Living a second digital life using virtual reality might have seemed like a distant dream a few years ago, but new technology is being developed to create the Metaverse. Earlier this year, Microsoft cited the Metaverse as a reason to purchase the game developer Activision Blizzard for $70 billion. Other companies are pushing out novel devices to win the technological turf war.

The Metaverse is a virtual space where people can interact with their friends, shop for outfits and anything else they can do in real life. We would be our digital avatars, and all our interactions will be online. For it to be fully realistic, virtual reality is being used in an attempt to immerse the user in a 3D world.

Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist, announced that the Metaverse is the new technological wave following the cell phones wave and will play a significant role in our future lives. “It’s about being within the computer rather than accessing the computer,” Ball said. “It’s about being always online rather than always having access to an online world.”

People may wonder if the Metaverse is new at all, since it exists in some form in video games. However, in comparison to the technology expected to be used for the Metaverse, videogames present only the preliminary software. Technologists have said that due to faster internet connections and more advanced gaming devices, the Metaverse will be unlike anything else seen in gaming.

An important point is that the market is there for people looking to invest in growing technologies. In games that roughly resemble what the Metaverse may look like, such as “Fortnite,” people are spending hundreds of dollars on outfits and additions to their digital avatars. Investments are undoubtedly going to start pouring in for such promising markets.

Although there is a lot of talk about the Metaverse, the technology is still young. Activision Blizzard’s work with the Metaverse has been rudimentary and only includes games where users spend hours building communities by interacting with other users. Microsoft has also begun developing technologies relating to the Metaverse. This is especially promising as Microsoft is the developer of HoloLens, a $3,500 headset that shows virtual holograms. It is also the owner of Xbox, which is expected to start developing technologies related to virtual reality soon.

However, there is a lot of concern in terms of privacy and security of users when engaging in the Metaverse. Technologies like virtual reality headsets collect more information about us than traditional screens can. There are almost no protections stopping the government from using virtual reality headsets to collect body-related data.

Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group, and the Extended Reality Safety Initiative, a nonprofit organization that develops standards on virtual reality usage, have sounded serious alarms about the uncontrollable growth of this technology.

“In some respects, a 3D headset is not really any different than a 3D monitor,” director of technology projects at Electronic Frontier Foundation Jon Callas said. “But then there are other things being done that could be extraordinarily intrusive.

With a lot of personal information being already gathered about us online without our knowledge, virtual reality threatens to add fuel to the fire. Although new technologies may seem exciting at first, we need to tread carefully and establish policies and standards to help protect users’ privacy, on the internet and beyond, in the Metaverse.