MetaWelt: Embodied in Which Body? Simplex Didactics to Live the Web 3.0

Eric Schmidt (CEO at Google) opens his presentation at The Future of the Digital Economy of the World Economic Forum, in 2015, stating that Internet is destined to disappear soon because there would be so many IPv4 addresses due to IPv6, so many devices, wearable technologies, artefacts to interact with that we will not even per-ceive and that will be part of our lives all the time. At this point a spontaneous ques-tion follows: if we are all online 24 hours a day 7 days a week, if the technologies that surround us become completely invisible, what does the term “reality” mean? Not even ten years later, Schmidt’s statement seems to have materialised in a different way of living the web compared to the past decade, characterised by an increasing use of devices capable of communicating with each other and with the network. In the last 10 years, technologies such as ubiquitus, cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), Non Fungible Token (NFT), Blockchain, cryptocurrencies etc., seem to have provided a powerful improvement to the hybridisation of digital and real con-texts, pushing people to wonder if the real Vs virtual dichotomy still makes sense. The philosopher, Luciano Floridi, synthesises this drive for hybridisation with the concept of on-life, offering a perspective that goes beyond dichotomies and recognises virtuality as a space for a social, political, legal, educational construction of reality. This gradual realisation of a Mangrove Society [1] seems to have met a sort of litmus test effect. In fact, even Facebook Inc. has moved in this direction; it changed its name to Meta Inc. in 2021, making clear its ambition to speed up the change process and to take a pivotal role in the web 3.0 where Virtual reality should be one of the focus business areas. As stated by Zuckerberg, his company will seek to lay the foun-dations for an interconnected set of experiences in a 3D space, an “embodied Internet”, a new decentralised and hybrid ecosystem, both digital and physical, synthesised for some time through metaverse expression. The expression embodied internet is very significant as it leads in an almost natural way to ask “embodied in which body?”. Indeed, it seems clear that the main media through which the web of the future ap-pears destined to be enjoyed is made up of extended reality (a set of immersive, mixed and augmented virtual reality) and one of the main characteristics of this media is a high degree of bodily involvement in forms of human-machine interaction. How-ever, the involvement of the body does not imply that a virtual avatar, personified by the user, must necessarily replicate the same properties of the human body (avatars can take on non-humanoid forms). Thus, if we analyse the etymology of the term ‘virtual’ we understand how the true potential of this media is not in the simulation but in the creation of new forms of reality. The term virtual derives from the Latin word virtus which means "strength" or "power", from which late medieval translators, having to render the Aristotelian term «dynamis» into Latin, coined the neologism "virtualis" understood as "potential". In this sense, the original dimension of virtual reality is not simulation, as is usually assumed, but potential. It is what can come to be, the latent power of a thing (or a body). It is not the illusory nature of the simulat-ed copy, but the dimension of possibility inherent in all of reality [2]. The spread of these technologies might seem far from the world of teaching, yet on 10/10/2022 Mi-crosoft announced a joint venture with Meta aimed at the creation and dissemination of Microsoft Teams Mesh (a version of Teams for VR). Similarly, different versions of MOODLE VR have been released, the development of ZOOM VR has been an-nounced, the Google VR/AR division is working on the VR expansions of Work-space and, in general, all the platforms mostly used in teaching appear to be moving in this direction. If on the one hand, therefore, teaching applications seem to have al-ready reached a good level of development, on the other hand there is a difficulty in imagining what it can mean to teach in an environment in which space and time can take on a different meaning from that to which we are used to and in which the body, the main machine for the construction of meanings, becomes a random variable. In this sense, it is necessary to start a reflection aimed at creating a theoretical framework to analyse and understand the potential of the phenomenon. In this context, simplexi-ty [3], as a theory that studies the way in which all living organisms, regardless of the structure of their body, adapt and learn through common principles and properties, and simple didactics [4], which aims to capitalise on the teaching/learning level these principles and properties, appear as a completely natural starting point to lay the foundations for a reflection aimed at investigating the ways in which users with "vari-able" bodies will be able to learn in virtual places. In this context, a first pilot exper-iment has been launched, aimed at analysing the inclusive potential of VR in the di-dactic/educational field.