Even if you don't know much about IT, everyone feels that the world has changed significantly based on IT technology and lives using IT services.
What's next in the evolution of computers, the internet, and smartphones? Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia (a global company that develops and manufactures devices that process graphics and display them on monitors), spoke about this in a keynote speech at a conference last October.
“The era of the Metaverse is coming.”

Metaverse is a compound word of 'meta', meaning 'transcendence', and 'verse', meaning 'world, universe'.
Although it is an unfamiliar word, we are already experiencing the metaverse in our daily lives.
Online games, social media, platform services, online maps & navigation, and more. The metaverse, the digital world, will continue to expand and become an inseparable part of our lives.
How should we understand and embrace the metaverse?

Professor Kim Sang-gyun, who has been conducting research in various fields such as industrial engineering and games, detected this change and wrote this book to quickly introduce it to domestic readers.
"Metaverse" introduces the basic concepts of the metaverse and each area in an easy-to-understand manner, using real-world IT services and corporate examples.
It presents the metaverse as a world of emerging things that provide new opportunities and excitement/fun to humans.
On the other hand, it allows us to think about aspects that can affect people in the real world through questions and stories.

The metaverse is not a world to escape reality or a means to avoid social interactions.
The metaverse is a world where we can interact more comfortably and with more people.
We must support and work together within the metaverse to create new value.

I hope that while reading this book, you will let your imagination run wild.
Imagine how our children will learn and grow in the new metaverse.
Imagine how corporate management and the industrial landscape will evolve in the new metaverse.
Imagine what changes will occur to national systems and global cooperation in the new metaverse.


Our bodies exist in the material world, the analog Earth, but our lives are increasingly moving into the digital world, the digital Earth.

The new world contained in digital media such as smartphones, computers, and the Internet, the digitized Earth, is called the metaverse.
Metaverse is a compound word of meta, meaning transcendence and virtuality, and universe, meaning world and universe.
It refers to a virtual world that transcends reality.


The growth of companies dominating the metaverse and digital world is surpassing offline manufacturing and distribution companies.
The metaverse is becoming the center of the global economy.
This is why the concept of the metaverse shouldn't be considered a distant fantasy, a playground for digital enthusiasts or Generation Z.

We hope you enjoy your journey to the four digital planets.
You may feel a little dizzy, but don't be afraid. This is a natural feeling, like the excitement of encountering something new for the first time. Enjoy your journey through the metaverse.

When you experience augmented reality content, you feel as if you are living on another Earth in a parallel universe with the real space as the background.

Augmented reality emerged as a means to wake up the lazy brain.
Since most information will be thrown away anyway, this is a way to organize and summarize information so that it stands out and is presented to the public.
These augmented reality devices not only efficiently convey information, but also give us a strong sense of presence in certain situations.


The role of the multiple high-performance lenses on our smartphones is to capture images for our life logging.
In short, life logging, which involves adding a little bit of an ideal image of yourself to your real self and excluding the part of yourself you don't want to show, is the trend.

I hope readers of this book will view their friends in the lifelogging metaverse, where they share and support each other's life records (lifelogs), as travel companions.
This is because you will be happier and more comfortable with your travel companions in the metaverse.

When you post something on social media, dopamine is released in the expectation that others will respond to you, and when others actually respond as you expected, endorphins are released, making you feel happy.
Here's an important point.
There is no end to the cycle of us posting records like this and being happy through the reactions of others.
This is because the human reward expectation system does not have complete satisfaction, such as, "Enough is enough!"


My true self is the sum of all the different versions of myself that appear in various metaverses.
The me who was shy when we gathered in the auditorium, the me who honestly shared my worries in the open chat room, the me who offered words of comfort to a fellow student who didn't know me when he posted his worries in the YouTube chat window - all of these are me.

In a contactless environment, video conferencing tools like Zoom have become everyone's classroom.
The mirror world of the classroom created online has made us reflect on how we learned offline and whether there were any problems with that method.
Not all education can take place in a mirror world.
We must meet, communicate, and learn in reality.
However, as in the case of Minerva Schools, described above, the efficiency and scalability of non-face-to-face distance learning in future education will spread widely across the entire education sector.
I hope we can think together about what kind of classroom we should decorate in the Mirror World and how that classroom will connect with classrooms in the real world.

The metaverse is a virtual world where we design a space, era, cultural background, characters, and social systems that are different from reality, and live within it. (Omitted) In this new world of our own creation, AI characters and humans try to live together.
Life in the real world is complicated and there are many things to do, so why gather in a virtual world and do something?

In the virtual world of the Metaverse, people show the best of humanity as described by Plato and the superhuman as described by Nietzsche.

We created artificial intelligence with the hope that it would improve human life.
However, if such artificial intelligence becomes the property of a few and is used by some to more easily dominate and control the whole, it may become an artificial intelligence that opposes humans, as in the virtual world metaverse.
Before rushing to develop and commercialize AI technology, it would be wise to seriously examine the problems AI poses in the metaverse.

Whatever the purpose of those who created the metaverse, those who live in it want to play and have fun.
The reason Baedal Minjok's app, rather than a game program or webtoon, incorporates fun and satire into its platform, and the reason users like such things, all stems from play.
As long as the human nature of liking play remains unchanged, more diverse metaverses will continue to emerge and expand their scope.

When something fails in the real world, the negative consequences that follow often leave us feeling deeply frustrated.
If you mess up a project you're working on or get a bad grade, you might get your bonus cut or endure criticism from your parents.
On the other hand, in the metaverse, if something fails, there is no deduction.
Rather, I encourage you to try it one more time.
In that situation, the experience of failure gives us a stronger motivation to challenge ourselves.


Some use the metaverse as a new business platform, some as a new playground, and some as a means to escape reality.
If uncontrollable worries and unhappiness are weighing you down, it's okay to take a break and forget about them in the metaverse.
However, the metaverse should not become a means to completely forget reality.
No matter how brilliant life may be in the metaverse, the metaverse exists because of reality.

We hope you'll be interested in the future of the metaverse.
We support your journey to the metaverse.

--- From the text