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"In the beginning ... was the command line" — so begins the essay by the American writer Neil Stevenson. Stevenson is a cult figure of the 90s for programmers. From under his pen in 1992 came the book "Avalanche" (Snow Crash), written in the genre of cyberpunk and portraying the near future, in which power belongs to corporations, and the whole world combines a network of virtual reality Metaverse. On the wave of popularity rapidly developing computer technology in the early 90s, the book received widespread recognition in cyberspace and Stevenson became known as "the hacker Hemingway".
# "Here, read everything by Neal Stephenson. He became our inspiration, " admitted Mike Paul, Manager of the technical division of Microsoft in a conversation with Newsweek.
But then the creation of virtual reality was constrained by insufficient development of technologies: GPUs were too slow, as well as the speed of Internet connection.
# "In the middle of 1999 there were two turning points. Nvidia released its first GeForce fast graphics processor and broadband began to appear," Philip Rosedale recalls.
At the same time, Rosedale founded the Linden Lab startup in San Francisco, which in 2003 launched a three-dimensional virtual world project with elements of the Second Life social network.
# "At an early stage, the people who joined our team, especially the developers, were truly obsessed with the idea of virtual reality. These were people who read the "Avalanche"," Rosedale says.
Second Life has rapidly gained popularity. It was not so much a game as a virtual space in which each participant could choose the format of existence. Residents of the virtual platform created art, built buildings, inhabited the territory of animals, are United in community and service clubs. In the virtual world appeared embassies of real countries, representatives of the largest universities in the world. The number of registered accounts on the platform by 2018 exceeded 49.5 million.
The world of Second Life was rapidly developing, but in mid-2007, the platform was faced with a harsh reality: Linden Lab had to ban gambling in the virtual world in accordance with the adoption of the Federal law in the United States prohibiting online gambling. This was the first time that centralized management from outside interfered with virtual reality. The decision to ban caused a violent outrage on the part of the platform participants. The forums are flooded with outraged comments:
# "Second Life becomes as boring as real life."
# "Second Life sat in a puddle. The ban on gambling is just the tip of the iceberg."
The tightening of the rules for participants really followed the prohibition of gambling.
Due to the actions of several avatars in 2010 under ban was the University of California Woodbury, which for several years has developed a virtual campus on the platform.
Meanwhile in the world began to gain popularity of a social network — Facebook, Instagram, there were games with elements of the augmented reality (AR), and interest in Second Life began to decline. In the four months of 2017, the platform lost more than 270 private settlements. Linden Lab's revenue fell from $100 million in 2009 to around $50 million in 2017.
The community of enthusiasts who believe in the future of virtual reality, seriously thought about how to create a more independent platform, and turned to blockchain technology. In 2015, the team of virtual reality developers United in Decentraland game reality project: its main difference was decentralized architecture. For this Decentraland it was decided to build on the blockchain Ethereum.
The main postulate of the project is that"the public virtual world must be managed in accordance with open standards, protected from the agenda of any centralized organization".
The platform is already running, but it works in a rather limited mode: graphics and textures are far from ideal. The concern is the ability of the Ethereum blockchain, which is Decentraland, to withstand this load, because in December 2017 due to the popularity of the game CryptoKitties in Ethereum appeared hours-long delays in transactions.
After Decentraland other blockchain projects on creation of virtual worlds began to appear on the market. Thus, the Mark project builds a decentralized ecosystem for virtual and augmented reality. Space. If Decentraland focuses on ordinary users, then Mark. Space is a platform for business: shops, offices, game simulators. The content posted on the platform is planned to be stored in decentralized repositories, which will be provided by the miners of the ecosystem. But so far, the platform, which already exists in the prototype, works with centralized servers. Mark. Space also uses Ethereum blockchain to create smart contracts.
Now the platform supports all Internet browsers and can be viewed without the use of VR-equipment on ordinary computers and smartphones.
The emphasis on virtual reality is made by another project, which also creates a decentralized virtual universe, Viarium. On the platform, it is proposed to create virtual spaces for the promotion of goods and services of companies in the real sector: for example, a construction company can create a virtual prototype of a house that has not yet been built, and potential buyers can study the layout of the apartment. In Viarium you can open stores, create showrooms, build boats and houses. Owners of virtual real estate will be able to lease premises to other participants of the platform.
All users of the platform - owners and tenants of virtual spaces, providers of server capacity for content storage, VR-designers, creators of intellectual property, employees of virtual offices — receive financial motivation to participate in the project.
One of the main differences of this project, in addition to the focus on consumers from the business sector, was that the platform promotes the use of VR-equipment to participate in the life of the universe. The company creates all over the world a set of special "entry points" — the equipped rooms located in the shopping and office centers where anyone who does not have at own disposal VR-glasses will be able to use the VR equipment and to enter the virtual world.
Unlike many projects that are just at the beginning of the idea and plan to attract funding through the sale of tokens, Viarium platform already has a basic architecture. The first world of Genesis Land was created, where you can buy plots and create your own virtual spaces.
The emergence of new players in this area suggests that virtual reality is just beginning to develop. According to the forecast of the consulting company International Data Corporation (IDC), the market of virtual and augmented reality (AR/VR) will grow by an average of 113.2% per year over the next four years and will increase from $11.4 billion in 2017 to $215 billion in 2021. Interest in virtual reality began to show the largest IT companies in the world, standing at the forefront of technology development. Thus, the founder of Facebook mark Zuckerberg at the annual conference F8 in San Jose told about the company's plans" to raise the technology of virtual and augmented reality to a whole new level", in particular, to create the opportunity to communicate with the avatar of a real person using a VR headset.
Blockchain technology can help virtual reality to maintain its sovereignty and make the new world and its economy more honest and independent.
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