It’s everywhere, the TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines. The Metaverse will be worth trillions of dollars with billions of visitors, not in the far off future but very soon, as in the current decade.
There are countless companies, both large established companies such as Meta and numerous small startups like us that are building their own Metaverse.
The race is on for investors in the metaverse, both small and large, including hedge funds scrabbling to buy ´property´ and ´assets´ in the larger metaverses being built or have been built such as Sandbox, Decentraland, and the upcoming Meta Offering as well as many others. These investments are in the hundreds of millions of dollars and no doubt many are amazed at the money being risked for a place in something that isn’t fully developed and has a proven commercial value. Also, if you buy a building in the real world you can see and touch it, but in the Metaverse, you are buying essentially a computer token that will resemble something in a computer program accessible with a virtual reality headset, for which less than 10 million have been sold worldwide in 2021. Some analysts project that by 2023 that will increase to 65 million.
The big question is will there be many metaverses or one dominant player? If there are multiple, the value of assets in any one is of course limited. We could envisage some dominant metaverses merging into a single metaverse and likewise the smaller metaverses or unique features of them incorporated in The Metaverse.
We are creating our Metaverse which we are calling MetalityVerse. We don’t pretend to believe that we will be the dominant one, we are only a startup with a small team but we do believe that we will incorporate some uniqueness that may become part of The Metaverse. Our creations are not going to be exclusive to MetalityVerse but our unique immersive environments and Virtual Humans (Avatars) would be able to be used in other metaverses. MetalityVerse will showcase our creativity.
During and post the worst of the pandemic the creation and the race to build the metaverse has accelerated. We all became used to working from home and being isolated from people in the real world just relying on video conferencing.
Now everyone wants to leave their house and get back to a ´normal´ life but are we living in the ´new normal’. Working from home is the new normal, shopping from the comfort of your home is the new normal and even when you’re tired socializing via video has remained a ´thing´. Even so, we still need that closeness only achieved by actually being in close proximity with other people. Can the Metaverse fill that void?
There can never really be that same feeling of togetherness that is only possible with actually being together in the real world but we can have a much more immersive experience within the Metaverse than can ever be achieved from voice or video chat. No, we can not actually touch someone in the metaverse though no doubt in the future there would be plug in’s or implanted chips that can fool our senses into thinking we have experienced touching something or someone. That being said we have our CFO currently based in the UK and we have our meetings in our virtual boardroom where we have a sense that we are together in the room meeting and that makes it feel as if the meeting was more rewarding and bridged the miles between us, even though we are represented by our avatar.
As the metaverse develops, more headsets are produced and sold, and meeting in the metaverse will become that new normal. Even living part of our lives in the Metaverse will feel like the norm in the sense that when we want to go shopping, instead of online on a computer, tablet, or phone, we visit the store or warehouse in the Metaverse, walk around, see the products and add them to our cart and then pay at the end. That will save time and give us back more of a normal shopping experience of days gone by, and for retailers, they are likely to sell more products just like in the real world through displays and placement of products that we are used to when shopping in the real world. How many times when you go to a grocery store or big box store to just buy one or two items, do we then come back with so much more? Whereas online it’s more likely that we just search and compare for a specific item and sometimes are given bundle choices which are less likely to be chosen as we don’t really see them. There will likely be more details available about the product such as reviews, dietary, and comparison shopping.
As developers and creators in the Metaverse, we do see that whether people like it or not this new technology will be embraced and become the new normal like other technologies have. A lot remember that when the ´personal computer´ was marketed in the 80s it was maybe a gimmick, fun, and mainly used for games and word processing, but was not seen to be necessary. The same with mobile phones, tablets, etc. The world is always changing and people tend to adapt, either embracing anything new or just accepting what is new.
We believe like many that this is going to be big and we’re excited to share our enthusiasm with the world so have decided to document our story via YouTube vlogs and Tik Tok videos as we build our Metaverse and discuss what others in this space are doing. This will give everyone an insight as to what the Metaverse is all about and what it’s capable of.
We look forward to comments and suggestions that may help us build in features that people would like to see.
