WHAT ARE THE BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES?

Just like the early days of the internet, where so many companies ran and became “dot-coms” and became internet companies, I do think you’re gonna see a lot of companies become metaverse companies or have a metaverse strategy. And right now you’re starting to see that a lot with companies like Nike that want to have their products shown in the metaverse, or we’ve seen the Ferrari car in Fortnite. So I think there’s gonna be a lot of business opportunities, especially around enabling a creator economy.

If you look at kind of internet business models over time, certainly advertising became very popular. When we kind of project forward with the metaverse, I think advertising may be a part of it but I don’t think it’s going to be the dominant model. We want to empower creators, whether that’s software developers building experiences, whether it’s people building levels in a game, or people are building digital assets, such as an avatar, such as a virtual car. And those folks having a marketplace or to sell that content, and you personally owning that content.

In some ways, the metaverse is here today with things like Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox. And in some ways, that AR wearable on a contact lens may be many years off. A lot of the experts today say that the vision that we talked about is maybe 10 years out.

One way is through our technology platform for enabling these massive models of the real world. An entire city modeled down to every brick and every blade of grass, and to be able to efficiently bring that to all the different metaverses with a technique called streaming. Just like you stream video for Netflix or YouTube, we enable streaming of these massive digitized worlds. And then the other thing that we’re trying to contribute to the metaverse is just awareness and support to ensure that it’s open and interoperable so that you own your content and you can bring your content to different metaverse experiences.

Just like the internet wasn’t built by one company or one organization, the metaverse — which is an even bigger vision than what the internet is today — no one company is going to build that. And we need large organizations to work together in order to achieve this mission. And therefore, we need interoperability among their different offerings. So that’s you, as a user and a participant, you don’t want to be locked into a walled garden. You want to own your identity, you want to own your digital goods, and you want to be able to spend your time with your content in the experiences that you’d like.

Imagine if you bought a digital car asset. Then you could bring the car into two different video games where the car could interact with the world, or you could even bring the car into a virtual house. That sort of thing.