Has one of your cool-nerdy friends tried to talk to you about ‘The Metaverse’ yet? If they did, and you responded with something like ‘oh yeah, of course, Metaverses are going to be huge’ ...and then quickly got out your phone to google what the hell it is, don’t worry. We've got your back.
Meta...what??
Metaverses are giant digital worlds in which you can freely interact with other users, your surroundings, and game environments in any way you want. They are virtual spaces which can co-exist with the real world through combinations of VR and AR.
You’ll be able to buy products, work and earn, consume and create content, and even socialise (probably even date; weird right?). But perhaps the most important difference between Metaverses and social media platforms on the one hand, and giant open world games like Roblox or Red Dead Redemption (on the other), is that you will, and indeed can already, own property and build your own place within the game environment.
Have you seen Ready Player One? Well, that’s what the creators of some of these Metaverses are explicitly going for. Some, like Earth 2 and After Earth are planned to be exact replicas of the Earth. The whole Earth, yes. Like, THE WHOLE PLANET!
Some are going for limited scale (like Decentraland and Sandbox) but high land value. Earth 2 are going for highly realistic graphics interfaces, and potentially unlimited building potential within their game environments. Others, like Alien Worlds are going for an immediately accessible and interactive game experience, though far more basic graphics (but you can get involved and play now!).
There’s a lot to say about the differences between each Metaverse and we’ve packed it all into a separate article where we rate them all here.
But why should you listen to your cool-nerdy mate about Metaverses?
Well, the reason is that they are here already, and although they are currently considered a niche interest area, they are going to be huge. If you’re under 45, the chances are that you are going to spend a large part of your life either interacting with them, living alongside them, or working and playing entirely within them.
Picture a 5th year school class for a moment: the school class is being taught about medieval history in England. Instead of 26 kids tightly packed into a classroom and one teacher scrambling to keep their attention and teach them the subject, there are 2,000 kids in the class via VR. It’s entirely interactive, and the kids can pull from various selected content in front of them whilst they listen to the teacher’s lesson through the audio in the headsets (think Minority Report). When they interact in the puzzles and tasks, they do so with other kids in India, Columbia, and Greenland. The content auto translates into various languages, and the kids’ questions and responses do too.
This kind of learning environment is made possible by the various Metaverse projects that are in development already.
In this example, the reason so many kids are there is because they WANT to be there. The Metaverse is a place they associate with gaming, fun, their friends, and socialising. It's gamified learning.
But there’s more. Now picture a virtual stadium within a Metaverse world. Instead of one single game being played in a giant 3D screen in the middle of the pitch, the viewers can choose from dozens. Instead of their being 60,000 fans, there are 2 million joining from all over the world. Perhaps, the fans no longer need season tickets. Instead, an NFT they bought gives them access to the arena (if you don’t know anything about these yet, check out this article on what NFT's are and why they’ve unlocked a whole load of new potential in Metaverses), and this NFT they invested in grows in value over time as more fans want to join and get access to watch the games. If you want to jump straight from playing Call of Duty within the Metaverse instantly into the stadium: no problem. You can change your avatar straight into your team’s home jersey. And as you buy it, instead of $US, the automated cashiers are taking crypto.
In short, Metaverses have the potential to revolutionise virtually (;) every single experience we currently partake in within the ‘real-world’.
But at its heart, one thing makes Metaverses extremely exciting for ordinary people like you and me: ownership. The possibility, at this early stage, to own a piece of what’s about to happen, at relatively low-price entry points. That doesn’t mean it’s risk-free: it’s not. And navigating this space to figure out what to buy, is hard.
But don’t worry, we’re put together these handy guides for what’s what, how to think about risk and buying, and how to avoid getting scammed.
So now you’re in. Welcome to the Metaverse. This is going to be fun.
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