farm holder. The Fake is for YOU, while (s)he wants The Real.

They use metaverse, virtual reality, video game technology to connect remotely to one's brain and body. To create a fake possibility of imitated life for a biased interpretation in favor of it by the inadequate ai detection system of "truth". For fake news and fake justice purposes.

Hiro walks straight through the display, and it vanishes. Amusement parks in the Metaverse can be fantastic, offering a wide selection of interactive three-dimensional movies. But in the end, they’re still nothing more than video games. Hiro’s not so poor, yet, that he would go and write video games for this company. It’s owned by the Nipponese, which is no big deal. But it’s also managed by the Nipponese, which means that all the programmers have to wear white shirts and show up at eight in the morning and sit in cubicles and go to meetings. When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that’s no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.

Threads snap.You would lose your way in the labyrinth.

We must transcend this recent model of a society where endless productivity is the ultimate good, and examine the scientific understanding of the raw motivations of human beings.

There is a constant interaction and overlap between the physical, virtual, augmented, and mixed worlds.

What Zuckerberg has in mind for Horizon is a dystopian advertising nightmare.

The next major technological platform for creative expansion of the mind will be cyberspace, or more specifically the Metaverse, a functional successor to today’s 2D Internet, with virtual places instead of Webpages. The Internet and smartphones have enabled the rapid and cheap sharing of information, immersive computing will be able to provide the same for experiences. That means that just as we can read, listen to, and watch videos of anything we want today, soon we’ll be able to experience stunning lifelike simulations in virtual reality indistinguishable from our physical world. We’ll be walking and actively interacting in the Metaverse, not slavishly staring at the flat screens. We would be able to turn our minds inside out and show our dreams to each other in this ecstadelic matrix of our own making.

Rife's key realization was that there's no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV—which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite—the people who go into the Metaverse, basically—who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages.

Online or offline, virtual reality is an artificial environment that you can enter, and you feel like you’re really there. Virtual Reality involves simulation of any imaginable environment that can be explored and interacted with by a person

World of Warcraft was ported over to the OASIS, and copies of Norrath and Azeroth were added to the growing catalog of OASIS planets. Other virtual worlds soon followed suit, from the Metaverse to the Matrix. The Firefly universe was anchored in a sector adjacent to the Star Wars galaxy, with a detailed re-creation of the Star Trek universe in the sector adjacent to that. Users could now teleport back and forth between their favorite fictional worlds. Middle Earth. Vulcan. Pern. Arrakis. Magrathea. Discworld, Mid-World, Riverworld, Ringworld. Worlds upon worlds.

The metaverse is, par excellence, the ultimate ANTI-travel dystopia. Well, at least on paper. Cambridge Dictionary defines travel as "to make a journey, usually over a long distance." In the metaverse, au contraire, there are no distances at all. The central concept of space is nonsensical in a virtual environment. That's why most people in our industry are still skeptical of its practical applications: if you erase one essential part (the distance) from the travel equation, only the journey remains. And so does the question: is traveling without moving, still traveling? Or is it something else?

As the bandwidth revolution unfolds, it will draw people more and more into the borderless virtual world of online communities and cybercommerce, a world with enough graphic density to become the “metaverse,” the kind of alternative, cyberspace reality imagined by the science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson. Stephenson’s “metaverse” is a virtual community with its own laws, princes, and villains.41 As ever more economic activity is drawn into cyberspace, the value of the state’s monopoly power within borders will shrink, giving states a growing incentive to franchise and fragment their sovereignty. Just

A massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.

For the first two or so years following the release of the iPad, it was common to see press reports and viral YouTube videos of infants and young children who would pick up an “analogue” magazine or book and try to “swipe” its nonexistent touchscreen. Today, those one-year-olds are eleven to twelve. A four-year-old in 2011 is now well on her way to adulthood.

Currently, the Metaverse has become real. Millions of people are waiting anxiously for this digital world to materialize so they can move in and stay. If we aren’t already distracted, exhausted, and disembodied, this major disruption to a physical world could be yet another violent piece to the traumatizing culture of grinding. As a person totally focused on our Spirits, souls, minds, and bodies, I am worried about the role the Metaverse will play in an already sleep-deprived and disconnected world. There are too many ways to ignore the deep inner knowing, intuition, and divine wisdom that exists in us from birth already. To exist daily over time in a space of increased virtual experiences will have a lasting effect on our

Hey, Hiro," the black-and-white guy says, "you want to try some Snow Crash?" A lot of people hang around in front of The Black Sun saying weird things. You ignore them. But this gets Hiro's attention. Oddity the first: The guy knows Hiro's name. But people have ways of getting that information. It's probably nothing. The second: This sounds like an offer from a drug pusher. Which would be normal in front of a Reality bar. But this is the Metaverse. And you can't sell drugs in the Metaverse, because you can't get high by looking at something. The third: The name of the drug. Hiro's never heard of a drug called Snow Crash before. That's not unusual -- a thousand new drugs get invented each year, and each of them sells under half a dozen brand names. But a "snow crash" is computer lingo. It means a system crash -- a bug -- at such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that controls the electron beam in the monitor, making it spray wildly across the screen, turning the perfect gridwork of pixels into a gyrating blizzard. Hiro has seen it happen a million times. But it's a very peculiar name for a drug. The thing that really gets Hiro's attention is his confidence. He has an utterly calm, stolid presence. It's like talking to an asteroid. Which would be okay if he were doing something that made the tiniest little bit of sense. Hiro's trying to read some clues in the guy's face, but the closer he looks, the more his shifty black-and-white avatar seems to break up into jittering, hardedged pixels. It's like putting his nose against the glass of a busted TV. It makes his teeth hurt. "Excuse me," Hiro says. "What did you say?

