▲ Kim Ha-gyun, planning and coordination officer of South Chungcheong Province

COVID-19 has changed the way people interact each other. Instead of trading face to face, non-contact online trading is spreading fast. It is not unfamiliar now to see the word ‘metaverse’ on the media. It is a compound word for meta and universe. Metaverse is a collective virtual shared space where activities and trades of people are made.

In that virtual space, people buy and sell things such as money, lands, art products and many more. Experts predict that people in the future will live come across in reality and virtual space at the same time. 

However, the bigger the metaverse becomes, the more people excluded from the space. The phenomenon can compare with the horsemen during the Industrial Revolution in the UK who worried about the job being disappeared; which indeed disappeared. The advent of metaverse, in this respect, is excitement for the tech savvy and pressure for the technophobic. It might be a great pressure for the latter as money is likely to flow and exchange in virtual space also. 

South Korean government’s ICT Innovation Square project is part of this move to prepare and respond fast. The impact of this metaverse technology will affect big and wide in many fields especially the display, semiconductor and automobile. So we all had better prepare.