With the increasing usage of the Internet, it's becoming harder and harder to distinguish between "real" life and "digital" life. Our routines are mostly reproduced in online environments, such as picking outfits for our avatars in games, fostering virtual relationships, constructing virtual homes, meeting friends at a virtual mall, and hosting holographic meetings. With this, a new era of digital transformation is coming, the metaverse era.

What is metaverse?

The metaverse is composed of virtual spaces in which you can create and explore it with other people who are not in the same physical space as you [1]. The metaverse is the future of the internet and it is made of persistent and shared 3D virtual spaces in which you are able to hangout with friends, work, play, learn, shop, and create. The metaverse requires new technologies, protocols, and companies to work on it and the expectation is that it emerges over time as different products, services and capabilities.

How to achieve the metaverse?

This is still a question to be answered. According to Panchenko, the CEO and Founder of Dmarket, today’s metaverses are simplified virtual items or virtual services accessible with or without virtual reality (VR) headsets. According to him, the metaverse will first include the fields of ubiquitous computing, blockchain with non-fungible tokens (NFTs), extended reality (XR) with virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), and will further be extended to other fields [4].

Which companies and products are already in the metaverse era?
Some of the pioneer industries to be the first in building metaverses are gaming, crypto, fashion, and Hollywood. The online video game Fortnite is building the foundations of the Internet's future, due to their 3D environments, social features, character personalization, and the ability to create new environments. Fortnite is even hosting in-game live concerts in order to engage people to spend more time immersed in these virtual worlds. Watch the full event video here, where Fortnite features Ariana Grande's concert.