So which theory did Lagos believe in? The relativist or the universalist?" "He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end, they are both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought had essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning." "But it seems to me there is a key difference," Hiro says. "The universalists think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our brains -- the pathways in the cortex. The relativists don't believe that we have any limits." "Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning a language is like blowing code into PROMs -- an analogy that I cannot interpret." "The analogy is clear. PROMs are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips," Hiro says. "When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and only once, you can place information into those chips and then freeze it -- the information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip -- it transmutes into hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMs, you can read it out, but you can't write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that the newborn human brain has no structure -- as the relativists would have it -- and that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures itself accordingly, the language gets 'blown into the hardware and becomes a permanent part of the brain's deep structure -- as the universalists would have it." "Yes. This was his interpretation." "Okay. So when he talked about Enki being a real person with magical powers, what he meant was that Enki somehow understood the connection between language and the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that a hacker, knowing the secrets of a computer system, can write code to control it -- digital namshubs?" "Lagos said that Enki had the ability to ascend into the universe of language and see it before his eyes. Much as humans go into the Metaverse. That gave him power to create nam-shubs. And nam-shubs had the power to alter the functioning of the brain and of the body." "Why isn't anyone doing this kind of thing nowadays? Why aren't there any namshubs in English?" "Not all languages are the same, as Steiner points out. Some languages are better at metaphor than others. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Chinese lend themselves to word play and have achieved a lasting grip on reality: Palestine had Qiryat Sefer, the 'City of the Letter,' and Syria had Byblos, the 'Town of the Book.' By contrast other civilizations seem 'speechless' or at least, as may have been the case in Egypt, not entirely cognizant of the creative and transformational powers of language. Lagos believed that Sumerian was an extraordinarily powerful language -- at least it was in Sumer five thousand years ago." "A language that lent itself to Enki's neurolinguistic hacking." "Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional language called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men to understand each other, to communicate without misunderstanding. It was the language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking a word. In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it. To quote Steiner again, 'Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus Babel was a second Fall.' And Isaac the Blind, an early Kabbalist, said that, to quote Gershom Scholem's translation, 'The speech of men is connected with divine speech and all language whether heavenly or human derives from one source: the Divine Name.' The practical Kabbalists, the sorcerers, bore the title Ba'al Shem, meaning 'master of the divine name.'" "The machine language of the world," Hiro says.

It's ironic that Juanita has come into this place in a low-tech, black-and-white avatar. She was the one who figured out a way to make avatars show something close to real emotion. That is a fact Hiro has never forgotten, because she did most of her work when they were together, and whenever an avatar looks surprised or angry or passionate in the Metaverse, he sees an echo of himself or Juanita - - the Adam and Eve of the Metaverse. Makes it hard to forget. Shortly after Juanita and Da5id got divorced, The Black Sun really took off. And once they got done counting their money, marketing the spinoffs, soaking up the adulation of others in the hacker community, they all came to the realization that what made this place a success was not the collision-avoidance algorithms or the bouncer daemons or any of that other stuff. It was Juanita's faces. Just ask the businessmen in the Nipponese Quadrant. They come here to talk turkey with suits from around the world, and they consider it just as good as a face-to-face. They more or less ignore what is being said -- a lot gets lost in translation, after all. They pay attention to the facial expressions and body language of the people they are talking to. And that's how they know what's going on inside a person's head-by condensing fact from the vapor of nuance. Juanita refused to analyze this process, insisted that it was something ineffable, something you couldn't explain with words. A radical, rosary-toting Catholic, she has no problem with that kind of thing. But the bitheads didn't like it. Said it was irrational mysticism. So she quit and took a job with some Nipponese company. They don't have any problem with irrational mysticism as long as it makes money. But Juanita never comes to The Black Sun anymore. Partly, she's pissed at Da5id and the other hackers who never appreciated her work. But she has also decided that the whole thing is bogus. That no matter how good it is, the Metaverse is distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants no such distortion in her relationships.

How is it, then, that Infinite Jest still feels so transcendently, electrically alive? Theory one: as a novel about an “entertainment” weaponized to enslave and destroy all who look upon it, Infinite Jest is the first great Internet novel. Yes, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson may have gotten there first with Neuromancer and Snow Crash, whose Matrix and Metaverse, respectively, more accurately surmised what the Internet would look and feel like. (Wallace, among other things, failed to anticipate the break from cartridge- and disc-based entertainment.) But Infinite Jest warned against the insidious virality of popular entertainment long before anyone but the most Delphic philosophers of technology. Sharing videos, binge-watching Netflix, the resultant neuro-pudding at the end of an epic gaming marathon, the perverse seduction of recording and devouring our most ordinary human thoughts on Facebook and Instagram—Wallace somehow knew all this was coming, and it gave him (as the man himself might have put it) the howling fantods.

