Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The new metaverse gold rush”.
It was like 1pm on a saturday in 2019 and my friends and i got together to go to a marshmallow concert. We got to the venue and there was a stage set up and lights and it’s us, and maybe like 60 other people – and it was weird dozens of people – are doing the exact same dance moves at the exact same time. There are a bunch of other people. Just jumping up and down in place, fortnite is one of the few games that can always drag me back in for one event or another. There’S a real novelty to a quote-unquote live concert happening in fortnite, it’s bizarre and uncanny, but it’s also exciting.
It feels like baby steps towards the future. Fortnite is much more than a wildly successful battle: royale game in 2020, its publisher, epic, expanded the game with a non-competitive party mode, complete with in-game events that marshmallow concert saw over 10 million attendees fortnite’s virtual world is an example of what some people call a metaverse Metaverse doesn’t have a single definition: it can cover virtual and augmented reality, decentralized payment systems and lots of other tech, but to a lot of people it means a digital 3d world full of real people with virtual bodies and ethic is just one of the companies trying To build it, the term metaverse isn’t new. It first appeared in 1992 when author neil stephenson imagined it with the novel snow crash. It was basically a big vr world that people visited as avatars these days. The term gets applied to anything that blends people’s physical and virtual lives. Some people link the metaverse with web3 an emerging type of online infrastructure. Web 3 is a broad term for decentralized systems like cryptocurrency. It’S supposed to let money and data work across different virtual worlds.
No matter what those worlds look like a lot of people, especially web 3 designers, say the metaverse can’t be run by a single company. Just like the internet isn’t a single website. If all this sounds kind of vague. Well, that’s right. The metaphors most powerful evangelists have different definitions for it and don’t even agree on how much it currently exists. If you talk to enough people, almost anything can start sounding like a metaverse is google maps. The metaverse is an nft pixel art drawing the metaverse. Is this video, the metaverse who can truly say the metaverse, will be the successor to the mobile internet, an embodied internet you’re, going to be able to do almost anything? You can imagine teleporting around the metaphors.
Things happen by thinking about experiencing yourself, but it doesn’t fully exist. But what does zuckerberg mean? What even is the metaverse? One of the biggest metaverse players is meta, formerly known as facebook meta changed its name in october 2021 to reflect ceo mark zuckerberg’s vision of the future internet, and it’s got big plans for the metaverse one of meta’s. Big dreams is that people are going to go to work in the metaverse, so i used its horizon. Workroom software to interview verge senior reporter alex heath, hey addie, hey alex my hands, aren’t like weird colors. Are they no they’re normal colors, okay cool? What is meta’s vision for the metaverse? Well, it’s something like this.
I mean this is not that great. This is actually probably the best uh version of what the metaverse will be, that someone could experience right now, but eventually they want this to be way more immersive and not just like our floating torsos, but our full bodies – and we cannot just sit at these desks. But walk around go outside right like there’s there’s you know outdoors here that we can’t explore and maybe jump into other virtual worlds that are run by other companies. I mean that’s the idea, and eventually the idea is the tech’s gon na get a lot better right. Now this is probably the best we’ve got.
The metaverse might sound futuristic, but real metaverse-like platforms have been around for decades. For just one example, let’s look back to 2003 when a company called lindenlab launched a virtual world called second life. Welcome to second life. Second, life had lots of features people associate with the metaverse and, in fact, news stories used that exact word to describe it. Second, life users could make virtual items and buy or sell virtual land using an in-game currency called the linden dollar that you could exchange for. Real money people made entire careers.
This way like ancho chung, who was referred to as second life’s first millionaire in 2006 and offline businesses were taking notice too. American apparel briefly opened a store inside second life ibm had a virtual office where people could meet up as avatars. Second, life had some real hurdles to adoption, but almost 20 years later, it’s still going with an estimated half million active monthly users living virtual lives. Most present day, metaverse tech wasn’t made for vr and ar although platforms like second life and roblox experimented with vr modes meta wants that to change, though it’s building vr only spaces like horizon worlds, and it’s made a huge investment in vr and ar hardware.
