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Welcome to Geek Time advanced, this is Brad. And hello, Lulu.

Hi. Brad.

We're going to talk a little bit more about the Metaverse.

Yes. And I start to sense that Metaverse that as we described it, it’s not exactly what Facebook is now, but maybe this is the direction they want to go.

Yes, when we look at like the metaphors and the real world kind of like what Facebook wants to have is we can have a Metaverse where when we are at home, we can use the goggles, and we can kind of like have whatever place we want to live in. If you ever use like HTC Vive and use their software, you can kind of have your own private little room that's on the top of a mountain.

And if you're in there, you kind of feel like you're actually in this mountain and you can look off into the distance.

But doesn't that require you to wear to goggle all the time.

Yeah, yeah.

Maybe in the future, there will be lighter options, maybe not goggles, maybe something even almost like contact lens.

Yeah, like Google Glass has try to do that, and like not many people got along with that. But one of the things that Meta is trying to do is they're trying to kind of incorporate the real world into the Metaverse. And so you could use your phone or like glasses or goggles or something like that that you could see. And so you can see everything that's happening in the real world, but also have kind of like these things that are belonging to the Metaverse.

It's like an overlayer of sorts.

You can have two places, you have the overlayer of the real world, and then you can kind of have your own like private space that you can kind of build outside of where you actually are.

Honestly it's one of those technologies that when you first hear it, you think wow, that is so cool. But then once you have some time to think about it, you think this sounds a bit creepy.

It is in a way.

Because gradually maybe the line between what's real, what's virtual will be blurred. Yeah. Let's talk about the issues and concerns later, talk about my fears, my nightmares later, but I would think this can change things like, I don't know, real estate?

So when you look at like real estate as it is now, if you want to buy a house.

You have to go and see.

You have to go, you have to look at the house, you want to do something you don't have to, but you should check out the neighborhood, right? You can look around the neighborhood. What a lot of companies are planning to do is you could have kind of like a drone.

We talked about this.

Within the house, but rather than just using the drone to take like pictures or to look around, you can actually use the Metaverse to log in, and see from the drones point of view, and look around the house.

Like real time looking around.

And so you could kind of like log in to the drone at night. The drone should have like sound and so you should be able to hear things. You can kind of like log in at night, if there's lots of noise from like the neighbors or something like that. You can kind of get a feeling for what type of place it is during the day, during the night.

That is pretty cool, but it's gonna potentially put real estate agents out, realtors out of their jobs.

Well, they would still have to be the ones that are selling you the property. It would just be they wouldn't be showing you the places as much, but...

Tech-enhanced experience.

But like you could also use the Metaverse to kind of look around the neighborhood, like see what they have there, do they have like good shops? Do they have like a lot of cars, you could kind of like watch the cars go by and so you can kind of get a feeling for the neighborhood a little bit better than if you were just to go and look at an apartment and just get a glimpse of the neighborhood at a particular time of day.

But actually you are still talking about real properties. I mean you can also sell virtual properties because Metaverse, if it's an overlying existence, then you can sell and buy this the actual house or flat that you live in, but you can also sell and buy the virtual side of it, right?

I don't know how Meta is going to do things now, they probably have some sort of like legality. If it's like an overlay of the real world, you probably wouldn't be able to buy like someone's apartment in the Metaverse if that's where they live in the real world. But...

Imagine if put on a goggle, the home owner put on a goggle and they see you, and they're like who are you?

Then you say I own this place.

Well you own it in the real world, but I own it in the Metaverse. But like uh, one of the things that they've been talking about as far as like when people create a virtual world, they have kind of like... they have a bunch of land and you can buy land and you can develop the land within the universe and then you could even like if you develop like a house, if you build a house.

In the Metaverse...

In the Metaverse.

...which means you use a computer program design it.

You could have a house like in the central area like if they had something that created, this is the central area of the Metaverse, you live close there, you could actually have like a company could sell you advertising that you could put on your house and actually you could make money. Because when people come by your house, they could see the advertisement.

Because there's so much possibility for AD space because it's a completely new world.