Take the 2013 film Monsters University. Even when using an industrial grade computing processor, it would have taken an average of 29 hours for each of the film’s 120,000-plus frames to be rendered. In total, that would have meant more than two years just to render the entire movie once, assuming not a single render was ever replaced or scene changed. With this challenge in mind, Pixar built a data center of 2,000 conjoined industrial-grade computers with a combined 24,000 cores that, when fully assigned, could render a frame in roughly seven seconds.

All of the top Roblox games, such as Adopt Me!, Tower of Hell, and Meep City, come from independent developers with little to no prior experience and staffs of 10 to 30 (having started with one or two). To date, these titles have been played 15 to 30 billion times each. In a single day, they’ll reach half as many players as Fortnite or Call of Duty—and half as many as titles like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or The Last of Us do in their lifetimes. And as for populating the platform with a wide range of virtual objects? 25 million items were made in 2021 alone, with 5.8 billion being earned or bought.

He pokes his katana through the side of the cube and follows it through the wall and out the other side. This is a hack. It is really based on a very old hack, a loophole that he found years ago when he was trying to graft the sword-fighting rules onto the existing Metaverse software. His blade doesn't have the power to cut a hole in the wall -- this would mean permanently changing the shape of someone else's building -- but it does have the power to penetrate things. Avatars do not have that power. That is the whole purpose of a wall in the Metaverse; it is a structure that does not allow avatars to penetrate it. But like anything else in the Metaverse, this rule is nothing but a protocol, a convention that different computers agree to follow. In theory, it cannot be ignored. But in practice, it depends upon the ability of different computers to swap information very precisely, at high speed, and at just the right times. And when you are connected to the system over a satellite uplink, as Hiro is, out here on the Raft, there is a delay as the signals bounce up to the satellite and back down. That delay can be taken advantage of, if you move quickly and don't look back. Hiro passes right through the wall on the tail end of his all-penetrating katana.

If these avatars were real people in a real street, Hiro wouldn't be able to reach the entrance. It's way too crowded. But the computer system that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every single one of the millions of people there, trying to prevent them from running into each other. It doesn't bother trying to solve this incredibly difficult problem. On the Street, avatars just walk right through each other. So when Hiro cuts through the crowd, headed for the entrance, he really is cutting through the crowd. When things get this jammed together, the computer simplifies things by drawing all of the avatars ghostly and translucent so you can see where you're going. Hiro appears solid to himself, but everyone else looks like a ghost. He walks through the crowd as if it's a fogbank, clearly seeing The Black Sun in front of him. He steps over the property line, and he's in the doorway. And in that instant he becomes solid and visible to all the avatars milling outside. As one, they all begin screaming. Not that they have any idea who the hell he is -- Hiro is just a starving CIC stringer who lives in a U-Stor-It by the airport. But in the entire world there are only a couple of thousand people who can step over the line into The Black Sun. He turns and looks back at ten thousand shrieking groupies. Now that he's all by himself in the entryway, no longer immersed in a flood of avatars, he can see all of the people in the front row of the crowd with perfect clarity. They are all done up in their wildest and fanciest avatars, hoping that Da5id -- The Black Sun's owner and hacker-in-chief -- will invite them inside. They flick and merge together into a hysterical wall. Stunningly beautiful women, computer-airbrushed and retouched at seventy-two frames a second, like Playboy pinups turned three-dimensional -- these are would-be actresses hoping to be discovered. Wild-looking abstracts, tornadoes of gyrating light-hackers who are hoping that Da5id will notice their talent, invite them inside, give them a job. A liberal sprinkling of black-and-white people -- persons who are accessing the Metaverse through cheap public terminals, and who are rendered in jerky, grainy black and white. A lot of these are run-of-the-mill psycho fans, devoted to the fantasy of stabbing some particular actress to death; they can't even get close in Reality, so they goggle into the Metaverse to stalk their prey. There are would-be rock stars done up in laser light, as though they just stepped off the concert stage, and the avatars of Nipponese businessmen, exquisitely rendered by their fancy equipment, but utterly reserved and boring in their suits.

I deal in information," he says to the smarmy, toadying pseudojournalist who "interviews" him. He's sitting in his office in Houston, looking slicker than normal. "All television going out to Consumers throughout the world goes through me. Most of the information transmitted to and from the CIC database passes through my networks. The Metaverse -- -the entire Street -- exists by virtue of a network that I own and control. "But that means, if you'll just follow my reasoning for a bit, that when I have a programmer working under me who is working with that information, he is wielding enormous power. Information is going into his brain. And it's staying there. It travels with him when he goes home at night. It gets all tangled up into his dreams, for Christ's sake. He talks to his wife about it. And, goddamn it, he doesn't have any right to that information. If I was running a car factory, I wouldn't let workers drive the cars home or borrow tools. But that's what I do at five o'clock each day, all over the world, when my hackers go home from work. "When they used to hang rustlers in the old days, the last thing they would do is piss their pants. That was the ultimate sign, you see, that they had lost control over their own bodies, that they were about to die. See, it's the first function of any organization to control its own sphincters. We're not even doing that. So we're working on refining our management techniques so that we can control that information no matter where it is -- on our hard disks or even inside the programmers' heads. Now, I can't say more because I got competition to worry about. But it is my fervent hope that in five or ten years, this kind of thing won't even be an issue.

