Metaverse is the latest buzzword in tech

What is the metaverse?

The concept is that the?metaverse?will be a network of 3D virtual worlds, where consumers will be able to do all the things they currently do online - work, shop, play, and socialize. Through a combination of multiple existing technologies, such as 5G, 3D, AR, VR, blockchain, cryptocurrency, cloud computing, and even social commerce, the possibility of creating a network of 3D virtual worlds is now very real.?In these virtual worlds, real people will interact as cartoon-like characters called avatars, as it happens in a real-time multiplayer video game, today.

Metaverse principles

A fully functioning economy:?Within the metaverse, individuals and organizations will be able to engage in a wide variety of value-generating activities and have a means of transferring that value to others.

Open and decentralized:?In metaverse no one entity (not even Meta) will have complete control when it comes to a participant’s data or experience, benefited from the blockchain world.

Interoperability:?Instead of what happens in one digital world which tends to stay in that digital world, within the metaverse, participants can take their data and experiences with them from one simulated virtual environment to another.

What technologies are empowering metaverse?

Companies are powering the 3D world with cutting-edge technologies like blockchain, augmented reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), 3D reconstruction, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of things (IoT) to make the real world metaverse experience. ?

VR based wearables (lenses, glasses, gloves, headsets?etc.) will explode in popularity augmenting the world around us, allowing us to connect with others in the same virtual room, regardless of physical distance, facilitating virtual assistants with the help of sophisticated artificial intelligence.?

Blockchain technology will offer a decentralized and transparent solution for digital evidence of ownership, digital collectability, value transfer, governance, accessibility, and interoperability. Cryptocurrencies will allow people to transfer value in the 3D digital environment while working and socializing.?

The web 3.0 will be the next generation of internet technology which enables a decentralized blockchain protocol, giving the ability to individuals to connect to an internet where they can own and be properly compensated for the time and data, rather than what happens today where giant centralized companies enjoy the lion’s share of the web and get the large percentages of the profits.?

The Metaverse would require extremely high internet speeds, high bandwidth, and low latency, especially when the user enters a vast virtual world. 5g enables extremely higher speed giving the ability to VR experiences that include the sense of touch and AR experiences that let visitors have in-depth conversations, with AI integrated, in real-time. Several countries have already launched research initiatives regarding 6G.?

Moreover, Brain-computer interfaces will allow to control avatars, various objects, and digital transactions with our brain signals. This technology is expected to boost Metaverse even more. ?

How the new metaverse world would look like?

The Metaverse by design will have no language barriers, using simultaneous?on-line real-time interpretations and translations by advanced artificial intelligence-powered translations machines. Metaverse’s denizens even though they speak different languages in their real life, their avatars will be able to communicate as they were all natives. ?

It will change the future of work and our professional lives by providing virtual workplaces/offices and new or existing jobs for people worldwide.?New job categories will be created that we don't know yet as well as a lot of the existing ones will change dramatically. ?

Workers in low-income countries, will be able to get jobs in western companies without having to emigrate. ?

More advanced tools will help organizations to make their remote way of working much more effective and efficient, providing better meetings, workplaces, team collaboration, job training, development, and performance management as well as to build and communicate their culture more effectively.?

When it comes to religion, we see God that has already entered the metaverse. Experts claim that the future of churchgoing lies in the metaverse because it reaches people who can't physically go to church, especially the ones who became chronically ill?and are unable to move. The anonymity of virtual reality can help people feel more confident about sharing deeply personal issues, but we should keep in mind the mental and spiritual harm that many people are experiencing today as attacks, based on their religious identity, race, gender, or sexual orientation, against them through internet.?Especially the people who feel unloved, unwanted, and unwelcome in our communities are very vulnerable and we must safeguard them of experiencing even more such attacks in the new metaverse world.?

