Metaverse: Essence and Military Application Value

Abstract

Global trends in digitalization and the consequences of the pandemic stirred up public interest in the metaverse space, which completely lacked the restrictions imposed by the governments of national states. Projects such as Second Life, Decentraland, The Sandbox, and others promote a new form of human existence and communication as an alternative to meeting basic human needs for live, contact, and freedom of movement. Leading technology companies are included in the development of metaverse of various purposes. It is assumed that the development of immersive technologies will make the presence in the metaverse approximate in feeling to real life and most of the social activity associated primarily with work and entertainment will flow into its virtual space. It is likely that the developers of the metaverse will agree on the use of a single blockchain protocol (a set of rules and actions in the network) that ensures uninterrupted data transfer, their complete safety and transparency. This, in turn, will lead to the emergence of unified digital property and its distribution in the Internet space Web 3.0 and 4.0. The basic principles of metaverse construction are used by the military departments of leading countries to organize a network in which the interaction of types and types of troops is tested through appropriate simulators, taking into account the implementation of the skills of military specialists connected to it. At the same time, the steady interest of the military in game simulations has been preserved since the mid-1980s. The potential of such a metaverse of virtual worlds has already been realized in military activities in the preparation of calculations of weapons, military and special equipment. The capabilities of this technology for military affairs go beyond the exclusively educational resource and are able to change the content of future military conflicts. Extended reality (XR) interfaces, which will be improved during the creation of metaverse, will subsequently become an integral part of armed struggle.