Lagos, typically for a nonbusinessman, had a fatal flaw: he thought too small. He figured that with a little venture capital, this neurolinguistic hacking could be developed as a new technology that would enable Rife to maintain possession of information that had passed into the brains of his programmers. Which, moral considerations aside, wasn't a bad idea. "Rife likes to think big. He immediately saw that this idea could be much more powerful. He took Lagos's idea and told Lagos himself to buzz off. Then he started dumping a lot of money into Pentecostal churches. He took a small church in Bayview, Texas, and built it up into a university. He took a smalltime preacher, the Reverend Wayne Bedford, and made him more important than the Pope. He constructed a string of self-supporting religious franchises all over the world, and used his university, and its Metaverse campus, to crank out tens of thousands of missionaries, who fanned out all over the Third World and began converting people by the hundreds of thousands, just like St. Louis Bertrand. L. Bob Rife's glossolalia cult is the most successful religion since the creation of Islam. They do a lot of talking about Jesus, but like many selfdescribed Christian churches, it has nothing to do with Christianity except that they use his name. It's a postrational religion. "He also wanted to spread the biological virus as a promoter or enhancer of the cult, but he couldn't really get away with doing that through the use of cult prostitution because it is flagrantly anti-Christian. But one of the major functions of his Third World missionaries was to go out into the hinterlands and vaccinate people -- and there was more than just vaccine in those needles. "Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we don't let religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot of drugs. So for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus from human blood serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.

The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse. Hiro's avatar is now on the Street, too, and if the couples coming off the monorail look over in his direction, they can see him, just as he's seeing them. They could strike up a conversation: Hiro in the U-Stor-It in L.A. and the four teenagers probably on a couch in a suburb of Chicago, each with their own laptop. But they probably won't talk to each other, any more than they would in Reality. These are nice kids, and they don't want to talk to a solitary crossbreed with a slick custom avatar who's packing a couple of swords. Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you're ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you've just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these. Hiro's avatar just looks like Hiro, with the difference that no matter what Hiro is wearing in Reality, his avatar always wears a black leather kimono. Most hacker types don't go in for garish avatars, because they know that it takes a lot more sophistication to render a realistic human face than a talking penis. Kind of the way people who really know clothing can appreciate the fine details that separate a cheap gray wool suit from an expensive hand-tailored gray wool suit. You can't just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse, like Captain Kirk beaming down from on high. This would be confusing and irritating to the people around you. It would break the metaphor. Materializing out of nowhere (or vanishing back into Reality) is considered to be a private function best done in the confines of your own House. Most avatars nowadays are anatomically correct, and naked as a babe when they are first created, so in any case, you have to make yourself decent before you emerge onto the Street. Unless you're something intrinsically indecent and you don't care.

Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows, special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored, and free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other. The only difference is that since the Street does not really exist -- it's just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere -- none of these things is being physically built. They are, rather, pieces of software, made available to the public over the worldwide fiber-optics network. When Hiro goes into the Metaverse and looks down the Street and sees buildings and electric signs stretching off into the darkness, disappearing over the curve of the globe, he is actually staring at the graphic representations -- the user interfaces -- of a myriad different pieces of software that have been engineered by major corporations. In order to place these things on the Street, they have had to get approval from the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, have had to buy frontage on the Street, get zoning approval, obtain permits, bribe inspectors, the whole bit. The money these corporations pay to build things on the Street all goes into a trust fund owned and operated by the GMPG, which pays for developing and expanding the machinery that enables the Street to exist. Hiro has a house in a neighborhood just off the busiest part of the Street. it is a very old neighborhood by Street standards. About ten years ago, when the Street protocol was first written, Hiro and some of his buddies pooled their money and bought one of the first development licenses, created a little neighborhood of hackers. At the time, it was just a little patchwork of light amid a vast blackness. Back then, the Street was just a necklace of streetlights around a black ball in space. Since then, the neighborhood hasn't changed much, but the Street has. By getting in on it early, Hiro's buddies got a head start on the whole business. Some of them even got very rich off of it. That's why Hiro has a nice big house in the Metaverse but has to share a 20-by- 30 in Reality. Real estate acumen does not always extend across universes.

