As he renames Facebook as Meta, Mark Zuckerberg is placing a bold bet on his vision of the future: a techno-utopia(技术乌托邦) where people are connected and live in a virtual universe.
The word “metaverse” was originally used in Neal Stephenson’s science fiction book Snow Crash from 1992, where human beings interacted with software in a three-dimensional virtual environment.
This is slightly different from “cyberspace”, which fictionally is a space including all compared to the metaverse, which allows people to be aware of their physical environments while interacting with it—similar to the difference between AR (digital objects overlayed<叠加> on the real world) and VR (interacting solely with digital objects).
Facebook is not the only tech giant to show its ownership of the metaverse. Apple, in particular, is also thought to be working on AR and VR devices. But for Zuckerberg, a failure to be at the heart of the world’s move to smartphones has motivated him to be at the forefront of what he thinks will be the next big change.
Critics have complained that the move is a timely attempt by Zuckerberg to distance Facebook from its latest wave of scandals(丑闻), after whistle-blower(告密者) Frances Haugen revealed lots of secret internal information to regulators and journalists, highlighting its struggle to self-regulate. But in interviews, Zuckerberg said the change had been carefully planned, for at least six months, and was not an attempt to move away from what critics claim is an increasingly bad brand.
If Zuckerberg’s grand plans are successful, the potential gains are not simply billions of dollars in advertising income, but also a flourishing online shopping business. He has said he intends to support an alternate digital economy—where users can buy digital items, such as art or clothes, to take with them as they teleport from space to space—as non-fungible tokens(非同质代币) increasingly gain in popularity. Inevitably, cryptocurrencies(加密数字货币) and NFTs would play a role in this shared world, he confirmed on Thursday. But getting there will be filled with challenges.
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