EXPANDING INTO THE VIRTUAL WORLD: WELCOME TO THE METAVERSE

By Alessandro Di Benedetto

It’s Tuesday, you’ve spent your day jumping from one conference room to another, with a short coffee break during which your colleague tells you about tonight’s Travis Scott concert.

The same evening, you drive to the concert in an outfit you love, to have some fun with friends while trying to avoid your weird neighbor that always wants to talk to you.

It was a fun and intense day, but here’s the plot twist: you never left your couch.

Welcome to the metaverse.

WHY NOW?

A few months ago, during the “Connect 2021” event, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the new corporate brand identity, Meta, which replaces Facebook as the umbrella for the company’s applications and technologies.

The choice of the name clearly targets Zuckerberg’s next big step: invest massively in the metaverse, which, according to the Connect 2021 transcript, is “a set of interconnected digital spaces that lets you do things you can’t do in the physical world. Importantly, it’ll be characterized by social presence, the feeling that you’re right there with another person, no matter where in the world you happen to be.”

METAVERSE: DEFINITION

Funny enough, the first appearance of the word is attributed to Sci-Fi author Neal Stephenson, in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash” in a line that reads: “In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse.” The word meta comes from the Greek word for beyond, and that’s basically correct. Etymologically, meta meant “after” in Greek, so metaverse also neatly implies a world or conception that requires a “real” world in order to move beyond it and acknowledge another realm.

It can loosely be defined as a digital reality, akin to the World Wide Web, but combining aspects of social media, augmented reality, online gaming and cryptocurrencies to allow users to act and interact virtually. If we build on our last series of articles about NFTs, with the existence of the metaverse, you will be able to invite your friends to an opening of your digital art collection in a whole new virtual world, in which everything is live, and where you present Jack Dorsey’s first tweet to the world, which you bought for a whooping U$S 2.9 million.

According to this definition, the metaverse is a boundless place where you can live your life online. It will make remote work so convincingly present, there won’t be much of a difference between beaming in and physically being in the meeting room. Indeed, CNET reported in August that Horizon Workrooms, a sort of virtual reality Zoom, has been used internally at Facebook/Meta for months. New figures from the company suggest nearly 20 percent of Facebook’s employees are working on virtual reality and augmented reality technologies.

IF I’VE TRIED VR ALREADY, DOES THAT MEAN THAT I’M ONBOARD FOR THE METAVERSE?

For those of us that have tried a virtual reality headset to watch an “experience”, or play an immersive video game, could that be considered as being in the metaverse? Partly.

According to the latest definitions of it, the metaverse is supposed to be boundless, giving you the freedom to… be free! That is not yet possible, at least not entirely. One of the first projects to attempt the feat was Second Life, almost 20 years ago.

Second Life is an online platform that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and have a second life in an online virtual world, or metaverse. Developed and owned by the San Francisco-based firm Linden Lab and launched on 23 June 2003, it saw rapid growth for some years and in 2013 it had approximately one million regular players.

Some would argue that Second Life is like a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG, the biggest one at that time being World of Warcraft). However, executives at Linden Lab were emphatic on the fact that their creation is not a game: "There is no manufactured conflict, no set objective".

In any case, Second Life hasn’t made a definitive jump into the metaverse. If the concept segued from only the computer platform into including a VR headset for example, that would see it become a metaverse.

WHAT ABOUT THE SPORTS INDUSTRY?

The sport and entertainment industries will definitely be affected by the metaverse. Unity, a cross-platform game engine that supports a variety of desktop, mobile, console and virtual reality platforms, has decided to enter the sports arena. Particularly popular for iOS and Android mobile game development and used for games such as Pokémon Go and Monument Valley, Unity recently hired Former Liverpool FC CEO Peter Moore to drive their sports and live entertainment division.

Moore is leading Unity’s latest innovation, called Metacast, which aims to provide a real-time three-dimensional platform for sport and entertainment. Basically, they build fully interactive pictures exploiting a method named volumetric capture, the same used in the elaboration of 360-degree video replays, but in this specific case everything is built from scratch.

The program can process around five million voxels – three-dimensional pixels – per second. Viewing angles can be deployed to any position without losing any detail. Recently, Unity exhibited Metacast in three different situations. The first of these was a UFC fight captured on a green screen, probably as part of a recent partnership with the UFC to explore the technology.

How real-time, three-dimensional footage is going to be distributed is still a riddle for now. For now, this kind of footage might be used for post-game analysis. The next step would be to give fans direct access to the images, allowing them to view exclusive angles and personalize their sportscast experience.

On the metaverse and the sports adapting to it, Moore commented:

“I’ve watched broadcast technologies evolve pretty slowly, and everything’s in 2D. And as we think of this new metaverse, where everything will have a digital twin, everything will be three dimensional. Because your vehicle will be autonomously driven, you’re going to be watching the game on the OLED screens of your vehicle. In your home, you’re going to be watching the game and the players are on your coffee table.”

AND MARKETING IN THE METAVERSE?

