Physical and Digital Worlds

In the middle of all this “metaverse” talk, I pulled up an article from November 3, 2020. Here you go!

I’ve been thinking about how there are two parallel worlds — the physical world and the digital world. The digital world is currently extremely basic — it refers to the social media profiles including email addresses, FB, Instagram, LinkedIn and other profiles we make on various platforms. Oh, this also includes avatars in PUBG and on iPhone iMessage.

Slowly, but steadily, we are increasing the amount of time we spend in the digital world. This is reflected in the amount of “screen” time we have. One might argue that the digital world isn’t a world, it is just a portal to some other remote part of the physical world. And I’d agree, only because the digital world is extremely basic right now.

I imagine that the digital world is evolving. With games like minecraft coming up (yeah AoE was always there), people build worlds in the digital world.

There is a restriction though. And my flatmate articulated it really well the other day. We can only use 2 of 5 senses in the digital world currently — sight and sound. We don’t have the technology to help us sense smell, taste and touch yet. I believe some companies are working on haptic sensing (I think Google is working on it too).

But once we do, will we ever live in the physical world?