Soo-Yong Park’s Digital World Metaverse World of New Opportunities

One of the most common phenomena for us in the Corona 19 situation seems to be’untact’. Now, zoom meetings, webinas, and online shopping are recognized as natural activities. Before Corona 19, it could not be admitted to have a video conference without actually meeting, and wasn’t it recognized as something incomplete?

In line with this situation, the recent MZ generation does not inevitably replace some of the activities in the real world with digital, but instead replaces the real world itself with digital to create a new world where people meet and communicate in the digital world, and even economic activities. However, this is called’Metaverse’. Metaverse is a concept first used in Neil Stevenson’s novel Snow Crash (1992). It is a compound word of’meta’, which means’virtual, abstract, and transcendence’, and’universe’, which means’space’, which is commonly referred to as’virtual reality world’.

Metaverse has been popular with the MZ generation before Corona 19, but due to Corona 19, everyone is gathering as Metaverse. Although it is a virtual space, clothing items such as Louis Vuitton that can meet the virtual self, the desire to decorate the avatar and the virtual house where the avatar will reside, are traded. The economic system within the metaverse, in which not only the same real estate but also interiors and artworks are traded, is being created naturally.

In the metaverse, performances and exhibitions are held just like the real world. Recently, American hip-hop singer Travis Scott performed a virtual live concert at the Fortnite Metaverse, and more than 10 million avatars watched the show and recorded sales of more than $20 million. Compared to the $1.7 million (approximately 1.8 billion won) revenue of the offline tour’Astro World’ he conducted in 2019, this is an unusual record.

ZEPETO is a metaverse developed by a domestic company. When you take a self photo with a smartphone or select your own photo from the gallery, it creates an avatar that resembles the user, and the user is an avatar as an item of a luxury brand affiliated with ZEPETO. Do activities such as decorating and attending fan signing events. Gepetto subscribers reach 200 million. A world much larger than the population of Korea has been created.

In recent years, the background of rapid attention to the metaverse is the emergence of NFT (Non-Fungible Token), which is called’Impossible Coin’. When the real world is digitized, there are many convenient points, but in the digital world, copying is easily made, making it difficult to estimate the value of the original. However, as NFT technology based on blockchain technology has recently been applied to digital pictures, sound sources, and items, buyers can prove that they are the original owners, and the transaction market based on this has been activated. Through the digital art trade based on NFT technology, a total of 100,000 works were sold around the world until the beginning of March, with a total transaction amount of about 220 billion won. People who own original digital works may rent their own works to art museums on the Metaverse, or even open their own exhibitions. As such, the metaverse is a virtual world, but it is changing into another world where economic activities are exchanged with each other beyond meeting and communication. In the midst of last year’s US presidential election, Joe Biden’s camp opened an election camp in a metaverse and communicated with the voters in it, suggesting that its influence is already paying attention to the political world. Another aspect is that compared to the real estate, stocks, and art markets occupied by older generations to the MZ generation, the metaverse is seen as a world of new opportunities where there are no vested rights yet.

As a virtual world, it is possible to reduce the meaning of it as a world of value bubble, fraud, and fiction, but for us young people, shouldn’t we be able to express our will to the world of opportunity that is just beginning?