Is the Metaverse Dead…….

Being a passionate left-hander by birth, the creative side of me is always at work in any thing I do. My comfort zone is being in the creative, fuzzy zone – more people will consider it as their discomfort zone. I was sort of cut out for innovation & living in the fuzzy world. One of my self-talks for many years has been -

‘Thank you God for creating me as a passionately independent original thinker, keeping me always in a create mode’. And I am strong believer of Self-talk.

Coming back to the Metaverse topic, with all the layoffs, shutting down of entire divisions, I do get asked a lot about is ‘Metaverse dead’. Lets look at the journey- take a glimpse of where I started the my journey with Virtual Worlds and how I got to be known as an SME in this space. I got to lead the Innovation ecosystem globally for a more than decade. I have been building and living in the virtual world for over a decade now….. and this is not just to brag or do a sales talk. Let me quote a few examples -

·????????When I launched the Innovation centre in 2013, the first things that got configured is the Immersive zone- a 6 wall sized screens, 60+ feet wide experience zone delivering room scale immersive experiences . Mind you, then GPU’s did not exist ?? and we built environments like immersive 4D retail- you pick a product in the virtual world turn it around, see the price and specs and drop it into a virtual cart. This was 2013…….. and many of you who have visited the centre and met me, would have experienced it. The Digital Virtual Bank- move money from a virtual ATM into your e-wallet to shop in the virtual world- this was 2014, and one of the largest US based global consumer banks top CXO’s were the first to experience it.

·????????I went on to build the room scale pepper ghost hologram for industrially immersive experience design and experiences in 2015. This was a big hit- JCB Back hoe aftermarket solution was a fire starter in 2016. The Oil Rig Ops & Maintenance was developed on Oculus, and then ported onto HTC vive. There were several others- I mentored an intern to build a Desert Safari on Google cardboard in 2016 and the MR experiences for BIM and Car Configurator on HoloLens.

·????????Then came the big one in 2017 – Augmented Virtuality experience inside CAVE (Computer Augmented Virtual Environment). Configured with motion tracking, head tracking, the Oil Rig experience was elevated to the highest levels of immersive experience. This was when complex industrial training for Derrickman, Offshore installation manager, pipeline inspection, drill bit inspection and remote assisted drill bit replacement in the Oil Rig were rendered in the virtual world. All the leading Oil & Gas majors anchored in and resulted in creating a big business momentum.

2017 also saw me bring in the LPD screens from Prysm and the room scale holo-gauze, a massive room scale experience platform. Both these were part of the newly built US MountianView innovation centre that I led end to end.

I have lived through the evolution of Google Cardboard to Google lens, to more sophisticated HMD’s and the room scale Holograms and CAVE.

So then now the question – with Microsoft stopping HoloLens and shutting down the entire division, with Google also doing the same, also with Apple postponing the launch of its hardware, are these any signs of things to come. What most of us see is the turmoil of layoffs – 12,000 people laid off, 10,000 people laid off and most of them in some way connected to the topic of interest. This seems to cloud the vision into the future. What we are missing to notice is that a new world that is getting formed to shape up things to come. All categories of service offerings for Metaverse are shaping up in parallel, and like the multiple S curves for Emerging tech, the same pattern is visible in the Metaverse space too…..

1.??????Metaverse as a Service, and we did see very good action in the CES, with a series of launches and announcements. Many of them were start-ups

2.??????Platforms – for the first time since the advent of Cloud, we are seeing both the Service provider side of platforms and the consumer side of platforms. Considering the sheer economies of scale by engaging the consumer side of the target market, the platform play will drive exponential scale. All the investments into Mesh, Omniverse on one side and the Decentraland, The Sandbox, Axie Infinity, Spatail.io etc on the other

3.??????Bespoke Virtual Environment, leveraging all the grounds up tool to create 3D models and environments, render them into virtual worlds and then design exemplary experiences which are nearest to the physical world across all 18 degree of freedom ??. With Unity, Unreal engine, with NERF, and with the low code no code strategies taking centre stage, this world will be last to evolve to scale. ?

The costs of HMD will be a key factor, and the Start-up action in this space is now maturing. The abrupt, and almost knee jerk responses from the large organization post CES 2023 is now becoming obvious. Is it an indication that we are expecting the biggest innovations in the hardware space in coming months?

So my POV, my take, Metaverse is here to stay, call it by any other name, do it in any other way and realise it in which ever form, virtual worlds have arrived, and will make inroads into our daily living soon.

CIOKlub Bangalore Chapter VRARA Bangalore