The metaverse

Yet another sci-fi phenomenon in the tech world and the spaces of crypto, gaming, and art — the metaverse is the futuristic concept that refers to a persistent simulated online digital universe that mimics the real world.

On the tech side, to provide an immersive experience for its users, the metaverse combines multiple elements, including such integral components as VR, AR, MR, and blockchain, along with social media concepts.

Coined in the early 1990s by American science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash, the term ‘metaverse’ originally described a virtual world in the imagined future where VR goggle-wearing users inhabit 3D avatars and buy and sell virtual real estate on a planet-encircling market.

Today it is considered more as a future iteration of the internet that creates a shared 3D virtual space, an environment that enriches users’ interaction while they perform online the activities that they do in everyday life, whatever they are — working or shopping, playing games, or socializing together.

The metaverse concept has been a buzzword and one of the hottest trends, especially after Facebook’s announcement that it was rebranding to Meta, and giant companies like Microsoft, Google, and Sony dived into the metaverse with their unique platforms or started investing.

Currently, there are plenty of metaverses out there, for example, the popular virtual world Decentraland, the Pokemon-inspired play-to-earn metaverse game Axie Infinity, and the digital gaming platform The Sandbox.

While a single, united metaverse with unified online infrastructure and real-time events is likely a way off, the developments that may lead to its creation are already here.

Advantages of the metaverse

The most notable one is that the metaverse destroys geographic barriers, connecting the world and negating physical distance. It brings some kind of equality. The metaverse acts as a neutral space where everyone can meet as equals to some extent.

On top of that, the metaverse has the potential to bring innovations in communication, mainly for business and educational institutions. With the benefits of 3D virtual worlds and engaging seamless experiences, social interactions and events are way more immersive. Keep in mind, that since the raging pandemic grasped the world in its clutches in 2020, individuals and organizations recognized the value of remote or distance interactive meetings, working, and learning in event of restrictions. So today it makes sense.

Another metaverse advantage focuses on the creation of a separate virtual economy. The metaverse economy can serve as the ideal platform for exchanges of digital assets with real economic value. Cryptocurrency and NFTs play crucial roles here through blockchain technology providing decentralization, transparency, and trust. Due to them, the metaverse provides the right grounds for innovative advancements in DeFi, GameFi, and tokenization of content.

Also, the metaverse brings up new opportunities for expanding branding and social media beyond Web2, along with establishing its role in marketing.

A late 2021 Statista survey of global internet users found that overcoming obstacles that prevented them from doing something in real life was perceived as the biggest benefit of the metaverse. Enhancing creativity and imagination was ranked second with 37 percent of respondents claiming this as a benefit. The metaverse also holds promise for upskilling, education, and exploring new career opportunities.

Cons of the metaverse

However, despite the apparent advantages, as always, there are two sides to every coin. It is difficult not to pay attention to cyber security crime, fraud, Sybil attacks and identity theft, and other sorts of illegal activities that are already disrupting the existing extremely vulnerable digital space.

The statistics show insane numbers — around 1 in 15 people become victims of identity fraud. And in 2022 identity theft scenarios are increasing drastically. There were 5.7 million reports of identity theft and fraud in the US only last year, up from 4.7 million in 2020. With a $500 median loss, the cost to victims is growing as society becomes more digitally dependent.

One of the reasons why security threats remain is that people store, contribute, and share a lot of personal information (PII) and sensitive data online. Events like the LinkedIn breach that exposed 700 million user records confirmes that, shaking the digitized world to the bone over and again.

One of the most significant security risks in the digital space is the one that is associated with social networks. Users can never be 100% sure that you interact with the exact person they want to connect with — or with a real person altogether. In the metaverse, with the proliferation of avatars and lack of moderation, communication with the right individual may become even more challenging.

In addition, in the metaverse where people will enter more networks via various tools like VR goggles, mobile devices, and various services, the risk of fraudulence or device thievery is much higher.

Privacy has always been a concern in the digital space, with people unaware of their data being collected and sold. The main agenda for criticism is the fact that major players like Meta are leading the charge towards the new metaverse. Considering their previous history with privacy concerns of their users, that doesn’t simply fade away. The metaverse can lead to new issues in privacy for individuals as well as institutions.

Other concerns around the metaverse are related to mental health issues, addiction, and loss of connection with the physical world. Thus, as a realistic 3D universe the metaverse blurs the gap between real and virtual worlds. Similar to gaming, addiction becomes a significant issue. There is a bigger addiction risk with the metaverse, since users are fully immersed in a virtual world, and while they are in the metaverse they easily lose track of time.

