Meimaris for meta-Facebook: Zuckerberg attempts illusion of solution in teleportation dream |

Interview with Fotis Nakos, Vangelis Kioulhatzoglou

Our daily lives are constantly changing and today a large percentage of people – although lately many young people have turned their backs – depend on social media and Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg.

He himself, in fact, wanting to turn the game and the negative clouds over the business that made him world famous and a billionaire, announced radical changes with the promise that for free and through an avatar, we will be able to be everywhere and probably for free.

Meta made the announcement after Zuckerberg previously presented to the international audience the “metaverse” (the “meta-universe”), which according to him is the future of the Internet, after computers and mobile phones, in which people will have access with their avatar to interact, work or entertain through technology (eg wearing virtual or augmented reality glasses or helmets).

“When I started Facebook, we used to type mostly text on websites. When we got camera phones, the Internet became more visual and mobile. As connections became faster, video became a richer way to share experiences. The next platform will be even more immersive – a tangible Internet, where you will be in the experience and you will not just look at it. We call this “metaverse” and it will touch every product we make. We will be on metaverse first, not Facebook. This means that over time you will not need a Facebook account to use our other services. “, he said.

How feasible is this, what will change in everyday life, what are the risks?

Emeritus Professor of New Technologies of EKPA and Member of the Board of the Institute for Information Technologies in Education of UNESCO (IT), Michalis Meimaris, spoke at skai.gr for this meta-era on social media that we and our children will be called to live.

At the same time, he explains why Zuckerberg made these sudden changes and who he will be called upon to face in order to be crowned with success in this new venture, as well as Microsoft has already announced that it is bringing metaverse into Teams, its own version of Zoom, which is also integrated in Windows 11, while Elon Musk, is clearly ahead of satellite networks and satellite sending.

The interview in detail:

Q: As Facebook says in its announcement about metaverse, this “is a new phase of interconnected virtual experiences, with the aim of creating online interactions, much closer to the personal contact experience”. Can you explain to us in simple words what this means?

ΑΠ: It means that we are changing into “users” !!! Users of virtual and augmented reality applications that create, according to Mark Zuckerberg, “better quality social experiences”. In other words, for this interview, the avatar that I have chosen today to “represent” me, is in the virtual world suggested by and discusses with you himself or your avatar. That is, we have, in a way, an “immersion” in experience.

I think Mark Zuckerberg is drawn to the old teleportation dream and tries to give it an illusion of a solution, a virtual solution.

Q: In essence, metaverse opens the door to a digital world like no other. What activities will a person be able to perform in there, will he be able to travel from, say, his home?

ΑΠ: Virtual worlds with the possibility of online interactions already exist, mainly in computer games. What Mark Zuckerberg envisions, in my opinion, is to slowly move away from the two dimensions of the screen and, through avatars and holograms, to create virtual worlds with “layers of reality” (layers of reality), where the user is immersed. will be able to have an “authentic” sense of presence. What is currently being planned is the possibility to be able, for example, through my avatar to visit from my home the virtual world of each store and try on clothes, shoes, etc.
In these virtual worlds, the Zuckerberg metaverse promises that almost everything in our lives can take place, from work, education and communication to entertainment, travel and more. So it seems, and in fact because Bill Gates’ Microsoft with Teams application has entered this road race, that a large part of our daily life at some point in the future will take place in virtual worlds, but also in worlds where the real and the virtual.
The issue is these worlds, utopian and dystopian, that now have detailed personal data for each of us, who manages them?

Q: Perhaps one of the reasons why Facebook (but also every social media in general) is now an integral part of our daily lives, is on the one hand the fact that it is extremely simple to use and on the other hand that it allows anyone access in it, completely free. Will the same be true for metaverse?

ΑΠ: New technologies are characterized by high acceleration in their evolution, but it is not linear. In the case of the metaverse we are discussing, virtual reality, which it uses so much, has been with us for many years now, since even in Greece in 1994 at the conference “From Computer Graphics to Virtual Reality”, which we organized at the Department of Communication and Mass Media According to the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, the archimandrite of Karpathos Kallinikos “exchanged” his helmet with the VR helmet! However, it took a long time for this helmet to be transformed into easy-to-use and lightweight glasses and to create applications that even today, before the general use that Zuckerberg proposes through the metaverse, are limited.

* This is the poster of the 1994 event, where the virtual glasses were used

A second essential feature for the success of both hardware and software, as well as the entire design and use of digital technology-based products and services, is usability and accessibility. In Greece, since 2007, on the initiative of the Department of Communication and Media of EKPA, a community of scientists and students from various university laboratories in the country and people of applications, who deal with this interesting issue.

As for facebook and of course, as you say, it owes a lot to its evolution, both in usability and free access.

The truth is that Mark Zuckerberg while saying that metaverse will be made by companies, creators and developers of the applications, for now with the new corporate scheme Meta Platforms, Inc. and the sum of the recruitments he makes, he proceeds alone. In other words, he clearly believes that facebook had the idea and the vision and is reopening the streets that he is carving. In other words, it seems that nothing changes in the economic model that he proposes and … “imposes”.

Q: For most people, Zuckerberg’s announcements were a “thunderbolt”. However, for those of you who have devoted your academic work to the study of new technologies, was it a surprise to move into this new phase of the digital age? Is now the right time to take this step?

ΑΠ: Metaverse is based on the principles and applications of virtual reality (Virtual Reality -VR) and augmented reality (Augmented reality – AR). Examples of environments where there have already been online interactions through several incomplete avatars are Second Life and Fortnite, as well as Zuckerberg’s Horizon Workspace. Zuckerberg offers what he says is a “relationship and communication” to a community of 2.4 billion people on Facebook and Instagram, combining the threads of individual technologies that had not yet found a common “walk”, he plans to give them a huge boost with metaverse , evangelizing better social experiences for users.
But in addition to computers that have to manage huge data sets at very high speeds, networks of sufficient bandwidth are required to handle all of this information. The difficulty here is that Mark Zuckerberg should probably use satellite networks and there he will meet Elon Musk, who has already launched a series of satellites for this purpose, the number of which already amounts to about 1,800, and according to what says, to rise to 12,000 or even 42,000 by 2027.

As for the moment Mark Zuckerberg chose for this announcement, a first reading tells us that he wants to convince the necessary investors for his new venture, dispelling the bad reputation that has been overshadowing Facebook in recent months.
A second reason is definitely the relative removal of young people from facebook. For these and perhaps many other reasons, Mark Zuckerberg chooses to take his companies further, that is, to become, as he puts it, meta.

Q: Neal Stephenson’s book, Snow Crash (1992), “describes a virtual reality world where companies belong and end users are treated as citizens of a corporate dystopian dictatorship.” The above reference to Stephenson’s book was invoked by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to ridicule Zuckerberg. How much do you agree with this comment?

ΑΠ: N. Stephenson’s words remind us of comics as well as Ian Fleming’s books, where the dystopian world was created by people who have always been associated with big companies. For quite some time now, I have been of the opinion that science fiction is a reality and therefore many of these “prophecies” can happen if they have not already happened.

You know, while we are rightly dealing with the potentially dystopian world of metaverse where our children will live, being too preoccupied with what might happen in the future is a shift from the terrible things that are happening right now in our real-world analog world.
In conclusion, we must say that technological development has offered a lot to humanity, in other words in our real world, it is enough just to consider the applications of new technologies in medicine. So the metaverse, and what it will bring with it, since every new invention has as a consequence and many others, will definitely have applications with a positive sign.