Into the Metaverse
Yimin Huang | July 28th, 2022
Source: LeewayHertz
Introduction
With all the buzz around the metaverse, what does it exactly mean?
The metaverse is a theoretical concept of a fully immersive digital three-dimensional world. It incorporates various technologies, including virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), and cryptocurrencies. In this virtual world, you have a "body" (avatar) that you can customize, a home to fill with the stuff you like, and hundreds of spaces to visit. You can interact with other users, do work, play games and perform most of the activities that you do in everyday life.
Although talk surrounding the metaverse has only come into prominence recently, the term was coined in 1992 by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, who described it in his novel Snow Crash, as a three-dimensional virtual space where humans go to escape a totalitarian reality. Developments in technology today have made what was once a sci-fi concept a very possible reality.
Source: H-Blogger
The technology involved in creating the metaverse
To create a truly immersive experience, our senses of sight, sound, touch, and motion should all receive consistent inputs to create a conceptual picture of the virtual surroundings. Today, technology addressing our sense of sight is rather developed, achieved via VR headsets, which have seen mainstream applications in games and experience hubs. In addition to VR, creating a more interconnected physical and digital world necessitates a level of machine intelligence. For instance, AI can help with natural language processing, the computational processing of human languages so that machines and robots can understand what users are saying and speech can be processed to generate certain inputs or outputs from the digital system. AR technology is also useful in embedding virtual items in the real-world environment (the game Pokemon Go made use of this very technology).
Gaming companies have already started to make their first moves into the metaverse. Platforms like Roblox have begun experimenting with virtual immersive worlds with Fortnite having hosted a virtual reality concert featuring pop star Ariana Grande, with the latest being PUBG’s collaboration with K-pop group Blackpink to hold an in-game virtual concert. Software graphics company Nvidia is reportedly building its “Omniverse", a platform connecting 3D virtual worlds for real-time simulation and collaboration between creators, designers, and engineers. Moreover, there are already many mini, domain-specific metaverses, such as those found in virtual worlds such as Decentraland, and digital game platforms such as The Sandbox.
However, tech giants are likely to synthesize the various aspects of the metaverse into the mainstream by envisioning a virtual world that encompasses many more aspects of everyday life, from work to entertainment.
Source: Cointelegraph
Key players: Microsoft vs Meta
Facebook’s rebranding into Meta signifies its forward-thinking shift to branch out into more than one product. Meta’s early concept, Horizon Home, allows one to hang out with their friends, and Horizon Workrooms allow meetings to be held in virtual rooms using Oculus VR headsets.
Microsoft has a more enterprise focus compared to Meta’s social elements and relationship focus. Microsoft intends for metaverse apps to be used in business, education, training, and entertainment. Its Hololens has already benefited manufacturing companies, helping to eliminate errors and improve process quality. Microsoft is taking a hierarchical approach, incorporating their metaverse concept into their project contributions like Mesh for Teams and associating people in mixed reality through work.
Source: Pew Research Center
The potential of the metaverse
The outlook is for the metaverse to be a much more evolved space with many potentially useful applications, allowing us to cycle between activities, chats, and locations without the need to step out of our doorsteps. One key characteristic of the metaverse, in its most developed form, is that it can potentially contain a fully-fledged economy encompassing both physical and virtual worlds. Businesses and brands can enter the metaverse to fulfill gaps in customer needs via the use of technologies like AR and VR.
Herein lies the applicability of NFTs as a new class of digital assets. Virtual marketplaces can serve as a fertile trading ground for NFTs, where sellers can easily mint assets directly in the VR landscape. Sports brand Nike is already making its first foray into the metaverse with its virtual "Nikeland" and has now acquired a studio known for making NFTs of products. Furthermore, art galleries and museums can place NFT artworks in metaverses such as Сryptovoxels, powered by the Ethereum blockchain. Digital “real estate” is another possible application, where digital territories are sold and bought. For instance, Decentraland is a virtual territory where plots of land can be sold as NFTs, slated to enter the metaverse and made accessible later in 2022.
Senior management at Meta has said that “the metaverse isn’t a single product one company can build alone", mentioning how it would exist “whether Facebook is there or not". It is also potentially dangerous for a single firm to be supporting the metaverse infrastructure, as outages of its services would have major ramifications. In another post announcing proposed hire in Europe to drive its metaverse plans, the company further said that “no one company will own and operate the metaverse" and that “its key feature will be its openness and interoperability", which would mean “collaboration and cooperation across companies, developers, creators, and policymakers".
Data privacy concerns are one key area that would require such collaboration between major stakeholders and one that had previously generated a bad rep for the company. Meta announced its plans of focusing its metaverse development in Europe, where the European Union has put in place some of the world’s strictest data privacy and processing rules as part of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This could be a part of a strategy to stay in step with regulators while creating the new tech to prevent similar privacy missteps.
Source: CNET
Conclusion
According to Grayscale Investments, the metaverse is expected to be a trillion-dollar income opportunity encompassing hardware, social commerce, digital events, advertising, and creator monetization. Jefferies Group also considers investing in the metaverse as big an opportunity as it was in the early days of the internet. While there exists huge potential in the metaverse, it should be noted that such a metaverse won’t be built overnight and would likely take another couple of years before becoming a reality. Ultimately, the metaverse is still at its nascent stage, and what it will look like is dependent on technological developments in the coming years.