The metaverse, explained: what it is, and why tech companies love it

The advent of Bitcoin in 2009 kicked off the rising popularity of cryptocurrencies over the last decade. However, across the metaverse, Ethereum, which also supports NFTs, is the most popular cryptocurrency. While the technologies are quite complicated, their usages are quite simple to understand.

How Is The Metaverse Different From The Internet?

Today, websites serve various purposes, from shopping, entertainment, to communication. The emergence of social networks made the internet a channel for people to connect and share their lives with each other. The management consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, estimated the metaverse could generate $5 trillion in revenue for businesses by 2030. While this definition is generally true, it’s important to know that Meta doesn’t control the metaverse; no company does.

Isn’t the metaverse just… video games?

This stands in relatively grounded contrast with other companies’ visions of the future, which range from optimistic to outright fan fiction. At one point during Meta’s original presentation on the metaverse, the company showed a scenario in which a young woman is sitting on her couch scrolling through Instagram when she sees a video a friend has posted of a concert that’s happening halfway across the world. Think about education as a use case for why this could be so powerful. Today, kids learning remotely navigate a series of apps, websites, zoom rooms, google docs, etc. Frankly, it’s a terrible user experience and it is devastating children.

1. VR headsets are still very clunky, and most people experience motion sickness or physical pain if they wear them for too long.
2. For technical reasons, though, many modern metaverse-like spaces end up splitting users into sharded servers where a small subset of users can interact.
3. I hate to shatter the illusion, but it’s simply not possible with even very advanced versions of existing technology.
4. “A hardware wallet is a physical USB drive that you can use to protect your land from phishing attempts by adding two-step verification for whenever funds or NFTs are transferred out of your wallet.
5. You can conduct many activities in the virtual world as you do in the real world, such as buying and selling goods, attending concerts, going to museums, building or renovating a house, and more.

A persistent “world” for the avatars to inhabit and interact with

And it will again disrupt the order of the market, knocking some of the biggest tech companies off of their perch. Zuckerberg then moved onto potential opportunities for expansion within the mixed reality headset market, like a headset for work or fitness. Meta opened up access to the operating system that powers its Quest headsets on Monday, which Zuckerberg said will help the mixed reality ecosystem grow faster. For his part, Mattmann believes the future of the metaverse is in mixed reality combined with generative AI and powered by complex visual, textual, and auditory multi-modal AI models. Hernandez believes that the metaverse will increasingly prove useful to organizations that work on developing meaningful value that translates into, for example, a better experience for customers and employees, lower costs and revenue growth opportunities.

How Major Brands Are Getting Involved

Regardless, the uniqueness and supposed portability of NFTs has metaverse proponents excited. “The Apple Vision Pro and the Meta Quest 3 take us closer to this future than we’ve ever been,” Rosenberg said. Other major tech companies such as Google, Samsung, Sony, Microsoft, and HTC are also pushing toward this future. In addition, the GenAI boom only makes the immersive digital space more likely since it can help augment our physical world with mixed reality content at scale.

It’s impossible to separate Facebook’s vision of a future in which everyone has a digital wardrobe to swipe through from the fact that Facebook really wants to make money selling virtual clothes. But Facebook isn’t the only company that stands to financially benefit from metaverse hype. These kinds of avatars have been common in all sorts of online gaming beaxy exchange review and social spaces since the ’90s (anyone remember Habbo Hotel?). But an avatar’s fidelity and abilities can vary greatly from service to service. Recent advances in virtual reality have enabled users to truly embody their fantastical avatars, seeing through their virtual eyes and using hand-tracking controllers to gesture and interact with virtual items.

Just as significant a factor in the metaverse trend is the coronavirus pandemic, which has radically altered lifestyles across the planet. It should be noted that it is possible to “own” and even trade virtual items in plenty of games and virtual spaces, Second Life included, without using the blockchain — but that ownership is pretty flimsy and usually subject to a license agreement. NFTs offer different (but similarly flimsy) methodologies of proving ownership.

