Heard about Facebook changing its name to Meta? Well, that’s because the company wants to focus on building the “metaverse”, which is supposed to be the next big thing in the digital world.

 So what is the Metaverse?

 And is it something that we parents should be concerned about?

Simply put, the Metaverse is internet 2.0. It is like an alternate world, within ours, where we can play outdoor games at home, travel to places without vehicles, attend school, buy land, earn money, be at our workplace while in our homes at the same time and much more. Metaverse is a future combination of several technologies that make the internet more immersive. These technologies include augmented reality (think Pokemon Go or Google glasses), live video chats (like Zoom or Facetime), a digital economy (virtual items and coins), and virtual reality (like the Oculus Rift, which is now owned by Facebook/Meta).

 While social media apps that we use today help us to text, call, and upload photos and videos, metaverse takes this to another level, wherein people will have their avatars that will meet in chat rooms and the experience is getting real day by day.

 Just 6 months ago (Dec 21), Meta launched its first virtual reality product, a social space called Horizon Worlds. In only a few months, Horizon Worlds has grown quickly to 300,000 users with 10,000 user-created worlds. 

Mark Zuckerberg Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Meta predicts that a fully operational metaverse will be part of our daily lives by the end of this decade.

 In fact at the recently concluded World Economic Forum conference in Switzerland it was deliberated that children’s future education lies in Metaverse because they want to “reduce the reliance on textbooks, notebooks and pencils as critical learning tools,” because they cause climate change!

Recently Zuckerberg announced that it will expand its partnership with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to provide a curriculum on Digital Safety & Online Well-being and AR for over 10 million students and one-million educators in India

While every innovation has its advantages, Metaverse has an ugly side to it which we want to throw light on!

Now that you have a background about it and where the world is heading, please don’t miss reading the 2nd part of this post next week where we will share how Metaverse can be a tool in the hands of the devil to disrupt our children, and at a mass and quick pace.