Diogo Queiroz de Andrade

The many dimensions of the multiverse

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Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook rebranding, the discussion about the coming digital transformation has left the academic and experimentalist sphere to reach the general public. It was not too soon.

Simply put, the multiverse can be said to be the realization of the promises of recent years: technologies such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things, 5G, virtual reality, and augmented reality have come together with cloud computing, blockchain, and superior processing power to create a perennial, permanent, and ubiquitous digital layer.

It corresponds to the drift that humanity has been tracing, moving decisively towards a deep interaction between the physical and the digital – in which the common element is the human who moves ever more subtly between both spaces.

Just as we already conduct much of our professional and social lives today in the midst of the Internet, so too will it be in the times of the multiverse.

The difference, which is not a detail, is that we will drop the screen and take advantage of digital realities in an immersive way, multiplying virtual interactions.

The term may even have been born in science fiction, but its construction started much earlier, in the laboratories of universities and companies; and the fruits that are beginning to be harvested today are redefining humanity’s relationship with what is tangible. The multiverse is a fundamental layer of human reality, always active, synchronous, and with much more (and better) content than the Internet has today; as an experience that crosses the physical and digital worlds, it allows us to operate in different dimensions, opening the way to redefine concepts and shake up the pillars of social and individual modernity.

Technological inevitability imposes on academia the imperative of research because almost everything remains to be discovered. The challenge, for citizens and institutions, is immense. And that is why ObiMedia dedicates one of its research fields to the multiverse and its many facets.