The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a polished glass dome with a purplish optical coating. Whenever Hiro is using the machine, this lens emerges and clicks into place, its base flush with the surface of the computer. The neighborhood loglo is curved and foreshortened on its surface. Hiro finds it erotic. This is partly because he hasn't been properly laid in several weeks. But there's more to it. Hiro's father, who was stationed in Japan for many years, was obsessed with cameras. He kept bringing them back from his stints in the Far East, encased in many protective layers, so that when he took them out to show Hiro, it was like watching an exquisite striptease as they emerged from all that black leather and nylon, zippers and straps. And once the lens was finally exposed, pure geometric equation made real, so powerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could only think it was like nuzzling through skirts and lingerie and outer labia and inner labia. . . . It made him feel naked and weak and brave. The lens can see half of the universe -- the half that is above the computer, which includes most of Hiro. In this way, it can generally keep track of where Hiro is and what direction he's looking in. Down inside the computer are three lasers -- a red one, a green one, and a blue one. They are powerful enough to make a bright light but not powerful enough to burn through the back of your eyeball and broil your brain, fry your frontals, lase your lobes. As everyone learned in elementary school, these three colors of light can be combined, with different intensities, to produce any color that Hiro's eye is capable of seeing. In this way, a narrow beam of any color can be shot out of the innards of the computer, up through that fisheye lens, in any direction. Through the use of electronic mirrors inside the computer, this beam is made to sweep back and forth across the lenses of Hiro's goggles, in much the same way as the electron beam in a television paints the inner surface of the eponymous Tube. The resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro's view of Reality. By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye, the image can be made three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a second, it can be made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional image at a resolution of 2K pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye can perceive, and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little earphones, the moving 3-D pictures can have a perfectly realistic soundtrack. So Hiro's not actually here at all. He's in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.

The most fundamental element of reality is the quantum vacuum, the energy- and in-formation-filled plenum that underlies, generates, and interacts with our universe, and with whatever universes may exist in the Metaverse.

You're a hacker. That means you have deep structures to worry about, too." "Deep structures?" "Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you learned binary code?" "Sure." "You were forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves grow new connections as you use them -- the axons split and push their way between the dividing glial cells -- your bioware selfmodifies -- the software becomes part of the hardware. So now you're vulnerable -- all hackers are vulnerable -- to a nam-shub. We have to look out for each other." "What's a nam-shub? Why am I vulnerable to it?" "Just don't stare into any bitmaps. Anyone try to show you a raw bitmap lately? Like, in the Metaverse?" Interesting. "Not to me personally, but now that you mention it, this Brandy came up to my friend --" "A cult prostitute of Asherah. Trying to spread the disease. Which is synonymous with evil. Sound melodramatic? Not really. You know, to the Mesopotamians, there was no independent concept of evil. Just disease and ill health. Evil was a synonym for disease. So what does that tell you?

Da5id Meier, supreme hacker overlord, founding father of the Metaverse protocol, creator and proprietor of the world-famous Black Sun, has just suffered a system crash. He’s been thrown out of his own bar by his own daemons.

[regarding the quality of Juanita’s coding of avatar faces in the Metaverse] They [businessmen] come here to talk turkey with suits from around the world and they consider it just as good as a face to face. They more or less ignore what is being said - a lot gets lost in translation after all. They pay attention to the facial expressions and body language of the people they are talking to and that’s how they know what’s going on inside a person’s head... by condensing fact from the vapor of nuance.

Online Marketing Strategy and Trends to Dominate in 2022 After observing some marketing strategies and trends that have emerged in the last few months, it seems fitting that we just hop on the bandwagon and give our take on them as well. After all, the landscape of online marketing is always changing. What worked last year might not do as much this year. And the same thing can be said of what will work and not work in the coming years. But our observations right now show a landscape full of new opportunities to try out. 2021 was a bit of a roller coaster for Meta. Besides just changing their name, they introduced something that appears to have gained a large foothold Don’t misunderstand, this isn’t just Facebook anymore. This is an entirely new world within the aspects of virtue and augmented reality. Before fully introducing this concept last October, it was just thought that the Metaverse would just be another video game console. As it turns out, it could be the next evolution of social media. This opens the doors for a new era of marketing strategy, with many brands already taking advantage of what the Metaverse has to offer. No matter what avenue you decide to take, always make sure you are creating top-notch quality content. Your marketing strategy has a higher chance of success when you do. Don’t get caught up in the rush to create as much content as possible. If you’re doing it by yourself, allow yourself to go slow at first. As you get comfortable with your new skills, you can then start to churn out more content that is high quality. As always, no matter what marketing strategy you decide, we at the Marketing Agency in Utah are here to assist you. Contact us to set up a consultation where we can discuss these and other marketing strategies that best fit your business needs!

All technologically-enhanced realities are, de facto, XR. It can be a digital overlay placed over what we can see and experience in the physical world (a simple Snapchat filter, for example), VR roller coasters, or Pokémon GO. Whenever we're not (only) dealing with the physical world, we're in the metaverse.

Thinking of the metaverse as simple VR is like looking at a good pizza and thinking you're about to eat a raw tomato.

Interoperability is the biggest challenge for brands trying to enter the metaverse. The risk of betting in the wrong m-world and being left empty-handed in five years is real. Interoperability of platforms is not a prerequisite for the metaverse, but without it, we'll end up working in silos with the same (disastrous) Web 2.0's paradigm. We must make sure that environments, objects, avatars, NFTs, avatar skins, etc. can be moved from one platform to the other. I should be able to play Axie Infinity, sell my Axie on OpenSea, get paid in Ethereum, buy an avatar skin in Minecraft, and then wear it in Decentraland. That's the central concept of decentralization (and the core idea of Web 3.0). Are we there yet? Definitely not.

iscussing the potential of the Metaverse via Zoom is like talking about the Internet revolution by fax

Discussing the potential of the Metaverse via Zoom is like talking about the Internet revolution by fax

Oggi, scegliamo un hotel basando la nostra decisione su foto, video e recensioni: il Metaverso potrebbe fornire un’esperienza più coinvolgente e permetterci di visitare una destinazione, prenotare una camera d’albergo o un tavolo al ristorante, entrare in un museo mentre siamo seduti sul nostro divano, per poi vivere l’esperienza in real life.

