Future Tech: What the Metaverse and NFTs will look like in the future
In today’s episode of Future Tech I’m excited to talk about the metaverse and NFTs. More specifically, what will they look like in the future? The metaverse is essentially a virtual world or a virtual experience, and can be in Virtual Reality (VR). Everything you can do in the real world, you can do in a virtual world. It’s nothing new, since kids have been playing Minecraft and Roblox for years, those are essentially a metaverse. Nowadays you can build things, buy things, and socialize with other people through avatars in places like Decentraland or the Sandbox. NFTs on the other hand are basically a way to authenticate a purchase and show proof of ownership, of say, a piece of art. It’s actually a lot less complicated than you might think. I’ll go over the metaverse, NFTs, and where they are headed in the future in this episode, so tune in!
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Here’s the transcript from this podcast episode, please excuse any typos!
What exactly is the metaverse? A lot of people are texting me, calling me, asking me online and on social media. What are NFT’s and what is the metaverse? They’re, you know, they’re a little confused. There’s a lot of articles out there you can read about them. Of course Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg recently rebranded Facebook as meta to show everyone Hey, we don’t want to be the big bad Facebook anymore. We want to be better, right? So just a rebranding. But just to kind of give you guys like a simple as simple as it can be definition of the metaverse. The easiest way is really two words, right? It’s a virtual environment, or a virtual experience, right? This could be wearing a VR headset where you are hanging out with friends watching a movie together or in an alternate reality type space. are called alt space VR, using an Oculus, or a quest or some other VR headset. But really, it’s just like the real world but in a virtual environment, right. And there’s a lot of things you can do in a metaverse. So we can touch kind of on those things on what you can do in a metaphor so we can see where it’s headed. So one of the main things you can do is you can buy land, right? There are environments such as decentraland that are very popular, the Sandbox is getting some popularity, and there are others as well. Where you purchase land as an NFT and that’s something else that we’re going to cover here. So I guess we’ll talk about what an NFT is so that we can talk about how it works in the metaverse. So an NFT stands for non fungible token. It’s basically just proof of ownership. Right? So let’s look. I’m gonna give you a real world example. It makes it really simple.
Let’s say you want to buy a Picasso painting, right? These paintings are worth 10s of millions of dollars of fakes out there, or posters you can buy, you know, a poster, and the poster of the Picasso painting is not real, it costs you $10 That’s kind of what you would consider a screenshot of an NFT painting right like so let’s say you’re an artist, and you want to sell a painting that you digitally drew in Photoshop or on your iPad or whatever. You post it as an NFT on a market like open sea or wearable. There’s a lot of these NFT marketplaces. And what happens is people will bid or buy your entity or your art piece your whatever it is you’re selling, could be anything could be a song, it could be a book and what happens when they purchase it, there is a transaction on a blockchain which is basically a ledger, a spreadsheet or a public document that says you know, person A is selling the item Person B purchased the item, the transaction shows up on the blockchain, and that way you can’t dispute the ownership. Right? That’s what it is. So if you take a picture of this NF T art piece or you take a screenshot of it, you don’t own it. You just have a screenshot of it. You can’t prove that you own it because your transaction is not on the blockchain. So going back to the Picasso painting, let’s say you go to Christie’s or Sotheby’s auction house and you’re a zillionaire and you can afford a $50 million Picasso painting, and you bid on the painting and you win the auction. Now you have all this paperwork like the provenance, the documentation, the invoice, the purchase, order, the bank, wire transaction, like all that stuff, that proves you know a certificate of authenticity that proves that you own this piece of art. That is the real world example of buying an F t all the paperwork, documentation and proof. The NFT piece of art is on the blockchain, you purchase it and the transaction is on the blockchain can’t dispute it. You’re the owner. That’s it.
It’s actually really simple. So taking the NFT’s now, putting them into the metaverse, this is where it gets cool, right? So let’s say you’re in decentraland. It’s a good place to start because everyone has been hearing about the sandbox or decentraland. Let’s say you want to open a clothing store. You have a nice fashion line and you can digitally draw your outfits or you can take pictures of them. You can now buy a parcel of land as an NFT on open sea or wearable or decentraland land and you can purchase a parcel of land and start building a store. Like an actual store. It looks like a store where you get people that are in there with their VR headsets or on a mobile phone or on a desktop computer. They have avatars. These avatars are basically virtual versions of yourself. You’ve seen these in games like fortnight. You’ve seen them in Roblox and Minecraft, those little people that are running around building things. This is not a new thing. The Metaverse is not new, it’s only starting to gain popularity. Because Facebook rebranded to meta and crypto currencies are building games and building virtual environments. And virtual reality headsets are becoming very popular nowadays. But this is not a new thing. We’ve seen the movie and we read the book Ready Player One. That’s a version of the metaverse, right? So you build your store in this Metaverse in this virtual environment, and now people who have avatars or have accounts in these, you know lands can come and check out your clothing. You can maybe sell pieces of art or actual clothing as NFT’s you know, you can pretty much do anything.
