In December 2021, "meta-universe" was selected as the word of the year by Collins Dictionary. It was selected as one of the "Top 10 Internet Terms of 2021" and "Top 10 Buzzwords of 2021" by Chew Wen Zi on May 6 and 8, respectively. In January 2022, think Tank was selected as the top 10 words of 2021.
The term was coined in the 1992 science fiction novel Avalanche, which depicts a vast virtual reality world in which people are controlled by digital avatars and compete with each other to improve their status, and is still described as futuristic. With the development of science and technology, the concept of meta-universe has been raised again, and has been widely concerned and discussed by the academic circle and the public.
Technically speaking, the meta-universe is a virtual world that is linked and created by means of science and technology, mapped and interactive with the real world, and a digital living space with a new social system. In essence, it is a virtual and digitized process of the real world, which requires a lot of transformation of content production, economic system, user experience and physical world content. But the metasexes evolve gradually, as tools and platforms converge and evolve, underpinned by shared infrastructure, standards and protocols. It provides immersive experience based on extended reality technology, generates a mirror image of the real world based on digital twin technology, builds an economic system based on blockchain technology, closely integrates the virtual world with the real world in economic system, social system and identity system, and allows each user to produce content and edit the world. The meta-universe, in effect, is the digitization of the physical world.
The realization of the meta-universe makes it possible for people to realize the freedom of individual creation, the decentralization of trade, the two-way exchange rate relationship between the physical world and the virtual world in the virtual world, and finally realize the innovation of the virtual world -- creation.
The creation of the physical world and the creation of the virtual world and the data world, let us see two different worlds. In fact, there are a lot of controversies about the future direction of the meta-universe. The meta-universe may not be a universe, but a time node that divides the data world from the physical world. When it is more than 12 hours, it means that the data world becomes the focus of our life and the first environment of our life. Some people think that the emergence and development of the meta-universe is an inevitable trend of the development of science and technology. Others, such as Liu Cixin, author of the famous science fiction "The Three-Body Problem", believe that human beings should not immerse themselves in a virtual world and let their desires set them on fire. Instead, we should look forward to the stars and the sea, explore interstellar civilization and explore the boundaries of the Galaxy. In any case, the realization of the metasomes is bound to lead to nodesification of the civilization state, with clear boundaries between the real world and the virtual world.
Although the metasurverse is controversial, its innovation still has great significance for our life, education and science popularization. The meta-universe should be a "complement" and "perfection" of reality, not a "substitute". How to deal with the relationship between the virtual world and the real world is also an important subject for human beings to explore and study. How can we be sure that the world we're living in isn't just another form of data meta-universe when we actually build and immerse ourselves in it?
In fact, the ultimate questioning of the meta-universe is our questioning of the true meaning. Human emotion, the earth's bearing of love, beauty and poetic induction, these are irreplaceable parts of the real world. In the face of the meta-universe, everyone is like an outsider, but who is not a player? The development of science and technology brings us more possibilities, but we still need to be wary of the capital side set up behind, statute, escort the future of the meta-universe. Opportunities and risks always accompany, and the ultimate core of development is the pursuit of freedom.
In fact, our country has also given the corresponding plan for the development of the meta-universe. On December 24, 2021, Shanghai municipality issued the "14th Five-year Plan for the Development of Shanghai Electronic Information Industry", which clearly stated that it would strengthen the forward-looking research and development of core technology and basic capabilities at the bottom of the meta-universe, promote the development of new terminals for deepening perceptual interaction and the construction of systematic virtual content, and explore industrial applications. For the exploration of new science and technology, we need to explore a lot of places to the West, but at the same time, we also need to have our own unique exploration and try, in the future, there will be more deep-rooted collisions and exchanges, so as to develop our own truly belong to the new science and technology like the meta-universe with Chinese characteristics.
In fact, we have a lot of ideas and constructions about the metasurverse, but they are not necessarily frameworks, so we are actively exploring the Chinese method. Although the meta-universe is still a concept, many of the achievements and advances in human history have been driven by concepts. People have always been through their own imagination, generation after generation of implementation, imagination into reality. Human dreams can be realized precisely because human beings have the ability to learn, share, pass on, inherit, and constantly practice and create through knowledge and technology, culture and spirit. No matter how the future development of the meta-universe, the precious cultural and spiritual wealth of mankind will continue to be continued in a specific way.