[Book Sip] How Generative AI and Metaverse Will Change the Future Like This

Editor's NoteSome sentences encapsulate the entire content of a book, while others instantly resonate with readers, creating a connection with the book. We excerpt and introduce such meaningful sentences from books.

This book forecasts the future society shaped by the widespread use of generative AI and the metaverse. The term ‘metaverse’ is a compound of ‘meta’ meaning transcendence and ‘verse’ meaning world, first appearing in the 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash. Currently, the field where the metaverse is most actively applied is gaming. A famous singer’s concert in Fortnite recorded 12.7 million simultaneous viewers, and creators in the game Roblox have established their own economic systems. Companies regard the metaverse as a new growth engine. Big tech companies such as Meta, Apple, Tesla, and Microsoft are fiercely competing, with Apple releasing the extended reality device Apple Vision Pro and predicting that within the next decade, Apple Vision Pro will replace smartphones. The book explores these backgrounds and envisions the future landscape.

The metaverse concert by rapper Travis Scott held on the game platform Fortnite recorded 12.3 million simultaneous viewers and was watched by a total of 27.7 million players. Considering that even the largest offline concert venues can hardly accommodate more than 100,000 people, this proves that when conducted remotely, real-time network technology can effectively unite the entire global population to watch or enjoy a performance together. - p.38

On June 12, 2023, Apple CEO Tim Cook introduced Apple’s new next-generation computing device, Vision Pro. The term he chose was ‘spatial computing.’ In other words, with Vision Pro, the user’s surrounding space transforms into a space where computers can be utilized, and Vision Pro is differentiated to control this changed environment and provide users with the best experience. Although he did not use the term explicitly, this was essentially the announcement of an XR device for the metaverse. - p.69

Looking at ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, which appeared like a comet at the end of 2022, artificial intelligence understands speech well and even creates impressive images matching the context of sentences. This clearly shows that creativity, creation, and language domains are no longer areas AI cannot invade. - p.77

At Pulse9, an AI graphics specialist company, a popularity vote was conducted for 101 virtual idols each of male and female, newly generated by learning images of all-time idols who debuted in Korea. Among them, ‘Ham Chorong,’ who ranked first in the female category in the mid-term tally, debuted as a promotional ambassador for a major gaming tournament. The AI girl group Iiterniti has appeared on live TV broadcasts, and male idols have begun full-scale activities as advertising models for multinational beauty companies like L'Or?al. We are becoming very accustomed to seeing characters created by generative AI. - p.108

The first project to properly demonstrate that NFT technology can be applied not only to some games but also very diversely was ‘NBA Top Shot.’ It achieved great success by creating and selling NBA basketball video clips as collectible digital NFT cards. Although exact statistics were not released, it recorded tens of millions of transactions and an enormous transaction volume exceeding trillions of won, showing the great potential for the creator economy using NFTs to grow significantly in the future. - p.139

The Future of the Metaverse Changed by Generative AI | Written by Jihoon Jeong | Gimmyoung Publishing | 160 pages | 11,500 KRW

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.