The cool thing is, you know as we move into where this is headed, like you know the future. So as we move into the future of the metaverse and NFT’s as you know, some people think we’re in the beginning of it. I think we’re somewhere in the middle of it right because we’ve already been building again Roblox Minecraft fortnight decentraland sandbox these things are already a virtual reality. Pun intended, but they’re already reality. We’ve already been kind of living in these virtual environments. We’ve already been watching movies, in virtual environments. We hang out with friends in VR, like I mean, we’re talking a couple years ago. I owned an Oculus headset and I wrote an article about this. And I was hanging out with friends from different countries, different states. We were watching movies together, playing games, playing cards against humanity together, physically seeing each other face to face, I mean as avatars, but you can see someone you can talk to. It’s a lot more personal than texting, or on social media like commenting on someone. You can physically talk to someone face to face, kind of like FaceTime, but the thing is FaceTime and video chatting and zoom are just staring at a screen. You’re just talking to someone. And that’s it, right? With VR in the metaverse. It’s more collaborative. It’s more personal. It’s more fun. So as we move into the future, that fun and those collaborations and the experiences are just going to be bigger and bigger and bigger. Some of the examples I can think of would be music, right? So as a good example, I had just watched this virtual concert that Justin Bieber held like a week ago, right? It’s just happened. He was wearing a mocap suit motion capture suit you can see him in a little window, and his virtual avatar of Justin which looked like him but was virtual. And then all of us who were watching were also standing around him in this virtual environment cheering him on and posting chat messages that popped up as speech bubbles. And he was singing and performing while we’re watching him in this virtual environment. People are wearing VR headsets, they’re actually in the concert. So I mean, that’s just the beginning of a music hosting concert right? hearing music with your friends live where you’re actually walking around this virtual environment. People are starting to fund comic books, write newsletters.
Things like that are very collaborative, like maybe an artist and Peter and somebody designing together create a Dao or decentralized autonomous organization, which is the new version of an LLC or a company. These people are starting to collaborate on projects together using vows and the metaverse and NFTs. And it’s just this really cool way of collaborating on projects with people who you might not have normally been able to because of restrictions of whatever kind. So as we continue forward, as the technology progresses and things get even more interesting. You’re going to soon see the ability to create a realistic version of yourself as an avatar, call it a meta human, virtual human, whatever you want to call it, it will be you just like you see in movies that have CGI where the characters are not real but they look real. Think about that right? So you’ll have like this real version of you. In the metaverse. Now you’re hanging out with your friends and your family. And it’s really you. It’s not just like a cartoon avatar. And now you can watch movies together, play music together, go to concerts together, hang out together, do things together in these virtual environments. And it’s kind of like a mini world. Like you can have a car you can get gas for your car, you can get food, probably can’t eat it. Maybe that’s going to be somewhere even down the road. But you can collaborate on projects in this Metaverse as you know, the possibilities are endless and I think that if there’s anything that you can take home from what the metaverse is, what NF T’s are, the future of them and where this is all headed. It’s basically let’s face it, a better version of the world.
Because the world is going crazy, it’s chaos. There are so many problems, at least in these virtual environments. Things are fun. You’re having a good time collaborating on creative projects. You’re making comic books, movies, music, concerts, you’re building stores for your businesses, you’re selling your art. You’re able to gather people for events whether it’s a protest, or maybe you’re supporting an idea. You can do so many things in VR and in the metaverse using NFT’s that you just can’t do in the real world the same way. And it’s no secret that it’s only gaining popularity when you see names like Nike, and you know Sony and you know, every single big company, Microsoft and everybody’s jumping into the metaverse. You know, you have these matrix the new matrix movies coming out and this company is releasing 100,000 matrix and FTEs and people are starting to really incorporate characters from movies and assets digital assets and brands that they have in the metaverse Imagine being able to like clothing out for yourself, Nike sneakers that fit you and all these things. And your avatar is actually you to the tee, your measurements, your height, your width everything so you can choose different items to try on in this Metaverse environment. effect. You see how it fits you that too big is too small. And you can walk around and maybe eventually you can wear a haptic feedback suit that kind of shows you you can feel what it feels like. I mean, things can get pretty crazy.
You can potentially start picking out that’s in a metaverse. That you can then order and then it comes to your house and it fits perfectly because you already tried it on yourself even though your virtual self but you tried it on so you’re able to see if it works. This is just one idea, right? There’s a million of them. So I would love to hear yours. What do you think the metaverse has had and where do you think NFT’s are headed? I mean you can already buy a domain name like I own jsherm.soll if you want to send me solana coins, send them to jsherm.sol instead of a long 20 character. It’s like letters and numbers, you know, crazy you know, a lot of addresses. Instead of doing that to send the jsherm.sol Look at that. Simple you can buy domain names as topic coin dot crypto dot Sol dot eth Ethereum, there’s, you know, these domain names are also making things easier. Technology is going to keep progressing in the metaverse and NFTS crypto blockchain. And I’d love to know where you think it’s headed. Leave them in the comments and I would love to talk to you more about it in time, I will see you guys all in next week’s episode.