The rise of the metaverse will clearly lead to an influx of companies looking to pick up advertising dollars from brands trying to get into this trend (we see you Zuck…). It’s more important than ever for brands to identify how to leverage value within their niche to reach virtual consumers.

On the platform side, gaming is currently best equipped to help brands get into the metaverse, because games have a loyal user base accustomed to consuming in virtual space. Just think about it, teenagers and young adults playing Fortnite already have a metaverse of their own, and some brands are already tapping into it. In a year, Fortnite has seen the inclusion of the NFL, John Wick, Marvel, Marshmello, Weezer, and the UEFA World Cup.

However, not every brand is a good fit for virtual consumption. While it makes sense for Allianz to have an office in one of these virtual spaces, it would be tough for them to sell life insurance to a character that is virtually immortal. It would be more useful for them to have an “on-site” presence, like companies that have a presence on Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp at the moment.

Brands and products that consumers are most likely to purchase virtually are those that engage with users’ appearance or identity, and this explains why fashion and beauty companies have been up and running as non-gaming related brands in the metaverse. Huge brands such as Nike and Balenciaga have recently partnered with Epic Games to bring their virtualized products into Fortnite.

Luxury brands could also emerge as a natural fit within the space of collectables and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), another flourishing space in the metaverse.

NFTs are digital assets that are secured on the blockchain, and if you need to understand how all this works please see our three part series on NFTs. This new form of virtual collecting has risen steeply in popularity over the past year, to the point that brands are already selling digital versions of their goods for more than their physical price, like Gucci did.

BIG GARDEN WALLS OR MANY POINTS OF ENTRY?

Meta’s decision to enter early into the metaverse is far from naïve. Their plan seems clear enough: they want to be the first and unique access point to this new generation of metaverse. By controlling the whole “metaverse” domain, they can position themselves as an unavoidable platform and make the advertisement dollars pour in.

And it seems they’ve been planning this for a while. Back in 2014, then Facebook announced that it had reached a definitive agreement to acquire Oculus VR, Inc., the leader in immersive virtual reality technology, including headsets and hand-held controllers, for a total of approximately U$S 2 billion. The company was founded in 2012, so Meta was really early in the race to buy Oculus. They understood that if they wanted to dominate what could become the central piece of equipment of the metaverse, buying Oculus would be a daring move.

Despite their competitive push to be the first and only, Meta won’t be able to appropriate the entire metaverse. Current opinion holds that confining everyone into only one metaverse would be technically impossible because processing power would be outrageous and would incur tons of crashes and bugs. Not to mention that a large majority of the population no longer appreciates the Facebook brand, name change aside.

Plus the rest of the American tech giants, formerly GAFAM turned GAMMA, are not simply surrendering the metaverse to Meta. Microsoft has already developed their own interface called Mesh and aims at being the leader of VR work meeting rooms. Other worthy rivals are Zuckerberg’s historic archrivals: the Winklevoss twins. Yes, the ones that “had the idea for Facebook first” and went on a legal crusade against him. After accepting a multi-million dollar settlement from Zuckerberg a couple of years ago, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss became Bitcoin billionaires and are at the center of the future of crypto, the creative economy and quite possibly a new operating model for Big Tech itself. Through their fund, called Gemini Frontier, the twins have become investors and official advisors to the Czech company Somnium Space, which is developing one of the world’s most advanced VR technologies.

Another competitor is Decentraland, a decentralised 3D virtual reality platform that consists of 90,601 parcels of land. Virtual estate is represented by NFTs which can be bought with the ERC-20 token MANA. It opened to the public in February 2020 and is overseen by the nonprofit Decentraland Foundation. This “metaverse” already has a few of the elements that we would expect to find: a dedicated cryptocurrency that is based on an existing blockchain, a defined bloc of parcels, a gaming element and a way to interact with other avatars.

The next growing player in the metaverse scene is Sandbox, an Ethereum-based, shared online world in which users own plots of terrain represented as NFTs, along with NFTs for characters and other items. These land plots can be customized and designed with interactive game experiences, which can also be monetized to generate income for holders. Brands and celebrities that bought land in Sandbox include Adidas, Snoop Dogg, The Walking Dead, PwC Hong Kong, The Smurfs, Atari and Deadmau5.

IS THERE NO TURNING BACK?

The next five-to-ten years will be key to determine how the metaverse will evolve. Will Meta be the most popular hub? Will we become one with our digital self?

If you’ve watched “Ready Player One”, a movie by Steve Spielberg, you may be worried about where we’re headed. In the film,

“the world is gripped by an energy crisis and global warming, causing widespread social problems and economic stagnation. The primary escape for most people is a virtual universe called the OASIS, which is accessed with a visor and haptic gloves. It functions both as an MMORPG and as a virtual society, boasting the most stable currency in the world.”

As frightening and futuristic as this may seem, we can also approach the metaverse with curiosity, and by getting involved, help shape the way virtual universes will impact our daily lives and the future of humanity.

Are you already onboard with the metaverse? Let us know in the comments!

EXPANDING INTO THE VIRTUAL WORLD: WELCOME TO THE METAVERSE