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The metaverse. Remember that? You can’t escape the feeling that in reality it isn’t really anything life- or business-changing, at least not yet at any rate.
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That said, aspects of what we might
call the metaverse are already here and businesses are basing investment
decisions on the future of the internet.
Investors for example bought $650
million of virtual real estate last year, we learn from a two-part “Future of
the Metaverse” podcast hosted by chip maker ARM.
“They’re buying stuff that doesn’t
exist,” says Matthew Griffin, the founder and CEO of the World Futures Forum.
“We’re talking about a thing that’s only recently got a definition that
technically doesn’t actually exist but that actually has real impact in the
real world.”
The other participant on the podcast
is ARM’s director of innovation, Remy Pottier. He points to examples of the metaverse
being built today by companies including Autodesk, NVIDIA and BMW, which are
creating digital twins to train robots and educate workers.
Other examples from the gaming world
are Roblox, Unity and Epic Games. “These experience creation platforms and 3D
engines are generating billions in revenues generally just from the platform
itself,” says Griffin.
He also suggests that the metaverse
is a new marketing channel where brands can access existing or potentially new
customers.
“It makes a lot of sense for brands
to switch part of their digital marketing budget to metaverse-related budget
and test virtual product just before they go and they go and build it in the
physical world.”
For example, drugs designed in
virtual reality landscapes that are then eventually manufactured in the real
world, but occurring at speeds that were unimaginable even just a couple of
years ago.
“For consumers, it means that a lot
of live or play experiences will switch to the metaverse,” Griffin
posits. “This means potentially new immersive, personalized experience.
Wherever you go it means, 3D virtual options that open up for film, television,
and music and that we will be able to consume.”
Physical hardware such as VR headgear
remains a primary barrier to consumer experiences in the metaverse, but Griffin
thinks that “increasingly in the next couple of years, from a gadgets
perspective, we could actually see slipping into the metaverse as easy as
putting on a pair of sunglasses.”
The next step is easier user control
via gesture, voice or other forms of haptic interface.
Pottier outlines four categories of
use case driving metaverse development.
The first is about transcending time
and place — digital teleportation. “It’s about adding a way to travel the
world in a digital way without moving from your chair.”
It’s not just about “tourism,” but
business, too. He points to a next generation of immersive video conferencing
that enables one to “teleport.”
“It can be training, education,
product development… to co-create and co-develop product in the metaverse from
sites that will be in India, or in China, or Europe, and people can meet in
this collaboration room, look at the device touch it and, decide whether or not
it’s the right device they want to create.”
Another use case is dubbed “window
into the unseen.” This is a realistic simulation of what’s happening inside,
for instance, a running motor or an internal view of organs for surgeons.
Number three is alternate reality. One example
is Pokémon Go, where digital worlds are overlaid on the real in
real time.
A fourth is expanding human
capabilities. “We are weak today and very limited when you think about the
metaverse capability, which is infinite. Just think about real time translation
of everything you do. You will be able to speak any language without even
having to think about it. It could augment your five senses, from everything to
the digital world or become your super digital assistant, that basically knows
everything you did. The digital assistant just knows, because it has been
able to store everything.”
In the second part of the podcast,
Pottier and Griffin discuss the how closely the metaverse could resemble
sci-fi movies.
Griffin argues that a prerequisite to
any form of successful metaverse is a set of laws and legislation to build it
on.
“For example, if I’m going to be
building my metaverse and I choose a particular platform to build it, and bear
in mind that can incorporate an entire city, as some countries are trying to
do, what happens when the company hosting that platform goes bust?
“We’ve seen a lot of virtual reality
trademarks already being registered for company, for third parties that have
nothing to do with the original trademarks.
“What happens when somebody else goes
onto that same platform, into my virtual world, and then starts building their
own virtual reality world in my world? Where do we end up with this kind of
this Disney multiverse madness?”
He goes on, “How do we actually audit
what’s going on in the metaverse? Because we’re doing all these different
things, we have no idea how to keep track of them, how to monitor them, how to
report on them. Adidas, for example, has been selling NFTs [but] how do you
actually report on that?”
The pair then went on to discuss more far-fetched
concepts such as the blending of the virtual with the real, a familiar concept
from trippy sci-fi classics like Total Recall and The
Matrix.
The gist of the discussion is that
many of the elements that could lead to such fictional scenarios are already
science fact.
Pottier says, “To actually get into The
Matrix scenario, I think first we need to actually already agree to
live in The Matrix in a virtual actual reality, at least part
of, maybe most of our time. It means that we are already living in some kind
of Ready Player One kind of world, and we already agreed to do
that.”
Another idea: most people are used to
the idea of a brain machine interface, like a skull cap that reads our brain
signals and converts it into text or images.
“Three years ago, we managed to prove that you can
actually use artificial intelligence and brain machine interfaces to push
information into people’s heads,” says Pottier. “So in The Matrix,
when Trinity goes up to the Huey and says, I need to learn how to fly a Huey
now and all of a sudden the knowledge is uploaded to her brain, and she gets in
and then flies Neo out over the skyscrapers and the skyline. We’ve already done
that.
“What scientists have figured out in the labs is
how to upload or transmit knowledge to your brain using technology. So when we
actually have a look at that Matrix, we are way beyond that
already.
“We’ve got a Neuroprosthetic chip
that is used in Alzheimer’s able to read your biological brain signals and
convert them into ones and zeros. For Alzheimer’s patients, this improves their
memory retention by 30. But if I can convert your brain signals into ones and
zeros and store it on a computer chip in your head as a memory, isn’t that
memory downloading? And then couldn’t I take those ones and zeros and push them
into the cloud?”
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