Metaverse: The next leap

Facebook has decided to go Meta. Their new big platform? Metaverse. Fortune favours the bold! From the tech giant who delivered WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus, and a plethora of other successful applications, Meta announced in October 2021 a commitment to developing their very own Metaverse platform.

Meta is so devoted to this vision they’re investing $10 billion, and gambling their future stability on it! Unsurprisingly, the Metaverse has captured the attention of other tech giants, such as Microsoft, Apple, and Nvidia, who see this as being the next technological leap with a market value estimate upwards of $800 billion by 2025.

Some pundits even speculate the platform has the potential to hold the majority of the world’s wealth, which has major investors chomping at the bit!

Affari Media is a great advocate for VR and AR, and understands the implications of this emerging market. We’re already finding innovative ways to communicate, connect with, and market to your target audience using these neoteric advancements in immersive technologies.

This isn’t mere marketing buzzwords, nor a sci-fi fairy tale, or an investment pitch – it’s a ground-breaking world-shaking movement, and it’s happening right now!

So, what exactly is a Metaverse?

As imagined in Ready Player One, it’s the next stage in the ever-evolving internet and how we interact with it. By leveraging the pre-existing global network and game engine technology, the intention is to build the foundations of a virtual, three-dimensional, social universe. Gone are the days of being represented by just an icon on a screen. The future beckons us.

In the Metaverse, you’re a walking, talking, customisable avatar. The method of interaction is much closer to everyday life in comparison to a keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen. To see the Metaverse in all its glory we would use new wearable technology such as smart glasses, and other AR/VR devices to get the full 360° experience.

Immerse yourself in our virtual reality experience for Fujitsu.

For when those devices are out of reach there would be other methods to access the Metaverse via PCs, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones – giving online communities a multitude of ways to interact with each other on this new multifaceted platform.

The best approach to envisioning this future is by observing the evolution of the gaming industry over the past few decades and how it’s grown as a concept. Video games were once an isolated experience, limited to being enjoyed only by those present in the room, meaning developers creating these games relied heavily on story and gameplay to succeed.

The BBC reports the video game industry in the UK is now worth £3.86 billion. The top games like Call of Duty, Minecraft and Fortnite base the majority of their gameplay upon multiplayer activities and creating a social experience. The result is a massive uptake in engagement, the creation of e-Sports (worth over $1 billion as of 2020), and entirely new methods of generating revenue which had never been seen before.

Affari’s experience in creating gamified content sets us apart from our competitors. Our award-winning solutions provide interactive and gamified digital assets to breathe life into any marketing campaign, and land it smoothly and definitively in the future! Explore our award-winning interactive solutions, or request a demo of our services.

To give scale to the levels of connectivity this technology offers and its potential in the Metaverse, look no further than Travis Scott’s virtual performance on Fortnite. In April 2020, the online event called ‘Astronomical’ brought together over 12 million players to witness a truly one-off, unique, free performance. Not to mention the 3 million viewers watching the live stream.

The event demonstrated exactly how the Metaverse could operate and how revenue in the future will be created. Even though this was a free gig, there were still opportunities to buy digital merchandise. This generated a profit of $20 million without producing a single physical product.

We are now at the precipice of social media, video game technology, and the internet fusing together to make the ‘all-in-one’ platform, which will create new industries we can’t even imagine at this point.

In turn with the recent rise of digital consumption, we are also witnessing a seismic shift in the digital economy as well. This is largely thanks to the growth and popularity of cryptocurrencies and NFTs – both are vital to the development of the Metaverse.

Physical currencies will have no place in a virtual world, giving way to the era of digital coin tokens to pay for digital services and products. It’s a financial industry that has been maturing for the past decade, seemingly anticipating the launch of a platform where it can be utilized to its full potential.

As a developer myself, who has observed the recent evolution of immersive technologies, the sheer scale and gravity of the Metaverse blows my mind. Not necessarily the concept of the platform and how it operates, but in the deployment of this technology into existing infrastructure and the amalgamation of fringe technologies.

The Metaverse will bring us closer together as a global community, and especially during difficult and uncertain times such as the recent pandemic, it can supply us with the connection and sense of presence we all crave.

In the 70s nobody could have predicted ‘Pong’, an arcade video game, would have evolved to inspire greater works to the point where we now have digital games with a procedurally generated universe to explore (No Man’s Sky). Nor could most people in the 80s have predicted the internet would be as integral to our everyday life now as it is now.

We stand on the edge of the next technological era, and nobody, not even Mark Zuckerberg himself, could tell you where the Metaverse will go hereafter.