The metaverse is coming, not only because one of the biggest companies in the world rebranded to Meta but also because technology is coming of age. At this point, you may wonder, “What is the Metaverse?” It is a universe that exists on the digital plane. Ideally, it will be like a digital copy of the real world. And according to Meta’s vision, we’ll be able to work and play in the metaverse. We’ll build whole worlds purely from our imaginations and we’ll have digital copies of ourselves there too.
The metaverse is an amazing concept, one that will soon become real.
You might have noticed that the metaverse will be made of one thing: media. It will appeal primarily to our senses of vision and sound. Everything in the metaverse, from houses and businesses to people and animals will be made up of electronic media.
Media is thus set to play a crucial role in the near future, even more crucial than in the current interconnected world.
For the metaverse, traditional media won’t do. The idea is to recreate and manipulate reality at will, not capture it. As a result, newer forms of media will take center stage, including volumetric and creative synthetic media.
Volumetric Media
Until recently, media was two-dimensional. However, most people didn’t mind that. They were too busy making the most of 2D media. At its best, 2D media is awesome. We’ve been consuming it on our televisions, mobile phones, and computers without noticing anything wrong.
Part of why we were so okay with 2D media is because it’s a perfect illusion, one which our brains readily decode into three-dimensional media.
However, 2D media is limited when it comes to application in virtual reality. These limitations are on many fronts, including the degrees of freedom.
2D media is not meant for an immersive experience. It’s made to be experienced from afar. In addition, the point of view is fixed and determined by the director of the film you are watching or the photographer who took the image you are looking at.
And then comes volumetric media, more commonly referred to as 3D media. Suddenly, there are six degrees of freedom, along the x, y, and z axes. The viewpoint is not fixed. As a viewer, you can control how you want to experience a scene. Do you want the speeding vehicle to appear as if it’s coming right at you or do you want to watch it’s receding rear?
Such freedom is why 3D media is suited for the virtual world.
This is because while a high-quality 2D image may look as real as can be, you cannot explore it.
Against the backdrop of rising demand, volumetric media technology has advanced greatly. Volumetric capture devices such as 3D scanners are readily available and affordable. At the moment, some high-end smartphones can capture 3D media. In the next few years, this ability is projected to become more ubiquitous.
At the same time, technology that enables the consumption of 3D media has also come a great way. We started with 3D glasses that enabled the viewing of 3D movies in cinemas. Now, we have advanced virtual reality glasses that enable a highly immersive experience powered by 3D media.
Creative Synthetic Media
Another form of media that is set to become more prominent is creative synthetic media. Synthetic media is media that has been generated by computers. It includes photos, video, audio, and even text.
Great strides have been made in artificial intelligence and machine learning, enabling computers to learn the properties of media and generate new media.
A remarkable example is that of fake faces. Computers can now generate faces of people that do not exist. These faces are so accurate that they are virtually indistinguishable from the faces of real people.
For a computer to be able to generate faces, it has to be trained on hundreds of real faces. This is done using a generative adversarial network. There are two models, one for generating faces and the other one for detecting fake faces.
The task of the first model is to try and trick the second model.
With time, the second model gets so good at detecting fake faces that it can generate faces that seem real.
But this is only just scratching the surface of synthetic media. It gets even better. Fake faces can be animated and given AI-generated voices. The result of this is realistic video footage that may can’t easily be singled out as fake.
Conclusion
The metaverse will be a huge turning point in human history. Its full implementation may be as significant as the widespread use of the internet. Reality as we know it is about to change – drastically.
New forms of media will fuel this monumental change. These include volumetric and synthetic media. Great progress has been made in these types of media. All that’s left now is to mainstream them.