Finché non supereremo questo schema mentale binario (reale vs. virtuale/aumentato/misto), non coglieremo mai l’essenza del Metaverso e le sue applicazioni in campo business.

Per i ragazzi della generazione Alpha, giocare su Roblox con un avatar a 1.000 km di distanza, oggi, e a nascondino nel mondo fisico, domani, è praticamente la stessa esperienza. Nel giro di un paio di decenni, la realtà estesa e quella fisica diventeranno talmente indistinguibili al punto che non avrà neanche più senso porsi la domanda.

Ecco la principale incomprensione sul Metaverso. NON è virtuale. È, semmai, figitale: c’è continua interazione tra mondo fisico, virtuale, aumentato e misto.

Pensare al Metaverso come semplice realtà virtuale è come guardare una buona pizza e pensare che stai per mangiare un pomodoro crudo.

Il metaverso non è quello che Wired Italia o Barbara D’Urso vogliono farvi credere.

La narrazione della realtà virtuale come sinonimo di metaverso va smantellata. Non è virtuale. Non è aumentato. Non è fisico. Non è misto. È TUTTE queste cose. Inoltre, suggerisco di non pensare al metaverso come a una nuova tecnologia, quanto piuttosto a una convergenza di tecnologie preesistenti in un unico paradigma. Ricordi il primo iPhone? Non aveva nulla di innovativo. L’innovazione era quella di far convergere, in un unico device, tecnologie pre-esistenti (camere digitali, mp3 player, ecc.). NFT, Web 3.0, blockchain, decentralizzazione, DAO, DeFi… Tutto questo è metaverso. La realtà virtuale è un pezzetto infinitesimale.

To a certain extent, NFTs will likely be the bridge to the metaverse. For now, however, MΞMORIED, The Emotional Journey, and THE EXPERIENTIAL IN BETWEEN are nothing more than Marriott getting its foot in the metaverse door. However, it's still quite an interesting mentality shift. We'll probably see more exciting technology adoptions in the next three to five years, but this is a cool start, nonetheless.

An early incarnation of the metaverse can already be seen in gaming, one of the most (if not the most) immersive digital industries in the world, so if you're into video games, the whole concept may not be entirely new to you. Fitness is another industry where both VR and AR have been used quite heavily in recent years, so it would not be surprising that the foundations of the metaverse could emerge from these industries. Moreover, applications of VR/AR have been massively democratized recently. But let's not kid ourselves: this journey will go on for decades. First of all, the metaverse needs some infrastructures that not only do not exist today, but the whole Internet landscape has not been originally created to support such a revolutionary platform. Moreover, we will need standards and protocols (possibly from day one) exactly as we have for the Internet today, and -because of the complexity of the metaverse- this could take years. Not to mention the privacy and regulation concerns that building the metaverse can trigger. At this stage, therefore, any prediction on how the metaverse will look won't be much more than pure speculation, and the risk that the "hype" turns into "a bubble" is quite tangible.

The metaverse is far from being just VR. The metaverse, conceptually, is not Fornite, Minecraft, or The Sims. It's not an Instagram filter that turns you into a unicorn. It's not a Black Mirror episode, either. It's a new way to interact with reality(ies), being real-life, AR, VR, or MR. But, more interesting, the metaverse can (and probably will) be a fully functioning economy. How this will affect travel is still largely unknown, and even though I can foresee some of the Metaverse applications, the "hows and whys" are still nebulous.

In everyday conversation, when we refer to an event that happens "after" something else, we use the Latin prefix "post." "Meta" sounds more exotic, but it's just its Greek counterpart. However, the Hellenic prefix is slightly more nuanced, as it also means "about." So, when defining a meta-universe (a meta-verse), we have to consider both connotations of the term: a universe "beyond" the one we currently inhabit and one that's also self-referral. A post-universe. A meta-universe. In a word: a metaverse.

Want to visit the Ciudad Perdida, Atlantis, or Ancient Rome? You can travel back in time and experience something you can no longer do in the physical world (aka the "meat space"). Wanna check another planet out? Yup. Inspect your meeting room two weeks before the actual congress? Sure! Can the metaverse help persons with reduced mobility (PRM) take that trip they always dreamt of? You bet. The "embodied internet" is virgin territory for the hospitality industry (for any industry, for that matter), and we're still in the embryo stage of the technology.

Il Cambridge Dictionary definisce l’atto di viaggiare come “muoversi, di solito su una lunga distanza”. Nel metaverso, tuttavia, il concetto stesso di spazio non ha senso. Ecco perché la maggior parte degli addetti ai lavori è ancora scettica sulle applicazioni pratiche del metaverso in ambito turistico. Se si rimuove una parte essenziale (la distanza) dall’equazione travel, rimane solo il movimento. E resta, quindi, anche la domanda cruciale: viaggiare senza muoversi è ancora viaggiare?

