Metaverse, technically, by definition is a “continuum spanning the spectrum of digitally enhanced worlds, realities and business models”. This can find application across all aspects of business such as consumers, workers, and across the entire enterprise. It wing span expands from reality to virtual, 2D to 3D, and cloud/ Artificial Intelligence (AI) to extended reality. Many metaverses are being constructed, each with its own rallying points and theories about how to get it right. Some are for businesses, while others are for individuals. Platforms, partners, and technologies vary by company. 

A key aspect to remember is that the metaverse does not compete with the Internet; rather, it complements, expands, and enhances it.  Users in the metaverse go through a virtual world that mimics features of the actual world utilizing various technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), social media, and digital currency. . People “surf” the internet, but they also “live” in the metaverse to some extent. . Even though metaverse has governance issues  and is finding more traction in-game applications, from a commercial standpoint  market-ready metaverse platform are made available today for virtual collaboration, training and events. 

Metaverse became a household name after Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta in October 2021. And announced spending US$10billion over the coming years to build out its vision of the metaverse. There are a set of people who consider metaverse as the next evolution of the Internet. It may take many forms including gaming, business collaborations, online communities with a digital “avatar” or twins of themselves. 

Accenture, a technology firm, discovered a special class of enterprises known as “leap froggers” during the pandemic. These businesses quickly established digital strategies in the recent year with the goal of navigating the epidemic. These “leap froggers” have exceeded the competition by 4 to 5 times during the previous year, as seen and experienced.

Here are some interesting observations from a survey of top industrial executives on the prospects of the metaverse.

Survey of top industrial executives on the prospects of Metaverse

  • 98% of executives believe continuous advances in technology are becoming more reliable than economic, political, or social trends in informing their organisation’s long-term strategy
  • 71% of global executives state that the metaverse will have a positive impact on their organisations
  • 42% believe it will be a breakthrough or transformation
  • 95% of global executives believe that future digital platforms need to offer unified experiences, enabling interoperability of customer data across different platform and spaces
  • 74% of global executives report the number of IoT/Edge devices deployed in their organisations significantly or exponentially increased over the past 3 years
  • 69% of global executives report quantum computing will have a breakthrough or transformational impact on their organisations in the future

Source: Accenture Technologies, Vision Report 2022

NFT (non-fungible token), is a non-interchangeable unit of data stored on blockchain, a distributed ledger technology, that facilitates secure protocol for selling and trading. It provides a unique identification and cant be replaced with something else. It differs from bitcoin, which is fungible – meaning, you can trade one bitcoin for another bitcoin. It is not the case for NFT. Since it is uniquely identified, one-of-a-kind, it is non-fungible. Below are a few notable trends and numbers that qualifies the new alphabets in digital domain.

  • In 2021, Christie’s sold its most expensive digital art in history for US$69.3Mn. Just one year after their first auction, Christie’s have now surpassed $100Mn in NFT (Non-fungible tokens) sales.
  • The National Basketball Association converted video highlights from real-world games in to NFTs that fans could collect and trade. It generated $600Mn in sales
  • In the 3rd quarter of 2021, NFT sales surged to US$10.7billion, over 8 times higher than previous quarter.
  • Nike launched a virtual world called NIKELAND on Roblox in late 2021. 
  • In 2021, Gucci created The Gucci Garden Experience to sell virtual products and sold a virtual-only digital twin of a Gucci purse for a higher price than its real-world counterpart

Web 3 is a buzz word in crypto world today. 30 years back came Web 1. Back then, it was static pages of information loaded on a common server and we could access and read it. There was no interaction. This was the case till 2000 when web 2 was birthed. The web-based technologies advanced to enable interactive web pages – share opinions in the form of text, images, like or share contents. The growth of user-generated content (UGC) throughout the Social Media Era marked a paradigm shift in internet company revenue models. As the internet spread to major cities and towns throughout the world, revenue models such as YouTube channels and adverts became a major source of cash for these businesses.. Smart Phone had a huge impact on the surging demand in this space. Today, a user is well tracked on social media and data is fed to supercomputers that predict content to keep a person hooked on for longer duration. Web 2 is dominated by big firms like Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, & Microsoft. These companies are extremely powerful. Data held by these firms are  controlled by them. This has always been a concern. Web 3, was conceived with the advent of blockchain technology. Web 3 fundamentally follows the blockchain principle of decentralisation. Data in such cases is not stored centrally. The content creator has it in their custody. Assume you issue a reel on Instagram. Instead of posting and forgetting it, all the reels you post are NFTs issued in your name. Now you can sell this reel to another platform, or you can sell ownership to another. You can just be very innovative here to make more money.

In conclusion, mastering new alphabets in the digital domain is both intriguing and necessary because we will be living with them in the future. One of the most intriguing and enjoyable aspects of working with new technology is that we embark on a journey and solve challenges as we go. Each problem you solve has the potential to create a new problem or opportunity that you weren’t expecting. Then you may improve your thoughts and come up with solutions you might not have considered before. Persistence pays off in the long run, but conviction and focus are essential.

Jos Mathew

Singapore

+65-97346777

jos.mathew@hotmail.com

1990-94 batch, Karunya

Mech Engineering dept

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