In Finance could start seeing financial advisors and services much like in the physical world, including credit, mortgages, and rental agreements. A virtual world where avatars, buildings, objects, clothes, land, or art tokenized as a digital asset, can be bought, and sold just like in the real world, or where it is possible to walk around the buildings and participate in events in the virtual environment, means a huge new economic ecosystem. Today there are financial players who enter the meta world in a rapid manner to be able to position themselves as the pioneers of the future of digital finance, i.e. there are brokerages and banks in Korea that have already begun to create active virtual environments for their clients.?

In insurance, companies will define their digital risk appetite, adapt their underwriting rules, create, and launch the respective products in order, as it happens in the real world, to insure this new digital world and its related risks. Since metaverse is a blockchain-based world, one of the most secure technologies today, it is very acceptable from such an over-regulated industry as insurance.?

In real-estate, agents will show customers virtual estate for sale as they do it already for the real-world properties. ?

In tourism, tour guides will give virtual previews of real-world vacations, museum αand sightseeing tours etc.

When it comes to retail, Virtual shopping venues, stores, malls and more will pop up establishing a metaverse universe, promoting e-commerce sales and offer digital-only products for sale, such as non-fungible tokens, better known as NFTs, to dress and house avatars etc. They’ll buy NFT land?through a land sale agency or using an NFT marketplace to buy directly from landowners. Land can also be sold to other users on various platforms, and there will be renting mechanisms available in the future. In fact, those lands do not physically exist here on Earth.

For example, Nike, one of the first to invest in the metaverse, chose to premier?NIKELAND?on gaming platform Roblox. Visitors can play games and dress up their avatars for free, digital goods will soon be available for purchase. Several of Samsung's smart TVs now come with an NFT Platform app for discovering, purchasing, and trading in digital art.?

When it comes in gaming, live sports and casinos, betting and gambling industries higher growth is expected as well as crypto payments adoption will be the new norm and customer experience offerings.?

In the educational sector, opportunities will expand, providing access to a more qualitative training in a more effective way and much lower cost.?The whole industry will change dramatically since test centers, schools, colleges, universities etc. will shift their major business to the metaverse world. ?

From a corporate perspective, there are opportunities to massively scale. Instead of having stores in every city, a major retailer might build a global hub in the metaverse that is able to serve millions of customers. Smart brands will indeed buy real virtual estate and hire meta-builders to develop their brand presence and experiences, where they will sell both digital and physical products to consumers who split their time between worlds. ?

And while companies like Facebook, Google, Disney and Amazon will all build their unique presence and experiential platforms within the Metaverse, all must agree and comply on a set of shared protocols and technology standards for interoperability across different creators and domains as well as accessibility across all device types. Because the true promise of the Metaverse can only be realized when each of these “worlds” are part of a universe where we can seamlessly teleport from one world or experience to another in real-time. Massive opportunities for business-to-business enterprises, across industries and countries, are expected.

In marketing, the Metaverse will become a marketer’s Playground. The most important reason is marketers want to target and keep Millennials and Gen X up-to-date and engaged with their products and technologies, and metaverses allow them to target these audiences in a new way.?

In healthcare, for many decades, the delivery of healthcare has required physical interaction between a patient and a doctor as a means of making a diagnosis, receiving medical treatment, or performing surgical procedures for the patient. That changed slightly with the emergence of telehealth services, which made part of the patient-doctor relationship through digital means and the Internet. The Metaverse will change dramatically the traditional healthcare services. Surgeons will meet in a virtual operating theatre, and they can collaborate in surgery with assistance from other consultants and experts, nurses will meet patients in the metaverse and perform the daily check and discussions, visits to patients through virtualization giving them a lot of emotional support and make them feel better, patients and physicians will meet in a 3D clinic or any other location etc.

In Operational Technology (OT), business operations could test the products in a virtual environment at lower cost. They’ll be able to build a complex digital twin of a factory or industrial space at massive scale, and test how robotics systems will interact with the physical environment.

