The Immersive Wire - 19 December 2021 (Sunday edition)

By Tom FfiskeVR/AR and metaverse analysis every Wednesday and Sunday

// 19 December 2021

Missing seeing Spider-Man before I fly to Italy. Avoiding spoilers is like trying to avoid oxygen.

Invest to own a part of the future of exercise in the Metaverse

MAIN STORYA preface on the metaverse

Have you ever been confused by conversations around the metaverse?

You are not alone. Ever since the spike in interest during 2021, thousands of companies and pseudo-professionals ruffled through their websites and strapped the word to as many of their marketing materials as possible, capitalizing on an explosion of interest. Suddenly, companies that hosted private virtual worlds are building towards a metaverse, or AR companies are mapping out the world to build it out. A comparable situation happened in 2017, when Bitcoin exploded in value and ‘blockchain’ was bolted on the side of new start-ups seeking venture funding.

Not all of the companies are providing substantial contributions to the discussions.

The worst cases are companies that see they have a private world, and label it as a metaverse. The conversation will become nuanced over 2022 and beyond, but currently it is a rush of companies identifying a new business opportunity.

If you ask any of the companies what the metaverse is, you will get a range of different answers.

Some say it is a super internet where people can access experiences, zipping through the metaverse and going surfing, climbing, socializing et al. Others say it is a wholly social experience, where friends can hand and conduct activities together. Still others see it as a layer of reality, not a separate one; an overlay of information as people walk around the world. The madness of the conversations stem from the myriad of conversations which clutter social and mainstream media, obfuscating the view with a pyramid of poor takes.

My favourite definition comes from Matthew Ball, an established essayist who has been following the space more than the futurist you can find in a Silicon Valley bar: ‘The metaverse is an expansive network of persistent, real-time rendered 3D worlds and simulations that support continuity of identity, objects, history, payments, and entitlements, and can be experienced synchronously by an effectively unlimited number of users, each with an individual sense of presence.'

One other factor, less touched on, is that our conception of the metaverse is based on our modern-day perception of tech.

We see it as an evolution of the internet, an inevitability as we continue to evolve its function. But is that necessarily what it will look like? Our present influences how we view the future, like a lens that warps what the next few years will truly look like. A later chapter will use an example from a 1900s chocolatier predicting the 2000s, with visions of cities on trains or wooden flying machines. The metaverse will go beyond our conceptions today, and dabble into use-cases which we cannot predict. The best we can do is to see what people want, and build around what they truly want. Be careful about the metaverse and what people say about them; certainty lacks the flexibility of curious optimism.

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