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Lately there has been a lot of talk about metaverses, but not everyone understands what is behind this concept. Meanwhile, the term turned exactly 30 years old this year—it was first mentioned in Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel “Snow crash” in 1992. Nowadays, when many people talk about metaverses, they imagine the virtual world from the movie “Ready Player One” and strongly associate them with computer games and VR glasses.
But according to project manager at Yandex Academy Anastasia Tmur and tech blogger Sergei Romantsev, in fact, we have all been living in metaverses for a long time – we just don’t know about it. Essentially, the term refers to our simultaneous existence in the real and digital world. The simplest example is a non-cash payment: we convert cash into a set of zeros and ones that we use to pay, but we can convert it back into cash at any time. The situation is exactly the same with digital twins – each of us has them: this is a profile on a social network that knows everything about the user’s interests and collects a personal feed, or an account in a music service that is aware of our musical preferences and is able to issue appropriate recommendations.
