Thursday, March 28, 2024

The Metaverse needs a virtual jail


The Metaverse needs a virtual jail | 05e07e1ec1e840af887d65013120ee66
The author

Tillmann Prüfer is a member of the editor-in-chief of “Zeit-Magazin”.

Unfortunately, I still don’t quite understand when the metaverse, on which Mark Zuckerberg works so intensively, will finally be ready to move there. I didn’t even quite get what it was supposed to be. Nobody seems to know that for sure, but this much is known: It is a world of virtual reality, VR, in which people should spend most of their time in the future.

There you can play VR games, do sports or even go glamorous shopping without having to leave your computer for a moment. The company Meta, formerly Facebook called, has already sold ten million copies of Quest 2 virtual reality glasses for the Metaverse. Qualcomm and Microsoft jointly develop a Metaverse chip. The metaverse will come, if only because all the tech giants want it.

I’m a bit older and – unlike maybe Mark Zuckerberg – I remember the predecessor of the Metaverse well, that was a platform called Second Life. There you could create an avatar and send it through a virtual world wearing jeans and a t-shirt. You could meet other avatars and of course also shop.

Back then, everyone I knew had an avatar in Second Life, companies would buy “land” for large amounts of money to set up branches there. An Armani store was even opened with real virtual clothes. After a few years, however, not much was heard of Second Life, the platform became orphaned faster than Brandenburg. It was probably too exhausting for many people to live a second life alongside theirs.

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It’s not necessarily more fulfilling. The problem with avatars is that behind them are either mindless algorithms or – even worse – real people. And the digital version is no better than the real one. Rather worse. One reads again and again that female avatars are sexually harassed by males. Apparently, men live out in the virtual world what they would be imprisoned for in reality.

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Maybe we need virtual jails. What will they look like? You already know what the supermarkets will look like. A few years ago, the supermarket chain Walmart released a video on how to imagine shopping in the Metaverse. In it, a shopping cart can be seen navigating corridors that look as homey as a hospital. Like in real life, only sadder.

That reminds me that I also had an avatar at Second Life – it must have been standing there motionless for about 15 years. He probably has a long VR beard now. I could ask him how excited he is about the metaverse.

More: If you push a shopping cart with handles, you buy more

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