We are Already Living in the Metaverse
The metaverse strikes back
Ever since Facebook rebranded to Meta in October 2021, the term metaverse came back into people’s vocabulary after years of being mostly forgotten. If you are a 90’s kid, your first interaction with something akin to a digital life was by playing games such as The Sims, GTA or by watching movies such as The Matrix. Each of these had a different proposition with The Sims allowing players to build their own virtual home and family, GTA being more of a free-roaming game set in a somewhat realistic digital world, and The Matrix being, of course, the blockbuster movie that explored the idea of where developments in AI and of virtual worlds could eventually take us. All of these made people in the early 2000’s theorize about how technology could eventually lead us to create an effective second life in a digital world that feels as real as our first one. Even though games have seen an amazing evolution and with some new movies exploring concepts of digital worlds coming out over the 2010’s, this decade saw very few people talking about the term metaverse or companies trying to explore this concept further.
This was until Facebook’s rebranding to Meta in late 2021. In this bold move, the parent company of Instagram, Whatsapp, and Facebook shifted its focus from providing different social platforms with different purposes to attempting to become one virtual world where people can interact, work, play games, or just hang out. Around the same time, many other projects emerged also trying to develop their own versions of the metaverse, some of which include blockchain components, such as Sandbox and Decentraland, and some that are purely web2-based, such as Roblox and Epic Games (developer of Fortnite). Big techs and brands also followed the trend with Adidas and Nike doing some experiments with virtual worlds and Apple allegedly developing their own Augmented Reality headset. However, this race to conquer the metaverse is nothing different from what these companies have been doing for the past decades. It is simply a fancier name for developing technologies to further lock consumers into their closed digital ecosystems.
Metaverse, explained
There is no single universal definition for the term metaverse but we usually find some recurring characteristics among the different descriptions. The term was first coined by the author Neal Stevenson in his 1982 novel Snow Crash in which he used metaverse to describe a virtual world that is accessed by Virtual Reality (VR) technology, that is fully immersive and interactive, with a shared space for people to meet, play, and do business together. Today, the metaverse concept is much broader but the following characteristics are frequently used to describe it:
A virtual world where people spend a substantial part of their time. Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality headsets are usually used to make people feel comfortable spending this time there since they allow users to experience realistic and immersive 3D worlds that can be interacted with much like our real one.
Where people can interact with each other, look and be whoever they want. Avatars are usually included in metaverse definitions as a way for users to physically look however they desire and wear whatever clothes they wish. It is a virtual persona that other players will see and interact with in this world.
With its own economic system. Metaverses oftentimes allow people to not only interact with other players but also work, buy, and trade virtual assets with them. Blockchain technology, including cryptocurrency and tokens, is often used to make this internal economy work on a global scale, securely and transparently.
What all of the above have in common is that they describe things we usually do in our physical lives but in virtual worlds. In its essence, the metaverse relates to the degree to which our reality and virtuality are intertwined.
Why are we already there
Even though not via VR or AR (yet), we are already spending a lot of time in the digital world. On average, people spend 44% of their waking hours looking at a screen, a number that can be even higher if you have an office job or are from a younger generation. This is time we spend interacting with people on social media, playing games, reading the news, and streaming movies and TV shows. Basically time we spend consuming information that continuously shapes our thoughts and opinions.
We also already see many of peoples’ “avatars” on social media. While in front of screens, we are not only consuming information but also messaging people, sending emails, adding comments, sharing and liking posts, etc. Sometimes, while doing this, we might consciously or unconsciously indicate a different personality than the one we have in the real world, with some people going as far as showing different principles, values, and ideologies. Not to mention how users also create fake accounts to disconnect these second personas even further from their real-life individuals. Aside from personalities, people can also drastically change how they physically look on social media by using face filters and photo/video editing tools. In its essence, not many things differentiate a social media account from a metaverse avatar.
It is also undeniable that the digital economy is more developed than ever. Covid had a major impact on the public’s receptiveness to e-commerce and digital payments. People now feel more comfortable than ever shopping online, from grocery to fashion items, and digital payment methods are usually the only way to do so. Even though not yet generally adopted by consumers, some e-commerce platforms or marketplaces are even allowing users to pay using cryptocurrencies, one of the many types of digital assets.
We might not yet be using super immersive technologies such as VR and AR or cryptocurrencies to make most of our purchases but it is undeniable that we already see many aspects of what we call the metaverse present in our day-to-day lives.
Where are we heading to
So, now that we are already in the metaverse, where do we go next? Of course, the future is very hard to predict, but I believe our physical and digital lives will continue to intersect even more as time goes by. Meta, Apple and Microsoft will keep on investing billions of dollars to develop better technologies, such as improved AR/VR headsets, that will grab more and more of our attention span - not only because they are fun but also because they are useful. Imagine having infinite portable monitors for your laptop (see image below) or having video calls that look as real and interactive as meeting co-workers in an office space. These would most certainly be well received by consumers.
However, I don’t believe there will be one company that will build one metaverse that will rule them all. Instead, the competitiveness among these players to conquer this new trend and lock people even more into their ecosystems will be the one thing that will prevent any one of them to succeed. That’s because a dominant metaverse, just as we see in Sci-Fi films, requires interoperability and connectivity, it needs to be decentralized to provide a fully immersive and complete experience to users. I don’t see big techs or any other metaverse player being collaborative among themselves to build a virtual universe where people can choose between working with Google’s or Microsoft’s tools, where players can bring their virtual assets from one game to another, transact in a virtual economy where everyone gets a fair cut, etc. What will most likely happen is that, similarly to how we have different apps on our phones today, we will have different virtual worlds that we could call metaverses.
Dive deeper
Who cares about the metaverse? By MKBHD (video)
We’ve lost the plot by The Atlantic
Thought of the month
This month, I came across the idea of a “third place”. This concept was first explored by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in the 1980s and says that people usually have their home and work (or school) as a first and second place where they spend time. The third place would be somewhere where there are little to no financial barriers to entry and where people mostly socialize, such as coffee shops, gyms, clubs, running groups, churches, etc.
Chart of the month
Apple recently started rolling out Apple Pay Later, a feature that lets Apple Pay users pay their purchases in installments. It’s incredible to see the growth of the big tech’s payment solution, especially considering that it has surpassed Mastercard in the dollar value of transactions annually with its $6 trillion total (over half of what Visa has).