IN TODAY’S EVER-CHANGING world you wake up and you aren’t sure you recognize the world we live in. Well, get ready for what’s next. You will be flabbergasted with what’s just around the corner.

Are you ready for the new virtual community known as Metaverse? Metaverse is a 3D virtual world inhabited by avatars of real people. It’s the future of the internet, an upgraded version. It may prove to be a fancier successor to the internet you now know.

Metaverse will fundamentally change the way people interact with each other. Everything you can do in the digital and virtual worlds, you will be able to do inside of gaming. The term metaverse was coined by author Neal Stephenson in his 1992 book “Snow Crash.”

Metaverse is a concept rooted in science fiction. People will be able to hang out in immersive, shared digital spaces using avatars that allow them to virtually attend concerts or try on clothes in stores, just like they would do offline in the real world.

Major tech companies including Facebook, Microsoft and futuristic video-game companies like ZeniMax Mediaa, Discord and PlayGiga are investing billions of dollars in Metaverse. If you are standing still, you are falling behind. What will be your avatar?

The Metaverse is an expansive network of persistent, real-time rendered 3D worlds and simulations that support continuity of identity, objects, history, payments and entitlements. You and I might not know what that means, but ask your children and grandchildren to explain it to you.

Michael Wolf, cofounder and chief executive of consulting firm Activate Inc., recently made a few forecasts about the future of Metaverse. It will be a competitive future as software and technology giants determine what replaces the current internet.

Wolf said time spent watching digital videos will increase over the next four years and will surpass time spent watching TV by 2025. The shift to e-commerce will accelerate as more are buying movies online.

Wolf said audio will be one of the fastest-growing media formats with users estimated to spend nearly three hours a day listening to either podcasts or radio by 2025, up from 2.5 hours in 2018.

The global audience for e-sports is expected to surpass 700 million viewers by 2025. The projected viewers for 2021 is 557 million. What is unclear are the unintended consequences these new innovations will create.



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A FRIEND wondered if it’s too late to right the ship. Nothing makes sense anymore: no values, morals and no civility. We have become a nation that has lost its collective mind.

We are clearly living in an upside-down world where right is wrong and wrong is right, moral is immoral and immoral is moral, good is evil and evil is good. Speak up while you still have breath and a voice for soon you will have neither.

I have never dreamed that I would have to face the prospect of not living in the United States of America, at least not the one I have known all my life. This is my home and I was privileged to be born here. I’m afraid that everything is changing for the worse.

No matter how I vote, what I say, how much I pray, something evil has invaded our nation and our lives are never going to be the same. I have been confused by the hostility of family and friends. I look at people I have known all my life, so hate-filled that they agree with opinions they would never express as their own.