Pensa a come è cambiata la nostra percezione di una parola come “amico”. Fino al 2004, un amico era una persona fisica che frequentavi nella vita reale. Post-social, il termine ha assunto anche un altro significato, ovvero quello di una “connessione virtuale”, con la quale potresti potenzialmente non aver mai scambiato una parola. O pensa all’inglese “cloud”: prima di Microsoft Azure e AWS, una “nuvola” era semplicemente condensa di vapore acqueo. Il turismo potrebbe condividere un destino simile, modificando e allargando il proprio significato in modi che possiamo solo intravedere oggi.

Secondo il Journal Nature Climate Change, il turismo è responsabile dell’8% delle emissioni di anidride carbonica dell’economia globale. E se è vero che circa il 75% dell’inquinamento viene prodotto dai mezzi di trasporto (sia aerei che terrestri), il 21% è da ricondurre esclusivamente al consumo energetico delle strutture alberghiere. Sono cifre che fanno riflettere. Trovare alternative praticabili a un settore così poco sostenibile come il nostro non è solo auspicabile. È, a questo punto, obbligatorio.

Discutere del potenziale del Metaverso via Zoom è come parlare della rivoluzione di Internet via fax.

I am not a big fan of the word "metaverse." The term comes from a highly dystopic cyberpunk novel from the '90s. The book is filled with Mafia, drug dealers, mercenaries, and an economic collapse. Not really the rainbows, butterflies, and unicorns narrative most anarcho-capitalists are feeding us...

Virtual reality usually comes to mind when we picture the metaverse, but that's only one part of the equation, and -probably- not even the most interesting one.

Everyone seems to suffer from "metaverse FOMO" right now. To a certain extent, it's like the mid-'90s all over again. During the internet boom, companies that added a ".com" suffix to their names (even though they had nothing to do with the Internet) experienced abnormal returns in terms of stock value. That's precisely what is happening with any brand with the words crypto, blockchain, metaverse, or Web3 attached to it.

As of today, there's no such thing as THE metaverse. Instead, there are many metaverses and walled garden platforms. More than the metaverse, what we're experiencing today is a multiverse.

At some point, almost overnight, everyone started talking about the metaverse. It was suddenly treated like the Next Big Thing, even though most of the central blocks of the metaverse (digital twins, iCommerce, Business-to-Avatar advertising, etc.) have been around for years. To make things worse, it makes no sense to me to see a bunch of experts talking ABOUT the metaverse in a 2D environment. It's like talking about the Internet possibilities over a fax machine.

The metaverse is evolutionary, not revolutionary. It will unlikely replace traveling tout-court, but it will definitely play a role in it, especially in the early, top-funnel touchpoints of the traveler's journey. Currently, we pick a hotel founding our decision based on photos, videos, and reviews only, while the metaverse could provide a more immersive experience, and allow us to immerse in a destination, book a hotel room or a restaurant table while sitting at our couch, and -eventually- live the experience in the physical world. It's what I call "travel research on steroids." No static image, 2D video, or website will ever be able to deliver a comparable experience. It's the next level of the "try before you buy" concept. And, quite frankly, we're just scratching the surface.

The metaverse is not virtual. That's the false narrative I am trying to correct. The metaverse is, if anything, phygital. Customers increasingly jump between physical and digital realms in the journey to making a purchase. Until we overcome this binary mental scheme, we'll never grasp the essence of the metaverse.

It's time we reconsider what we (think) we know about the concept of reality. For alpha generation kids, playing Roblox with an avatar 1,000 km away one day and hide-and-seek in the physical world the day after, is pretty much the same experience. At a closer look, reality is simply a form of consensus among individuals.

The 1 Club is an asset-based invite only members’ club where only 11,111 members will ever be admitted via a saleable NFT. The club will bring together aspects of the metaverse and Web3 and the real world, creating a bridge for members to access future technology. The club aims to create both a virtual and physical platform to bring together the world’s most influential and inspiring people, where the convergence of a diversity of perspectives will encourage personal and professional growth alongside positive social change.

While technological progress typically occurs out of common sight, science fiction often provides the general public with the clearest view of the future.

Hiro’s view of Reality. By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye, the image can be made three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a second, it can be made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional image at a resolution of 2K pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye can perceive, and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little earphones, the moving 3-D pictures can have a perfectly realistic sound track. So Hiro’s not actually here at all. He’s in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse.

Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you’re ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you’ve just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these.

As Hiro approaches the Street, he sees two young couples, probably using their parents’ computers for a double date in the Metaverse, climbing down out of Port Zero, which is the local port of entry and monorail stop.

All of reality is owned by like five mega-corporations at this point," Gorbo explains.

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash popularized the term metaverse, envisioning a collective virtual and shared space.

Reality (with capital "R") is just a form of consensus among individuals. It's only real what is considered to be real according to an arbitrary agreement amongst us. Esse est percipi. So, is traveling to a virtual destination still traveling? Well, it all depends on what we agree upon. And nothing has meaning per se.

