What is the metaverse?
Metaverse is a hot topic on Wall Street these days. When you open the Wall Street Journal or turn on the TV or an online broadcast of the business news, a number of mentions are made of this term in corporate earnings calls. Stories covering marketing materials across a number of industries blithely mention the metaverse without elaborating on what it means.
Metaverse took on a new dimension after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg audaciously changed the name of his company to Metaverse Platforms Inc. as the U.S. government appeared to be attempting to break up his social media company.
But what exactly is metaverse to have garnered so much publicity?
Simply, metaverse is the successor to the internet. It will be interoperable across different platforms, persistent, synchronous and open to unlimited participants for an experience in social presence, office work and entertainment that spans the virtual and real worlds.
Actually, Neil Stephenson coined this term in his 1992 science-fiction novel “Snow Crash,” referring to a convergence of physical, augmented and virtual reality of shared space.
Metaverse, or MV, is a digital reality that blends aspects of social media, online gaming, augmented reality, virtual reality and cryptocurrencies to allow users and businesses to interact virtually.
MV is just beginning to be built by many companies. According to the Metaverse Index Fund, they include: hardware and software companies which provide the physical computing devices like smartphones, laptops and platforms to support MV; wireless networking companies which provide real-time connections with a high bandwidth (such as the 5G and 6G); virtual platforms for immersive and three-dimensional simulations; digital payment processing companies which provide financial services in digital currencies; and other service providers of content and other assets as well as user identity.
MV is more than a virtual and augmented reality experience. It is intended to be a more natural and comfortable interaction. Think about MV as an embodiment of internet where instead of just viewing content, you (actually, your avatar) are a participant in it by wearing a virtual reality headset. You’ll be able to sit as a hologram on a couch or in a chair in a conference room with another person, also as a hologram, and feel like you are sitting in the same room even if you are physically miles apart. It is a way of teleporting to different places to be with coworkers, friends and relatives, which would be a powerful experience akin to a real-world experience.
MV is also imaginative, like attending virtual concerts, shows or touring homes on laptops or mobile devices. You might be able to jump into a dancing experience with other people or do gym exercises in the metaverse without leaving your home. Metaverse could enable the future of education, where a student might participate in a virtual classroom with other students and the instructor and interact as in a real classroom, without making a physical journey to the classroom.
In short, when metaverse is fully created and implemented, communities of people can come together with millions of others for a 3-dimensional experience to create, learn, work, play and socialize.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he was fairly certain the MV (he calls it omiverse) economy would surpass our current economy at some point in the future. ARK Research estimates revenue from MV could approach $400 billion by 2025. Bloomberg News estimates this revenue could grow to $800 billion in the same period. The blending of the physical and virtual spaces whether for sociality or work are designed by companies with profits in mind.
MV would raise questions more serious than the social media platforms. How will the virtual space in MV be governed? How will its content will be moderated and what will MV’S existence do to our shared sense of reality? What protocols will be applied and monitored when unsuspecting minors meet unscrupulous adults in the metaverse and get exploited? Will the metaverse company be immunized by Section 203 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, like the social media companies now? Any individual is prohibited from knowingly transmitting obscene or indecent messages to a recipient under the age of 18. Since metaverese is a conglomerate of many companies, will a consortium of these companies govern it by installing appropriate safeguards?
Some of these questions which already have arisen with the present social media companies and are being studied for solutions that may well serve the virtual world enabled by digital technology of the metaverse in its implementation. A wise set of rules to govern the metaverse and their proper adjudication will ameliorate the present ills associated with the social media companies.