For the first time, the decentralized nature of Web3 will allow users to participate in digital economies without having to relinquish control of their data.
Wandering through the metaverse is like being in a computer game, but it will soon feel like real life. Unlike some dystopian visions of the metaverse, Advances in content generation by artificial intelligence will likely lead to a photorealistic metaverse with exact replicas of ourselves, propelling us toward a hyper-reality that blends our real and digital lives.
As technology advances, the photorealistic contents of the metaverse will be indistinguishable from physical reality. Driving this change will be powerful AI content generation algorithms that use real-world data to seamlessly recreate versions of ourselves within digital environments. The question is, as the real world expands into virtual space: How will you keep bad actors from controlling your photorealistic virtual version of yourself?
Will Our Digital Selves Be Slaves of Large Corporations?
The metaverse takes data collection to a new level and will be filled with immersive content and ever richer data streams.
As we move into a hyper-realistic metaverse, what’s at stake is the incredibly intimate nature of the data required to represent realistic versions of people, including digital copies of our faces, bodies, and voices. This is a major roadblock to developing an inclusive and user-friendly metaverse, especially when it comes to hyper-real content.
In order to bring billions of people into virtual worlds, content creators will need to use AI content generation algorithms trained on real-world data to create personalized and immersive experiences at scale. People must be willing to share their intimate and private biometric data with content creators; otherwise, the metaverse may end up being nothing more than an endless Zoom call with a bunch of legless torsos floating around.
How to Secure Your Hyper Real Identity in the Metaverse
The arrival of a “hyper real” metaverse is both an exciting and worrying prospect. On the one hand, the metaverse will create new avenues of immersion for human expression and interaction.
Therefore, the first principle in securing your hyper real identity in the metaverse is to positively assert ownership of your private biometric data. While it is up to governments to stop criminals from stealing your data and identity, you can at least use Blockchain technologies to claim your hyper-real identity and track its use by legitimate content creators.
Web3 Will Put People in Control of their Metaverse of Identity and Biometrics
In the context of today’s Internet, the barrier to identity theft at scale has been dramatically lowered, with millions of people falling victim to these attacks each year.
Although malicious actors will always be present in the metaverse, Web3 technologies can provide a set of barriers to a positive economy in which individuals can securely share their biometric data and appear as themselves in metaverse content experiences. It is essential that we create systems that allow individuals to control how they are represented in the metaverse and who has access to their biometric data.
By Audy Castaneda