Needless to say, while a secondary issue the metaverse UX issue remains, as for those who are not into tech or don’t belong to the crypto community, joining it is still problematic. Overcoming this flaw is important because without it the metaverse phenomenon will hardly reach mass adoption.

Biometrics

Biometrics as a technology for identifying a person based on the measurement and statistical analysis of its unique physical or behavioral characteristics is a phenomenon of high importance in modern society. It is a key to anchoring digital identity and the most suitable means of authenticating individuals in a reliable and fast way.

Overall face shape, fingerprints, palm print, hand geometry, iris recognition, DNA, dental records, and even more subtle metrics like heartbeats or odor — modern technology can measure extremely complex inputs to find identity matches or verify identity. And experts argue that growth trends in mobile identity verification and remote onboarding will be sustained due to the recent pandemic spread which leads to the e-passport and health-passport markets explosion.

Merits and demerits

Biometrics provides numerous benefits. Thus, biometric technology is comparatively less time-consuming, dependable, user-friendly, and hard to falsify.

However, there are some risks associated with biometric authentication. The main issues here are security and privacy concerns.

In the last decades, major tech companies like Apple have been constantly working on seamless user experiences without a hitch, bypassing the problems with login credentials. At the same time, users get used to trusting big tech to manage and collect their biometric data. These privacy concerns are multiplied by the fact that biometric data is regarded as highly sensitive since it may be linked to a single person.

Another major tech company Meta patents captures users’ behavioral biometrics data. Specifically, pupil movements, body poses, and crumpled noses, which Meta would use to make digital avatars realistically animated. The patents were reviewed by The Financial Times, according to their article Meta also intends to use biometric data to provide hyper-targeted advertising and sponsored content.

What’s more, the company says it has created a new tool, BuilderBot, that will enable someone in Horizon, Meta’s metaverse, to import and create digital objects and features using only their voice. The voice assistant may not include a biometric authentication feature, but would rapidly accumulate a database of speech data, if successful. And an AI model for chatting with virtual assistants, something called Project CAIRaoke, aims to enable natural conversations between assistants and people. Meta engineers also are working on software to translate all written languages and, separately, a universal speech translator for instant spoken-word translation.

Yet nothing is said about biometric privacy at Meta.

Furthermore, even though biometric scanners are persistently improving in terms of quality, they can still create false negatives when an authorized user is not identified or authenticated, as well as false positives when an unauthorized person is recognized and authenticated.

The most noteworthy merits and demerits of biometric identification are listed in the table above. In a nutshell, on the one hand, biometrics is secure, flexible, affordable, and trustable, as well as costly, and complex, and remains a constant subject to attacks, on the other.

Q&A

Before the world will dive headlong into the metaverse, the following questions need to be answered:

How to protect your biometric data from malicious collection or theft?

How to make sure that nobody else embodies your identity or metaverse avatar?

How to ensure that you are not manipulated, and the person or company you interact with virtually is who you think they are?

How to simplify the entrance to the metaverse and its UX for non-tech savvy users?

Blockchain and biometrics are the answers, coming to the rescue here.

Web3 and its backbone — blockchain have the potential to solve security issues and the need to trust personal data to major corporations when it comes to biometrics.

Decentralization and transparency are the key concepts in Web3, that strive to increase the level of trust between the network’s participants, in the scenario when there is no third party controlling it. To minimize the risk of fraud, the metaverse operator shouldn’t have complete control over the biometric identity information and user data. The chosen identity authentication system could work with blockchain technology to help people stay in control of their personal data and how they are used. The blockchain would keep personal data under a user’s control because it cannot be changed once it’s on the public ledger. The service would just check against the blockchain whether the data user is genuine. This so-called self-sovereign identity attempts to solve the problem of providing personal info to service providers without risking data misusage.

Linked with blockchain encryption and protocols like zero-knowledge proofs are phenomena that are designed to bring privacy to the metaverse.

Precise, reliable, and handy biometric identity verification can help protect metaverse users’ identities and the identities of others. Face recognition with liveness detection and iris scans are some of the most reliable biometric modalities. Regular biometric checks ensure that the metaverse user’s device such as VR goggles has not switched for another person. The system can have additional verification mechanisms, for example, through geolocation data. If the goggles are out of the usual space, further verification may be required. The idea is to validate a person’s authorized access with a combination of biometrics and other authentication elements, such as a second software device, as seen in two-step verification.

