Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes that attempts by corporations to create a Metaverse are going nowhere. He said Meta will “misfire”.
Buterin says the metaverse is going to happen. However, he feels the current attempts from corporate such as Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta “are going nowhere”. The metaverse, the virtual world of Web3 is a highly interactive 3D world that is focused on social connection. Corporations are looking to harness it through augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).
But there have been a number of “successful” metaverse projects like the Decentraland (MANA) and The Sandbox (SAND). Buterin highlighted that the use cases for these projects are unclear. Moreover, he says Meta’s attempt at creating a metaverse will be successful in its current form. The Ethereum boss said they don’t really know the definition of the metaverse yet, as it’s too early to know what people actually want. As such, he believes that anything Facebook creates will misfire.
Meta has developed a number of VR and AR applications, most notedly Meta Horizons and Workroom. The latter is a VR room for colleagues to connect and collaborate on ideas. The social media company has built first-generational smart glasses whereby users can connect to the metaverse by recording audio and video – they are surrounded by virtual worlds.
Other critics say centralized metaverses such as those proposed by Meta and Microsoft may affect the decentralization of ownership of goods and services within those virtual worlds. Decentraland and The Sandbox have partnered with several Web3 projects to introduce the Open Metaverse Alliance (OMA3). It will work towards building more transparent, inclusive, decentralized, and democratized metaverses. There is also the Metaverse Standards Forum (MSF), which has companies like Microsoft, Meta, Alibaba, Nvidia, and Sony among 35 other companies striving to build values and establish standards for an open and interoperable metaverse.