What is the metaverse, anyway?
The first thing to know is that it is still a largely theoretical concept. Yes, giants like Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Microsoft are racing to announce their plans to build one and align their brand with it; but it does not have a standardized and clearly-defined structure yet. That said, it is undoubtedly starting to shape, and with the backing of such juggernauts, it is sure to continue doing so quickly.
When I was 9, my family took its first step on the long road to the metaverse by connecting our computer to the internet. Within a year, I was already an active member in a prototypical version of the metaverse — Runescape. It may sound reductive, but massively multiplier online games like Runescape, Second Life, and Fortnite offer players a way to interact with others online within a simulated environment influenced by real life. Fortnite and other recent games go beyond players interacting and have become platforms for hosting immersive concerts and digital events that truly integrate the physical and virtual worlds. While video games have always been closer to approaching the metaverse due to their innate interactivity, other mediums are starting to follow.
The experience of transacting within a virtual marketplace has now become common to most thanks to Amazon, Shopify, and others. Over the past two years, telehealth, remote work, virtual conferences, and online lectures also entered our daily lives and became familiar parts of them.
Emergent use cases for virtualized retail have appeared across a wide range of applications beyond marketplaces. Bitmoji collaborates with clothing designers to implement avatar-based marketing techniques, and in NBA 2K22, players can shop for real items from real brands for their avatar to wear in the game. Other companies have also presented AR as a way to accommodate retailers’ needs. One example of this is virtual showrooms where customers can see a mockup of the product they’re purchasing without it being physically in stock. The intersection of these ideas highlights how the virtual and physical worlds can blend to bring retail into the metaverse.
Healthcare and education have also rapidly adapted to offer a combination of virtual and in-person experiences. But work productivity applications are one of the biggest reasons why the metaverse recently gained more interest. During Microsoft’s Inspire conference, the company clearly signalled its interest in building on the success of Teams with Mesh, a collaborative platform for virtual meetings and experiences. It joins many other initiatives that aim to stretch the boundaries of the physical world and add flexibility to the way we co-work. These projects, along with translation and transcription capabilities enabled by virtual meetings can make them much more preferable to ones held in a physical space.
While all these examples are encouraging signs that we are at the cusp of a technological breakthrough, it is notable that they are all led by individual companies without a significant emphasis on decentralization. If this persists to be the case, I would predict it can lead to data privacy issues and a level of corporate control that is challenging to govern. This is the future vision of the metaverse described in the dystopian novel and movie Ready Player One. The monopolized metaverse can mean that one or few companies own a global infrastructure connected to many of our most critical services.
While Ernest Cline’s novel is incredibly captivating, I don’t think its version of the metaverse is likely to emerge soon. I believe a semi-decentralized metaverse platform with a group of dominant providers building on top of it is more likely to evolve out of our current version of the internet. For this vision to materialize, it will be important to ensure that the metaverse behaves as a platform with enough regulation to prevent monopolization and exploitation.
In the book Tools and Weapons, Microsoft’s President, Brad Smith, emphasizes the importance of corporates and government bodies collaborating to mitigate the risk of emerging technologies being misused. As we enter this next period of innovation, I hope that this sentiment holds true and that we can shape the metaverse to be a force for good.
