Where Minecraft meets Marvel: the future of the digital world is a ‘metaverse’ where video games, music and films all come together
- The metaverse is a digital place where you go to find the things you love in a single, seamless experience – and when you leave, the world continues to develop
- This vision is starting to become a reality, even if obstacles such as licensing rights stand in the way of progress towards a fully immersive virtual world
Welcome to the pleasuredome! The digital world is fast becoming a reality to rival the physical world, and media are converging to form a “metaverse” that allows humans to assume a single digital identity and seamlessly move around in an infinite space that’s filled with their favourite games, films and music.
That was the big takeaway from the recent LA Games Conference, which this year took place online, organised by Digital Media Wire. In panels, speakers debated the impact of converging media on the future of humanity, as well as analysing new trends, the impact of NFTs on their business and the state of companies’ bottom lines.
So what is the metaverse?
The definitions of each panellist varied, but all agreed that the virtual world displayed in Steven Spielberg’s film Ready Player One, based on the 2011 novel of the same name, held some clues.
Generally, the metaverse is a place that you can go to find the games, music, films and programmes that you like, all brought together in a single immersive experience. For instance, in Ready Player One, when entering the metaverse the hero drives Doc’s De Lorean from Back to the Future, listens to Van Halen, runs into King Kong and encounters all manner of pop cultural icons in the same virtual space.