Digital transformation over the last 2 years brought a tsunami of change to every industry – from ubiquitous e commerce, to the adoption of telehealth in healthcare to digital wallets in financial services to curbside pickup and contactless shopping in retail – and cybercrime, digital technology has been at the forefront of this seismic shift.
There has been much talk recently about Facebooks recent renaming itself to focus on the metaverse. Microsoft has also long been evolving solutions for the metaverse. So what is it?
It is not the metaverse first imagined by Neal Stephenson in 1992’s “Snow Crash.” Instead, it is a persistent, digital world that is connected to many aspects of the physical world, including people, places and things. In this short video and in this announcement it’s described as a sort of inhabitable Internet (via 3-D avatars instead of people.
During his keynote talk at the Microsoft Ignite event, taking place virtually this week, CEO Satya Nadella described an emerging “metaverse” of digital experiences that will sustain businesses in the new world of hybrid work. Microsoft defines a metaverse as “a digital space inhabited by digital representations of people and things“
Nadella’s concluding statement about the metaverse suggested that it would not evolve into an inhuman digital world, reminiscent of “The Matrix” movie:
In a sense, the metaverse enables us to embed computing into the real world and to embed the real world into computing, bringing real presence to any digital space. For years we’ve talked about creating this digital representation of the world. But now we actually have the opportunity to go in that world and participate in it. What’s most important is that we are able to bring our humanity with us and choose how we want to experience this world and who we want to interact with.
