New Delhi, Dec 18 (IANS): The market for transactions in the Metaverse is expected to reach $6.1 billion this year, as tech giants like Meta (formerly Facebook) aim big on the VR/AR-based technology to bring deeper immersive experiences to billions in the future.

The global Metaverse market is forecast to hit nearly $42 billion globally by 2026, according to research firm Strategy Analytics.

Social media giant Facebook has said it will spend more than $10 billion to build out its vision for Metaverse.

Facebook has also announced to hire 10,000 people to help the social network build the Metaverse.

According to the company, the next computing platform has the potential to help unlock access to new creative, social and economic opportunities.

"The Metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today's online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world. It will let you share immersive experiences with other people even when you can't be together -- and do things together you couldn't do in the physical world," according to Meta.

Meta has also announced new tools to help people build for the Metaverse, including Presence Platform, which will enable new mixed reality experiences on Quest 2, and a $150-million investment in immersive learning to train the next generation of creators.

The term Metaverse was coined by Neal Stephenson in a science fiction novel almost 30 years ago.

In recent years, Metaverse has come to represent a utopian convergence of digital experiences fuelled by Moore's Law - an aspiration to enable rich, real-time, globally-interconnected virtual- and augmented-reality environments that will enable billions of people to work, play, collaborate and socialise in entirely new ways.

According to leading chip-maker Intel, building Metaverse -- at scale and accessible by billions of humans in real time -- will require a 1,000-times increase in computational efficiency from what we have today.

Raja Koduri, a senior vice president and head of Intel's Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, said that our computing, storage and networking infrastructure today is simply not enough to enable this Metaverse vision, being popularised by Meta (formerly Facebook) and other companies.

"We need several orders of magnitude more powerful computing capability, accessible at much lower latencies across a multitude of device form factors," Koduri said in a blog post this week.

"Indeed, the metaverse may be the next major platform in computing after the world wide web and mobile," Koduri added.