Value creation in the metaverse. The real business of the virtual world.
Defining the undefined: What is the metaverse, really?
It is a gaming platform, a virtual retail destination, a training tool, an advertising channel, a digital classroom, a new gateway to digital experiences. The metaverse seems to be whatever people’s imaginations dream it to be. But today the metaverse remains difficult to define, even though the term has been in circulation for decades. What we do know is that, beyond the hype, the metaverse is real, potentially revolutionary, and has the makings of a significant opportunity. Yet how it will eventually develop remains to be seen.
While the definition is still fluid—and will likely continue to be for some time—the consensus view is the metaverse is the next iteration of the internet, where it becomes something we are immersed in, rather than something we just view. “The metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet,” Mark Zuckerberg said last November as he announced that the name of the company he cofounded, Facebook, was changing to Meta. “We’ll be able to feel present—like we’re right there with people no matter how far apart we actually are.”
Meeting the technology demands of the metaverse
The technology required to power the metaverse is recent. Yet the technology required to truly realize its potential doesn’t exist and presents arguably the greatest challenge to the development of the metaverse of people’s imaginations. The bottom line is that advancements will be required in compute infrastructure, network infrastructure, and devices:
- Compute infrastructure. Limits of concurrency today cap the number of players on gaming experiences without creative workarounds such as spacing players across a map to avoid overloading processing resources. In a fully realized metaverse, many more users will need to be able to be online at once. In addition, low-quality rendering means devices without graphics processing units (such as smartphones) cannot present the photorealistic environments required to drive immersion.
- Network infrastructure. There are two common issues with network infrastructure today. High-latency “lagging” creates a sensation of video and/or audio being slow when using applications that require a high rate of frames-per-second, such as gaming and metaverse socializing. And low-bandwidth “buffering” occurs when data cannot be transferred quickly enough, delaying access to content or stopping it when it is already in progress.
- Interface hardware. Metaverse access today is primarily through flat screens: televisions, computers (PCs and laptops), and smartphones. We expect them to dominate for another five years before transitioning to AR/VR and eventually extended reality (XR). It is unclear what will shape the next wave of metaverse interfaces: for example, if mobile phones evolve quickly enough to enable AR and become the main way of accessing the metaverse, access may become more democratized. Yet significant advancements across all features of AR/VR are required as the metaverse develops, and we don’t expect mainstream XR devices such as contact lenses and brain-computer interfaces—to emerge for at least a decade. Additionally, a broad set of peripherals—from on- and off-body sensors to haptics—are still emerging, and have the potential to significantly expand the market
The metaverse is still being defined, both literally and figuratively. Yet its potential to unleash the next wave of digital disruption seems increasingly clear, with real-life benefits already emerging for early-adopting users and companies.
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‘We have Instagram. We have email. We have messaging. And then there’s our real-life friends; the real-life activity that we’re participating in. Sometimes there’s an intersection between those two. But when I think about a real-world vision of the metaverse, it’s really a union of those where they become much more deeply fused; where there’s a digital extension to everything that’s real.’
–John Hanke, CEO of Niantic
‘Web3, by definition, succeeds Web 2.0. The metaverse, by definition, succeeds our current computing and networking paradigm. The fact that they both succeed what we experience as the internet today naturally intertwines the two.’
–Matthew Ball, senior adviser at McKinsey
‘Gaming is already incredibly social and you have continuous innovation of social features. But as you’re trying to draw in people who don’t self-identify as gamers, a more extensive set of social-engagement mechanisms is going to be required to convince them to spend more time in the metaverse.’
–Ken Wee, chief strategy officer at Activision Blizzard
‘Use cases beyond gaming are not just in the future, they’re already emerging.’
–Kavya Pearlman, founder and CEO of XR Safety Initiative
‘We believe that with the metaverse we can create higher-quality government services. Current government services are demand-driven. However, we believe that in the future we can provide services in advance of demand—we can provide a new form of government services and, in that sense, it will be very helpful to citizens. We also believe this metaverse platform will help citizens see Seoul city in a different perspective.’
–Jong-Soo Park, CIO of Seoul’s Smart City Police Bureau
‘It’s going to be important to create a truly creator-focused economy in the open metaverse, where creators can realize the value of their creations and not just be at the mercy of a gatekeeper that takes all the profit off the top because they are at the gate and they can do it.’
–Marc Petit, VP of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine Ecosystem
‘It’s a virtual immersion into the next generation of the internet. The metaverse will be iterative, not any one size or shape. And the capabilities we have within it will all be unlocked by both open standards and the devices that we wear or that we use to interact in these worlds.’
–Brian Solis, global innovation evangelist at Salesforce
