Nowadays, museum visitors think nothing of taking selfies of and with portrait paintings on museum walls. The same applies for the three-dimensional digital reproduction of any kind of cultural assets. In fact, it is easier to “enter”, understand and change many objects relevant to science and technology in a Metaverse than simply being able to view them as two-dimensional images, akin to looking through a glass pane. Today, the gradual transition from Augmented Reality (AR) to Virtual Reality (VR) is emphasised in the collective term “Mixed Reality”.
The same applies to 3D models and augmented reality applications in medicine and industry. Digital 3D models, which cannot be “visited” as Metaverses, had been a standard method in architecture for years – the step from such models to the Metaverse was hence a small one. Architects and landscape planners use Metaverses to enable people to experience and manipulate objects like never before. In fact, “serious” applications of the Metaverse developed so far in education and research are enough to fill volumes.
Collins, which is still well worth reading five years on, makes it clear why the existence of such a Metaverse is a very much underestimated cultural achievement of mankind. Metaverses have no specific purpose, they are “merely” huge shared stages for all actions that come into their users’ minds. However, the special thing about Metaverses such as Second Life is that users do not pursue a gaming purpose prescribed by the application. Such are the liberties of blogging! ? The Metaverse – achievement of shared virtual space with no purposeīy rights, the Metaverse concept outlined above could also have been tested in the past, particularly in massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft. Incidentally, rather than going into the differences between the terms “Metaverse” and the “virtual world” in any greater depth in this article, I use them interchangeably. A key feature of the Metaverse is that space is persistent: time continues in this space even when I log off – other users’ avatars continue interacting and physical processes continue to take place following the laws of physics recreated in the virtual world. The Metaverse is the perceptible representation of a three-dimensional virtual space where humans, as self-created avatars, can operate and interact with each other.
The mega hype triggered around ten years ago by the virtual reality application “Second Life”, created by the Linden Lab company, popularised a term used in Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash: the Metaverse (see also the informative article about this concept in Wikipedia). From Snow Crash to Second Life – how the Metaverse developed and first became reality
#Open source 3d virtual world software
The fourth part of the series now explores how blockchains and open source software are helping to revive the potential of virtual reality (VR) for education, research and cultural heritage, which sank into oblivion alongside “Second Life”. The third part was about “Smart Contracts”, which enable the use of decentralised applications on blockchains. The second part addressed the issue of how Mozilla’s “Open Badges” have digitised and decentralised certificates in the area of education, how blockchains can be used to advance this application more systematically, and how Open Badges and e-portfolios are already being integrated on blockchains. In the first part, we explained how P2P file systems and blockchains are set to influence the future of scientific publishing and the Big Data challenges facing digital libraries. This blog post is the fourth part of an informal series of articles in the TIB Blog about the potential of blockchains in education and research.