The metaverse is the hottest trend in the technology industry and boasts of being something radically new that will open a new chapter in the network of networks as we know it today. However, the idea behind this concept is not as new as it may seem at first glance.
Living in parallel realities and being able to have experiences there that are almost as authentic (or more so) than those that occur in the real world (which is precisely what the metaverse proposes) was something that Ella Thayer already ventured into back in 1879 in her novel Wired Love . Although set in the Victorian era, this book, which tells the story of a romance forged between two telegraph operators, very cleverly anticipates many of the promises that the metaverse makes today.
And this concept is strongly influenced by history , jordan number data which provides shelter to much of what today is considered absolutely groundbreaking and disruptive (and is not so much).
It seems radically new, but the metaverse has more than a century of history
That story is strategically silenced by technological giants whose business models are heavily indebted to the so-called "Next Big Thing" and who are striving to become the owners and lords of the metaverse (as if you were the creators of such a phenomenal invention).
metaverse is rooted first and foremost in the idea of virtual universes . And as illustrated in the novel Wired Love , the telegraph and later the telephone already provided the basis for the concept of a virtual nature world in its most embryonic phase.
The so-called multi-user dungeons or MUDs emerged during the second half of the 20th century. MUDs (which are actually virtual universes) began to make their way into local computer networks in the late 1970s. They later found shelter in the shadow of the Internet in the 1980s and 1990s.
Richard Bartle, co-creator of the first multi-user dungeon crawler, noted in 1993 that 10% of all internet traffic was due to MUDs. This could not be otherwise, considering that virtual worlds with graphics and even avatars date back to the video game Habitat, released in 1985.
Is the metaverse a mere rehash of old ideas?
By the time broadband internet came along in the 2000s, many aspects of the contemporary metaverse were already firmly established . Much of what is being hyped up today as the metaverse is nothing more than a rehash of old ideas, explains Tom Boellstorff in an article for Fast Company .