Furthermore, biometrics enhances user experience. Biometrics is platform-agnostic, therefore users can leverage biometric verification for customer verification processes on all their devices — phones, goggles, or browsers. This makes biometrics very convenient when used for various gadgets. Compared with passwords, biometric authentication is faster and more seamless. With it, metaverse visitors have their biometric data at hand all the time, and it can’t be forgotten or lost.

On top of that, the appearance of items and agents metaverse users are interacting with can be adapted to their preferences based on data that they have shared. For example, eye tracking data can provide pupil dilation and gaze fixation data in response to visual stimuli, motion data can provide proxemic behavior and body language cues, and physiological data like EEG and skin conductance can provide levels of emotional activation. Additionally, facial tracking can also provide a window into an emotional response. These nonverbal cues can be fed into clever ML and AI algorithms to create personalized, idealized interactions.

Blockchain and biometrics merge could have many pros for the metaverse. Blockchain technology could provide biometric systems with some desirable characteristics such as immutability, accountability, availability, and universal access. Additionally, the integration of biometric technology is very beneficial for blockchain-based metaverses too, as it could significantly improve the current distributed digital identity schemes. In this case, an authentication protocol based on biometrics could significantly raise the current security level.

The merge: Web3 + biometrics

Humanode

Humanode is the world’s first blockchain project that utilizes a consensus mechanism based on crypto-biometric identification, to realize its goal of one human = one node = one vote network that brings Sybil resistance and innovative governance models to economics as a whole, and the crypto industry, in particular, using biometric technology.

Humanode’s direct biometric API allows metaverses and other Dapps to integrate and enable unique online identities.

Utilizing biometrics as one of its core technologies, Humanode creates the decentralized biometric identification layer that is not only used on the native Humanode platform but can be used in the metaverse. Due to FaceTec’s liveness detection technology, these biometric identifications ensure that the right person enters the metaverse and that he is a unique and real human being.

Humanode biometric identifications are likely to be tied in as an option for metaverse visitors’ identification in form of a wallet’s browser extension or as a full-fledged app. They will provide a simple way to interact with the metaverse and offer the most user-friendly interface for non-techy users. By only scanning their face, they will effortlessly access the metaverse, buy and sell tokens there, and sign transactions most accurately and securely.

It is known that the collection of biometric data raises privacy concerns about the ultimate use of this information. The Humanode team is working on it. Besides biometrics and blockchain technologies in the broad sense, the project utilizes crypto-biometrics which is based on a stack of various disciplines and technologies such as cybersecurity, encryption, liveness detection, and zero-knowledge proofs. Once a user logs in to the Humanode, the 1 to n search and matching operation happens in an encrypted space, and because it is zero-knowledge based, the only piece of information that is searched for and is given out is if that user is a registered user or not.

Avarta

FaceTec’s biometric technology plays a critical role in another ambitious crypto project. In this case, the company’s partner is Singapore-based Avarta, a startup that is working to build an identity platform tailored to the DeFi and metaverse spaces.

Avarta aims is to establish a trust scoring system based on aggregated wallet data collected from multiple blockchain platforms while empowering end users with the ability to control what information they share with trusted third parties when seeking to gain access to regulated platforms or whitelists. Avarta is also looking to leverage geofencing and device scoring for its identity platform and has patented what it calls a “Dynamic PIN Lock” system.

IriTech & IBCT

In July 2022, IriTech teamed up with the Institute of Blockchain Technology (IBCT) to strengthen security for metaverse applications. The result is the Decentralized Identity Data Hub (DIDH) that runs on the blockchain. In practice, the joint offering will replace legacy security solutions like PINs with more secure iris biometrics for those using hardware wallets. Those wallets often give the owner no recourse if they forget their PIN, whereas the IriTech offering will allow owners to retrieve their secret backup seed with an iris recognition scan. In doing so, it will give owners a way to recover their accounts without exposing them to the security risk associated with any knowledge-based authenticator.

The iris scan for the joint solution will be carried out with IriTech’s IriKey technology, which comes with liveness detection and is compatible with mobile devices. The goal, according to the two companies, is to give people more control over their personal information, in a manner that adheres to the principles of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). Data that is stored with the iris tech could theoretically be used for a variety of applications, ranging from healthcare and financial services to virtual and augmented reality. IriTech expects VR and AR to be especially popular use cases since its tech can be deployed alongside the iris tracker in a headset.

Conclusion

Both blockchain and biometrics technologies can mutually benefit each other and the metaverse, especially when combining them.

Although the unified metaverse is still in its infancy, from all the above discussion, it is clear that biometrics alongside blockchain has the potential to make metaverse identity management decentralized, secure, private, simplified, and seamless, metamorphosing the landscape and accelerating adoption.

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