In the metaverse, you’re represented by a customizable avatar that can move, speak, and/or perform animated actions. MMOs like WoW share an obvious kinship with metaverses in form, if not function. But there are closer analogues to be found in two post-Minecraft games that are hugely popular with kids. In both Roblox and Fortnite, your avatar, your presence, your customization choices, and your social connections are almost more important than the game itself — or the games, plural, in Roblox’s case. It’s a much more human way of interacting with technology, since the metaverse uses familiar human references like space, time, and identity in a way that is much more proximate to our own reality.

Because the concept of the metaverse is still pretty nebulous and difficult to succinctly describe, it feels like nearly anything blockchain-related could potentially be a piece of the coming metaverse. VR headsets like the Quest 2 are cheaper than ever, and Apple’s Vision Pro could be really cool if there’s ever https://forexbroker-listing.com/lexatrade-forex-broker/ a version that costs less than a laptop, tablet, and phone combined. Video games and other virtual worlds are getting easier to build and design. And I think the advances in photogrammetry—the process of creating digital 3D objects out of photos or video—make it an incredibly cool tool for digital artists.

But, in most cases, you can start exploring the metaverse with the devices you already have – a computer or a mobile device. In the metaverse, you can go about many of your everyday life’s day-to-day interactions and occurrences in your avatar form. Samsung opened its own virtual store in the metaverse—in the Ethereum-based game, Decentraland—via a digital recreation of its flagship New York City store. Microsoft, Meta, and every other company that shows wild demos like this are trying to give an artistic impression of what the future could be, not necessarily account for every technical question.

NFTs, which have become an obsession for crypto enthusiasts, snake-oil salesmen, suggestible executives, and (bizarrely) some parts of the art world over the last year or so, could enable the ownership of virtual items and real estate within the metaverse. Immersive computing under various terms will continue growing and evolving as devices become more powerful, graphical capabilities improve, and networks evolve. But Mike Buob, vice president of experience and innovation at Sogeti, a Capgemini division, argues it might be time to retire the term metaverse. “Whether the term becomes spatial computing, real-time 3D experiences, immersive experiences, or spatial experiences, the term metaverse will likely continue to have a negative connotation,” he said. Mattmann said the focus now is on mixed reality devices and providing connections for those who want to meet with one another but are too far away and unwilling to travel. He’s recently seen an uptick in metaverse technologies used for workplace meetings and productivity as an alternative to Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

People looking for more realistic, in-person-like meeting experiences are using services like Spatial, Glue and Meta’s Horizons Workrooms. Dr. Chris Mattmann, chief technology and innovation officer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, pointed out that a worldwide epidemic contributed to the hype. The original lofty goal that everyone would be inside the metaverse, have a headset, and use NFTs and digital currency to pay for experiences flourished during a time when we all had to stay home.

But Stephenson has made it abundantly clear that “there has been zero communication between me and FB & no biz relationship.” That means Facebook’s interpretation of “the metaverse” might end up being quite different from what Stephenson originally described. There are many things to challenge in Ball’s vision, but the biggest is his proposition that the metaverse will be a single network as open, interconnected, and interoperable as the internet is now. Some of these companies are creating the technology while others are creating the software. If anyone wants to do a breakdown of each company‘s involvement I will include it in this article. As a rule of thumb, if you plan to resell your NFT or coin at a profit, you are likely being suckered into a pyramid scheme. “I think it’s worth calling that out, that we’ve historically seen a lot of volatility in our stock during this phase of our product playbook where we’re investing in scaling a new product but aren’t yet monetizing it,” Zuckerberg said Wednesday.

In an idealized metaverse, every single user shares a single virtual world, where items and property persist for everyone between online sessions. For technical reasons, though, many modern metaverse-like spaces end up splitting users into sharded servers where a small subset of users can interact. Roblox is an incredibly free-form environment almost on par with Second Life, where players author their own games and chase status and dreams of real-world success — and where brands create advergames as a way to reach the elusive tween demographic.

The reality, of course, is probably closer to the messy, sometimes grubby Second Life. Give humans a chance to build a world without restrictions, and they’ll either come up with a branding opportunity or a fetish dungeon. That should serve as either a warning for the future architects of the metaverse, or an opportunity.

You’ve got to get comfortable with crypto if you want to be a landowner. There is absolutely no reason for land in the Metaverse to be scarce. If you are posting articles from the same news source to 3 or more different Reddits on a weekly basis, this applies to you. This is to prevent people posting their own news articles as if it was something for the community for the sole reason of empowering/educating people.