Professor Stephen Hawking predicted that the Earth could become inhabitable by as soon as 2600. Let's do the math: the average life expectancy exceeds 72 years. We are, at least mathematically, just a few generations away from mass extinction. So finding practicable alternatives to an environmentally harmful industry like ours is not only desirable. It's mandatory, at this point

The metaverse will unlikely replace traveling tout-court, but it will definitely play some kind of role in it, especially in the early, top-funnel micro-moments of the traveler's journey

The metaverse is the next level of the "try before you buy" concept, and it offers new vectors for advertisers and marketers alike, and they should not be underestimated, no matter how we feel about a virtual universe.

While we currently pick a hotel founding our decision on photos, videos, and reviews only, the metaverse could provide a more immersive experience, and allow us to "visit" a destination, book a hotel room or a restaurant table, bookmark a museum while sitting on our couch, and -then- live the experience IRL. It's travel research on steroids. No static image, 2D video, or website will ever be able to deliver an equivalent experience.

the Communist Party of China (CCP) began its biggest-ever crackdown of its domestic gaming industry. Among several new policies was a prohibition on minors playing video games Monday through Thursday that also limited their play from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights (in other words, it was impossible for a minor to play a video game for more than three hours per week). In addition, companies such as Tencent would use their facial recognition software and a player’s national ID to periodically ensure that these rules were not being skirted by a gamer borrowing an older user’s device.

The issue I have with the current discussions about the Metaverse is that the conventional wisdom narrows the focus on the Metaverse to the next increment to social media or the next step beyond a Zoom call. Where's the vision? Think beyond. When Boeing leverages a digital twin for airplane design/modelling, is that a form of the Metaverse? How about Da Vinci which is a robotic surgical system? Have you ever been on Flight of Passage at Disneyworld? Shouldn’t AI training (like for autonomous cars) be more like the Metaverse? Conventional wisdom might say no, those are not Metaverse. I say, forget conventional wisdom and forget the social media/office use case for Metaverse. The use cases are there to extract value from the current state of Metaverse technology, but they are not within the scope of the current conversations.

Any bad news for Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is pretty good news for the Metaverse.

We need a new tech-agnostic mindset if we don't want to be kept hostage of a dystopian, advertising-fueled XR nightmare.

Most metaverses provide immersive and fun experiences, but they also prevent users from escaping. They're 3D gilded cages, intentionally built to lock users in.

Interoperability may not be a technical metaverse requirement per se, but it should be. OMA3, O3DF, MSF, etc, are doing a great job in discussing standards, however, we still haven't fixed some of the Web 2.0 interoperability issues (your iMessage app is pretty useless on an android phone), let alone metaverse's.

Metaverse interoperability s a nuanced concept, and to a certain extent, we don't even need full interoperability. We may be ok with not being able to wear our Chewbacca skins during the virtual Monday meeting with our boss, but when it comes to metaverse interoperability, that's where I draw the line.

I am not a big fan of the term "metaverse". As probably everybody knows by now, the word comes from a dystopian cyberpunk novel filled with Mafia, drug dealers, mercenaries, and economic collapse. Not really the rainbows, butterflies, and unicorns virtual world narrative some anarcho-capitalists are trying to feed us.

Most of what we call "the metaverse" has been around for quite a long time. "Metaverse" is just a label we put on different technologies that pre-date Zuckerberg's version of the story.

What the metaverse did (or, more likely, will do) is to create a confluence of these technologies by building a new version of what we currently call "the Internet." I like to compare the metaverse to the first iPhone. If you think about it, nothing was really innovative about Steve Jobs's creation. The genius idea was to place existing and mainstream adopted technologies (digital cameras, iPods, desktop-like web experience. etc.) in one single lightweight, handheld device.

To build a sustainable metaverse, we should focus a little less on realism and immersivity and more on decentralization and value creation/disintermediation. Otherwise, the metaverse will be nothing else than "The Sims" on steroids. Still pretty cool, but pretty useless as well.

Dopo un quarto di secolo passato nel settore dell’Hospitality e del Travel, io non punto a diventare Ministro del Turismo. Punto a diventarne il Tyler Durden…

Ci sono centinaia di aziende metaversiche che operano oggi. Senza standard condivisi e comuni, possono diventare rapidamente silos chiusi, limitando la navigazione degli utenti a un’unica piattaforma invece di consentirgli di navigare liberamente attraverso più mondi virtuali. Potresti avere un hotel in Spatial, ma lo stesso hotel potrebbe non essere accessibile su Horizon, per esempio. Ecco perché non mi piace parlare di Metaverso, perché non esiste una cosa del genere. Ci sono più Metaversi. Se e come interagiranno tra loro, in questa fase, non è altro che speculazione e la mancanza di interoperabilità crea sicuramente delle sfide complesse per l’adozione di massa del Metaverso.

L’idea originaria di un metaverso unico e interoperabile, una specie di internet immersivo, sebbene suggestiva, è difficilmente attuabile. Più facile è prevedere che avremo 5/6 metaversi mainstream così come oggi abbiamo 5/6 social network mainstream. Ecco se dovessi fare un paragone i metaversi sono più simili ai social che al world wide web. Ce ne sarà uno per lavorare, uno per incontrare gli amici, uno per gli incontri galanti e così via. La vera sfida oggi è capire quali e quante di queste startup metaversiche sopravviverà alla prima bolla.

I confini tra reale e virtuale sono un retaggio del XX secolo. La realtà, ormai, è mista.