The Development Stages of Metaverse and Its Cultural Consequences

The discussion on the metaverse requires considering its cultural consequences through its artistic imagination and technological realization. The current stage of the metaverse presents a sharp contrast between the full-fledged artistic imagination and the limited technological realization. The primary stage is a virtual world created by virtual reality technology while the future advanced stage should be the integration of "real world" and "virtual world". The primary form of "metaverse" emphasizes the relative independence of cognition from the human body and tries to establish a "unmanned" virtual world with "no body participation"; while the advanced one proposes the human physical factor of "physical cognition" that must be fully considered in the seamless connection between the real world and the virtual one. The cognitive mode of "metaverse" is a complex of "disembodied cognition", "embodied cognition", "embodied cognition" and the combination of the two. The primary stage is establishing the aesthetic form of "Aesthetics of Isolation", but it is opposed to the concept of "Internet of everything" in information technology. While "metaverse" is developing into the advanced stage, its aesthetic form will be open and compatible, so as to generate the emerging "Aesthetics of Connection" transformation.