When it comes to metaverse, sky is the limit

Metaverse. A million, or perhaps even a trillion-dollar question! What is it really and why do we need it? There is really no agreed-upon definition right now. But it is basically a convergence of our physical and digital lives. It’s our digital lifestyles, which we’ve been living on phones or computers, slowly catching up to our physical lives in some way, for full convergence. It is enabled by different technologies, like augmented reality and virtual reality and there is also blockchain, which is a big component, 5G, edge computing, and many, many other technologies. It is ultimately about our identity and digital ownership-a new extension of human creativity in some ways and one day, we may just wake up to say, “The metaverse is here!” It’s going to be an evolution.

A big trend I’m seeing in business right now is how commerce is evolving as we head into these new virtual spaces and shared experiences, both in virtual and physical worlds. We have virtual-to-virtual commerce, decades-long phenomenon in the gaming space and now it is something that a lot of people are interested in. For instance, a Fortnite player uses Vbucks to buy a skin within the game. Similarly, I may be in a virtual experience and purchase something that could arrive physically at my home. And then there’s the opposite, where I am buying a physical item or a physical experience that unlocks something for me in a virtual space.

When you start to think about how much is being spent on the “direct-to-avatar” model, which is a new direct-to-consumer model - the estimates are $100 million dollars spent in 2021 inside gaming platforms for virtual goods, and that’s a number that’s going to keep expanding. So I see these projections as being certainly possible. When someone says $800 billion or $1 trillion by 2024, that’s possible, especially when you start to look at commerce beyond just virtual-to-virtual commerce but thinking of physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-physical commerce and unlocking those at scale. No wonder Apple is going all out on what they’re calling augmented reality and potentially leading us to post-mobile phone era. I foresee massive opportunities to take these new commerce models and do them at scale, which unlocks huge opportunities.

Customer support and experience, sales and marketing, events, engineering and architecting, workforce training, scenario planning are just the immediate benefits a business can leverage.

In future, it will all boil down to how enterprises are able to use the key features of the metaverse. How would persistent data be useful for an enterprise? For example, maybe a digital twin overlay onto a machine for employees to view and interact with. Or how would collaborative and interoperable content be used? Maybe to allow multiple parties (employees, customers, vendors) to crowdsource information and knowledge and interact with the digital twin, or other data available to the enterprise. Or how would decentralisation be useful? For example, having locally stored and processed information to improve on speed and latency.

This is how organisations would be evaluating the metaverse – in terms of these (persistent, decentralised, collaborative, interoperable) aspects and how they impact their business. We are still at the ground floor of the meta skyscraper. The only way - is up!

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