When it comes to the economics of the metaverse or metanomics—there are opportunities in almost every market area. Imagine you have an online avatar, having its own digital wallet in crypto, and you want to change what it/you are wearing, you will be able to buy limited-edition, digitally branded clothing that you pick after browsing a virtual showroom. Or you may start your own small business, such as an art gallery where you display your latest and greatest collections, or a virtual private club.?

To the extent that the metaverse will have its own economy, we should expect to see a proliferation of businesses?catering to the financial needs of its denizens. Blockchain and digital asset companies obviously will be critical in the metaverse, but companies that develop virtual assistants and other AI-powered agents for financial services should also likely have plenty of work to do.?

With such dramatic changes and new developments, it is vital a new effective governance model to be established. A good governance will assure a good and open metaverse world. It would be very good, for first time to build whatever framework is needed in time and not run behind the metaverse revolution as we usually do.?

What are the new risks and challenges that Metaverse brings in?

Most experts, even though they predict Metaverse’s bright future, they have also warned on the danger of its uncontrolled access.??

Studies have shown that uncontrolled social media usage has mental health effects on users. Much more mental health issues are expected to arise from long-term exposure in virtual worlds. People will not be able as many experts claim to distinguish reality from VR since the lines between the virtual world and physical world become more and more blurred. People even if they step out of the virtual world, they’ll continue feeling like they are still in.?

This will be even a bigger danger to children who grow with the metaverse and spend large amounts of time in such virtual worlds. But this is not the only risk for them. It is more than certain that its unmonitored use, especially by minors may make it difficult for the user to distinguish between the real and the virtual world. They would potentially be more exposed to further privacy violations, misinformation, misuse, harassments etc.?

The metaverse might be used to further propagate actions that would be deemed criminal in the real world. Violence, rape, and murder may be propagated in an uncontrolled world. Warnings have already been issued about some digital games due to their graphic content. The dangers would be even higher as it is a 3D simulated experience.?

The metaverse may be used for cybercrime activities. These include cyberbullying, impersonation, defamation, hacking and others. A criminal can impersonate an actual person or business and steal, blackmail or cause a lot of reputational damage in the real world.?

The metaverse carries a data privacy risk. Third parties can monitor activities, study consumer behavior, and engage in uncontrolled data mining.?

The metaverse will make it easier for intellectual property infringement to take place. Since there are no laws, then anybody can infringe content. Disclosure of unprotected information and trade secrets to the competition, can be very dangerous for any company. ?

Obviously, avatars are not independent thinkers. The metaverse raises new legal challenges. The lack of legislation and enforcement as well as the lack of physical laws and jurisdictions make difficult to control and regulate actions that would be deemed illegal. That’s why we must build the appropriate regulation to protect its users and minimize its related dangers, otherwise as many experts claim “The?metaverse?would be heaven for business, big tech?and?commerce -?and?hell for humans”.?

Will the metaverse replace the real life?

The metaverse could push in a new era where we live more in the digital world than in reality. AR glasses will become commodity since they’ll be necessary to shop, work, and live, just like the internet.

There are experts who claim that metaverse will "not be good for humanity". People will become so fascinated with their avatars and virtual life that they will start hating their real lives.?

The idea of a virtual world in which every user has an avatar and competes with friends and colleagues, makes it more appealing, especially for younger users and millennials.??

In theory, it is cool to dress up your avatar and send it to the top of the Eiffel Tower in the metaverse as it is to go there in person, but we all know that isn't true. Many things just can't be simulated.?

The metaverse will enrich every part of our lives, but the focus must be on enhancing our wellbeing in the real world, rather than the virtual one. The opposite will be a disaster.?

In conclusion

Metaverse will transform organizations significantly over the next 5 to 10 years, so rather than waiting for the technology to knock on their door, organizations should take a proactive approach to the topic by starting to address the conversations at the organizational level now. Business leaders and boardrooms around the world should start asap asking themselves, “What is my metaverse strategy?”. It is more than certain that laggard brands and organizations will face serious survival issues if they underestimate the dynamics of this new digital world.