Yeah, as you're like walking through a neighborhood and you're using your augmented reality, there's maybe like a piece of art that someone put there as something they wanted to show you, like a Benz or something like that. But a company could also put an advertisement somewhere. And so as you're going through augmented reality, you might see like an advertisement from McDonald's.

You know what I'm thinking is more with how popular these webcasters, these live streamers are. You gonna just see them everywhere on every virtual building and every Metaverse building, and you see different people selling, it will be very loud I think.

So when you think about like the Metaverse and having like places for sale, it really comes down to this whole idea that unless it's just an overlay of the world, they're going to have like a limited amount of space and they're gonna have like really popular areas.

Um.

So people are gonna want to buy property and like the closer you are, it’s like more popular the area is, the more it's gonna cost .

Really it's exactly the same as our world now

And as we kind of like talked about some people build their lives around virtual worlds like MMORPG is.

And so a lot of people would really want to like be there because they know they're maybe their life outside is kind of boring and so people are gonna buy a house somewhere in the virtual world. That's maybe much nicer than their real house.

True.

But like ...it really depends on how they work it out, whether it's just going to be an overlay or they're gonna have their own world. And there's probably going to be like several different Metaverses out there. Like probably you'll have the Metaverse from Facebook, but like the Metaverse itself is like the whole concept is an idea.

So you might have like the PlayStation.

Yeah, exactly I was gonna say, I think every game, especially the MMORPG games and each of them creates their own universe, their own world. And that can potentially be a Metaverse. And then people who love that game or love to play those roles, they can go to that one. You can be in different Metaverse.

Yeah, you could just... it would have to be something like where you log into one and then you log into another one. And I just have to do that on your computer or something. I'm pretty sure someone could figure out a way to be in more than one at the same time.

Yeah, but then we're going into the alternate universe and then also the multiverse.

Yeah.

But there are many concerns, honestly, hearing about all these, I think our addiction to being plugged in or even jacked in it would be unthinkable.

I mean like uh, there's a lot of addiction issues when it comes to the internet as it is, people build their life around a character that they have on a game.

When you turn that character into yourself and you are in the virtual reality world and it's not just you have your own like avatar skin on, and people can see you as you want to be seen, and then you're there and you can just be whoever you want to be, and then you don't have to leave the world unless it's just for like cooking or whatever.

But you could have someone else cook for you.

This reminds me of this thought experiment I talked to TJ about in our philosophy segment about would you like to be plugged into a pleasure machine? This is essentially the ultimate pleasure machine that you can be, whoever you wanna be.

Yeah, but there's also other things that I'm a bit worried about, it's although this all sounds fun, all sounds so adventurous, but it actually alienates people because you can be whoever you wanna be. But don't you lose even more of that real touch with real flesh and blood people?

Yeah. Like you're gonna be disconnected because you to actually have to see people, right? You have to actually touch people. It's like it will kind of have this negative feeling because there's going to be people who lived their entire life within the Metaverse almost, like they don't know what it's like to actually hug a person or something like that.

They'll go home, even if they're working right they may spend their entire work day in their home. Like they may just have things delivered to their home.

If you think it's bad enough for us in the future we might adopt this lifestyle think about future when kids who are born in the future that actually grow up in the idea of Metaverse. Human existence will probably change forever. Yeah. And then also I would worry about potential security issues because you can be hacked even more like your entire life, your entire persona can be hacked.

When we look at the way VR can be used like some games, for example, like TV shows and games cause people to have apoplectic moments, seizures, this there could be other issues with being plugged into the machine and having like light being into your eyes all the time. Yeah, there could be other issues with that as well.

A new age for digital zombies.

Digital zombies or maybe digital viruses that actually affect people.

Wow. Okay, thank you for the nightmare. So I think we're gonna stop here and that's certainly a lot to think about, Metaverse is one of the hottest topics now and I'm sure many of you probably know a lot more about it than we do, share with us in the comment section what you think, what are your worries? What are your dreams? Thank you again, Brad, for coming to the studio.

No problem.

We'll see you next time.

Bye.