Metaverse is becoming a popular word, and everybody is talking about it, but what is the meaning of metaverse? The sci-fi novel with the title Snow Crash, written by Neal Stephenson, was the first time the term metaverse was ever used. The term metaverse is a combination of 2 different words, which are meta and verse. Meta is from Greek, meaning post, after, or beyond and verse is short for the universe(Mystakidis, 2022). Based on those two words, we can conclude that metaverse means beyond the universe or our universe since the metaverse is digital. Neal Stephenson in his book imagines the future world where the metaverse is the internet 2.0 and the user can live there and do their activities on daily basis, each user will have their representation of themselves called an avatar. The user activities, movements, expressions, etc. are represented through this avatar. The metaverse is almost the same as the real world where the user cannot be in two places at once, there off-limit places and move at a limited speed (Remembering in the Metaverse: Preservation, Evaluation, and Perception, n.d.). Stephenson also defines the metaverse as a virtual world that is similar to the physical world where people can interact with each other (Lee et al., 2021). In this paper, we consider the metaverse is a collection of multiple elements in the three-dimensional world or 3D virtual environments where the user or human is reflected as an avatar where they can live or do any kind of social interaction as if they are living there without any physical limitation (Owens et al., 2011; Park & Kim, 2022). The concept of the metaverse has been brought to be more visual by Stephen Spielberg in the movie called Ready Player One, in this movie, there is an expensive virtual reality universe called OASIS, and people can enter this universe by using the head-mounted display (HMD) for VR rendering, sending, haptic feedback and modeling of a physical world and represent themselves by using an avatar (Duan et al., 2021; WarnerBros.Com | Ready Player One | Movie, n.d.). In the metaverse, people or users can interact for many reasons, not just for playing games but also for social, and cultural activities, economic, political, etc. (Park & Kim, 2022).
Based on the above figure, the first era of the metaverse is the literature era back in 1974 called Dungeons & Dragons, followed by Neuromancer in 1984. Several years after the literature era of the metaverse, the next era was called the text-based interactive games that started in 1987 until 1992. In this era, the game is played using a PC and a computer graphic to produce a better quality picture. The third era is called Virtual Worlds & Massively Multiplayer Games (MMOG). The MMOG era starts from 1996 to 2011, all the metaverse game in this era requires not just a PC but also massive internet usage and were compatible with or required a touchscreen as an input device, the most popular games in this era are Online traveler, Second Life, and Minecraft to name a few (Bardzell & Shankar, 2007). After the MMOG era ends, the Immersive Virtual Environment on smart mobiles & wearable era kicks in immediately from 2012 to 2017. In this era, new technologies have entered commercial markets such as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality has been used as the main tools of the game. Pokemon Go! and PlayStation VR is the most popular games in this era. In 2017 the third era of the metaverse has been replaced with the New Era of the Metaverse until now.