Metaverse - The New Age Empire : Relinquishing Our Identity to Acquire Digital Immortality

Metaverse or the real world and after, is the post-reality universe, an environment merging physical reality with digital virtuality as an evolving paradigm of the next-generation internet that aims to build a fully immersive and self-sustaining virtual shared space for humans to play, work, and socialize. It is based on merging technologies like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) that enable multisensory interactions with digital objects, virtual environments, and people. Hence, the Metaverse is an interconnected and unified web of social, networked immersive environments in persistent multiuser platforms. In this paper, we see Metaverse from a broader perspective, and we present our holistic view by relating the evolution of the Metaverse to the rise and fall of any empire. A series of fundamental challenges can arise in Metaverse security provisioning due to the Metaverse’s intrinsic characteristics, which can compromise individual identity. We elaborate on how data privacy will be a concept of the past as we deal with the more serious aspect of identity manipulation or identity loss. We dive deeper into how Metaverse can entice humans to the fantasy of Immortality and, in the process, lose our identity and individuality. Thus, relinquishing our complete control to machines. We will explore the aspect where extreme immersiveness, combined with an autonomous or a self-sustaining virtual universe, can be extremely dangerous to humans if not handled responsibly.