Meta’S pushed a lot further than many companies into vr and ar consumer hardware, whether that’s the meta quest, headset, a pair of camera, equipped, ray-ban, smart, glasses or high-tech prototypes like a high-resolution headset and a haptic glove virtual reality is a really big part of the metaverse. For meta, specifically, that we’re going to be using headsets to work and to socialize and play games, vr is not a mass-market technology right now. How realistic is its vision? I think it has the potential to get there. I think it’s probably going to take a few more years before it hits like say, console grade sales, but the quest 2.
The headset we’re both wearing, has already done roughly 10 million units in the first year based on third party estimates, which is nothing to you know, look down on, so i do think this has real potential. I think the tech is is going to improve dramatically over the next few years. Other companies do also see ar and vr as really important, like microsoft, which revealed the hololens mixed reality. Headset in 2015 bought the vr social network alt space vr in 2017, and just launched a collaborative platform called mesh.
There are some other smaller companies like nrel that also sell consumer focused mixed reality, glasses. The tech they’re making has been around for years, but it’s gotten dramatically better and more consumer-friendly very recently. There are good reasons why meta specifically cares so much about the metaverse there’s a sense of inevitability. I think that you know ceo mark zuckerberg feels about this, that this technology is just going to be so compelling for most people over the long arc of time say a decade that it makes sense to invest early now and be the leader, and i think, there’s Also a little bit of not wanting to repeat history right because for the last 10 or so years, facebook has really been under the thumb of apple and google on mobile, where they control the mobile operating systems, and that’s led them to have to pay. You know apple 30 on things and not be able to do all the software experiences they want to do so. I think they see an opportunity to really forge ahead on their own and kind of control, their own destiny, and, i think, that’s a large part of it as well.
Apps, like facebook are losing younger users and attracting negative publicity and a new platform could also give meta a fresh start. But there are lots of open questions about the metaverse. If you’re traveling, the internet, with a virtual body, harassment and invasions of privacy can feel a lot more personal if ar tech starts taking over the real world systems like facial recognition could track people at an unprecedented scale, and advertising could become a lot more invasive. You want to know that when you buy something or create something that your items will be useful in a lot of contexts and you’re not going to be locked into one world or platform companies like meta talk, a big game about interoperability, saying they don’t want to Own the metaverse, but their actions tell a different story so far: they’re building self-contained spaces that might include a bunch of different experiences, but don’t actually connect well to each other, let alone let you take things like virtual purchases across them. Meta says that it doesn’t want to own the metaverse. It just wants to be one part of this larger plan.
Where do you think it sees its role? They haven’t really shown interoperability yet, and so you know they’re preaching that, but they have yet to show it, and i think it’s going to be a while before we see really what that means. I mean the idea is that you could take. You know your virtual goods and your clothes and take them with you to fortnight in the metaverse right, but that means that epic games, which makes fortnite and meta, have to work together. They have to figure that out. Do you use blockchain technology? How do you even do that all these things haven’t been built, so this is all very early um for now, i think, for the foreseeable future we’re going to be living in like meta’s version of the metaverse they’d like to own as much of it as possible. I mean they’re spending 10 billion dollars.
You know just this year alone on this stuff and they’re gon na spend more annually going forward, while meta might be making the biggest play for the metaverse. So far its huge investment doesn’t mean it’ll come out on top. It’S tried to launch vr social spaces before and they haven’t caught on compared to competitors like vr chat and rec room, not to mention fortnite, roblox and minecraft right now. Lots of metaverse-like services already co-exist with apps and websites. The way that phones complement desktop computers but haven’t totally replaced them. The future might look like that too, and we might just call it the internet.
So whatever people like mark zuckerberg, say the metaverse isn’t necessarily inevitable and if it arrives it might not. Look like we expect. Hey thanks for watching.
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