It’s going to take years to build the infrastructure for the metaverse, not to mention establishing best practices, adding interoperability between platforms, and plenty more. VR is hardly mainstream, AR headsets aren’t ready for consumers, and your average home laptop or tablet today can’t handle heavily populated, super-polished 3D worlds with ease. Part of the reason why the term “metaverse” feels so nebulous right now is that it’s probably still years away—at least in a polished, cohesive form. It’s early days for crypto games and NFTs, and blockchain-driven decentralized apps (dapps) still have a long way to go before they’re accessible and easy enough for mainstream consumers to use. In some cases, this means a virtual world that mimics the space constraints and land scarcity of the real world, as seen in Second Life’s discrete plots of land.

Though it never went mainstream, it still has some devoted followers. But the forces at work two decades later—not to mention the huge technological leaps in the intervening years—promise to make the metaverse much more than a niche offering. “Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games Inc., which makes Fortnite, said in November that the metaverse has the potential to become a multitrillion-dollar https://forexbroker-listing.com/ part of the world economy,” according to Bloomberg. According to none other than JP Morgan, the metaverse represents a $1 trillion market, and a wide range of companies have announced their intention to explore the opportunities it presents. And as Apple’s demo showed, it’s not easy to reconstruct a 3D image of someone in another place without edging close to nightmare fuel.

Another notable but oft-forgotten example of an early metaverse was PlayStation Home. Sony’s ill-fated virtual social hub for PlayStation 3 launched in 2008 and closed in 2015, to the sorrow of its tiny community. It didn’t go anywhere and seemed, to a casual user, quite pointless, but it’s an interesting example of what a highly corporatized metaverse — as opposed to the anarchic, community-driven Second Life — might look like.

Numerous start-ups, such as Flox and Virtway Events, are trying to seize the opportunities by offering platforms for businesses to create immersive virtual conferences and events. Since the metaverse is virtual, it is always active, self-sustaining, and creates incredible possibilities in business. In fact, rather than thinking of one virtual space called the metaverse, it’s more appropriate to use the plural form, metaverses, at the current stage. Fortune’s upcoming Brainstorm Design conference is going to dive into how businesses are building experiences in the metaverse. How the metaverse will work and who will control it both remain to be seen, however, and the term has recently been used as a catch-all for a wide array of forward-looking tech, gaming, and NFT-centric initiatives.

He cited past efforts like short-video service Reels, Stories and the transition to mobile. While the claims that the metaverse is dead might be an overexaggeration, it is certainly the case that the metaverse is not being used in everyday life as originally envisioned, ventured Ramesh Vishwanathan, senior practice director at TEKsystems. In early 2023, both Disney and Microsoft announced they were shutting down their respective metaverse units. Even Meta seems to be paring down its efforts slightly, having let go of some of its metaverse division employees in recent company layoffs. While its infrastructure is still being set up, some companies and brands are jumping at the opportunity to be a part of this new world.

Grayscale and JP Morgan, on the other hand, see the metaverse as a potential $1 trillion market at some point in the future—but haven’t specify when. Again, a lot about the metaverse is currently uncertain, but investors and startups see dollar signs ahead. If you pay attention to the tech, gaming, or crypto worlds, then you might have heard about the metaverse well before late 2021. But even if you aren’t immersed in those spheres, chances are good that you’ve seen the marked increase in chatter since Facebook marked out its grand plans to build the metaverse.

Coca-Cola launched a “flavor born in the metaverse” alongside a Fortnite tie-in mini-game. “But here we are,” as Oculus consulting CTO John Carmack recently put it. “Mark Zuckerberg has decided that now is the time to build the metaverse, so enormous wheels are turning and resources are flowing and the effort is definitely going to be made.”

You can conduct many activities in the virtual world as you do in the real world, such as buying and selling goods, attending concerts, going to museums, building or renovating a house, and more. If virtual consumption is your thing, check out Fortune’s guide to shopping in the metaverse. Oh, and if you work at a tech-forward company, as Fortune reported this week, your company may already be rolling out return-to-work plan—in the metaverse, of course. It’s at this point that most discussions of what the metaverse entails start to stall.