# The Metaverse

By [Crypto Lessons](https://paragraph.com/@mankindness) · 2023-05-11

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The Metaverse is not a “thing”, but an **idea**. It’s actually incredibly useful as a concept in your own mind, to tie together so many new technologies: Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), NFTs, crypto, DeFi, satellite internet, global connectivity, immersive gaming, etc. It’s pretty overwhelming to try and imagine a world with all these technologies if you go one at a time, but the Metaverse offers an easy mental picture that can encompass all these technologies and more. 

Now, there is no unified definition of the Metaverse, but let’s take a shot at it. Let’s think of it as “**the merging of the physical and digital world**”. That could take many forms. There’s the Virtual Reality Metaverse: An immersive digital world that you experience fully virtually with a VR headset (like a 3D internet, Ready Player One or Futurama style), and the Augmented Reality Metaverse: one that exists as an overlay on top of your real world experience (picture a Heads Up Display through some fancy glasses that overlays data on anything you look at).

Most definitions in popular culture today are closer to the Ready Player One VR version, with you having a digital avatar that is experiencing a digital world. While this will certainly be part of how people will be able to experience this new world, that definition by itself is extremely limited and incomplete. We aren’t just going **into** the digital world, the digital world is coming **outward** to us. That’s important, as the second part isn’t as commonly discussed, and it’s a big part of seeing the future of what’s being built (even if we have to squint a little bit to see it 😉).

**So, to summarize: When we talk about the Metaverse, we mean the blending of the physical and the digital world. We primarily mean either pulling more of our senses and experiences into the digital world, or bringing more of the digital world into our physical lives.**

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*Originally published on [Crypto Lessons](https://paragraph.com/@mankindness/the-metaverse)*