These two Trends are making the Metaverse a Reality faster than you think.
The hot topic of 2022 was the Metaverse. But now we have 2023 — the year of AI & ChatGPT. Who cares about Zuckerberg’s visions from 2021 that never came true? Nobody wants to wait more than a year for the future, right?
Of course, there has been and continues to be a lot of nonsensical hype around the Metaverse that does more harm than good. It’s also a problem when Meta offers us hardware today for something that they say will take 10–15 years to mature. I can see this making sense for wine and cheese, but a Quest VR headset?
So, does it still make sense to discuss the Metaverse as part of anyone’s future? Yes, it does! Because two trends will ensure that the Metaverse will not disappear any time soon — quite the opposite, in fact. No matter what Meta’s stock price says, the Metaverse phenomenon has just begun and will become a reality sooner than many people think.
But first, let us define what we are talking about. There are already many very elaborate frameworks for defining the Metaverse. They all make sense but are too complicated at this stage of development. We might need all ten layers of McKinsey’s Metaverse model in the future. But for now, maybe three components are enough?
In order to find a definition that is simple and practical for the time being, we at University of Münster’s XRLab-MCM decided to focus on three things:
Persistent virtual worlds…
… with real humans in it being represented by avatars…
…who see meaningful social interaction (= not just shooting at each other) as an important part of the user experience.
Without going into too much detail or discussing all the different edge cases we can think of, the combination of these three components forms a basic Metaverse. This focus on the social aspect of the Metaverse brings us to the first trend.
Trend #1: The Internet will become a social place.
Humans are social creatures, and our lives in the offline world tend to be very lively: shopping, going out to eat, spending the evening — most of that we prefer to do in the company of others. But online? We are mostly alone in our digital bubble. It's time to face a fact that we often forget: the Internet today is a very lonely place.
How can we shop with friends on Amazon or Zalando? How do we spend an evening with others online? The pandemic has shown us that we can do a lot more with others online than we previously thought. But at the end of the day, everyone on Zoom just sits alone at home in front of a webcam. Hardly a social experience. There is also an increasing need for deeper and more meaningful digital collaboration in companies because real team building rarely happens on Microsoft Teams.
All this will drive the need for the Internet to become more social, and this is exactly where the Metaverse will come in: the next evolutionary step of the Internet is not about going from 2D to 3D, but about turning a lonely place into a lively one — transforming the Internet into a truly social space. And this is happening now, not in 10–15 years!
Even though we have a long way to go before we get that single, all-encompassing Metaverse, many small proto-metaverses exist today. Good examples of this are virtual worlds like Fortnite, Roblox, or Minecraft. In surveys done at the XRLab-MCM, we found that more than a third of users said that the main reason they played these games was to “be with friends.” So, contrary to what many parents might think when their kids play alone at home, this is often a deeply social activity.
If you’re wondering now why those kids wouldn’t meet their friends in the “real world”, you’re missing out on the second trend driving the Metaverse.
Trend #2: The fusion of the physical and digital worlds into a new form of reality.
Just like we no longer distinguish between mobile and non-mobile internet today, we will increasingly forget the clear distinction between being online and not being online. Life will still happen in reality, but we will understand this term differently, ranging from physical to digitally augmented reality (AR) to a totally virtual one (VR).
As demonstrated by Fortnite and others, these virtual realities are available on smartphones and laptops. It is not necessary to have a VR headset from a company like Pico Interactive or Meta. However, those do have one distinct advantage: they provide the strongest immersion — the sensation of being immersed in a virtual world.
This is also important for the idea of the Metaverse as a social space. Because strong immersion not only gives us the feeling of being present in a different place. Whenever other humans, represented by avatars, are present there as well, this transforms into social presence: the sensation of being in a different place together with others.
To avoid misunderstanding, the goal here is not to replace physical interactions, but to make something emotionally equivalent possible when they may not be an option.
VR makes this possible in part because our memory can barely tell the difference between such virtual and physical experiences. If you play mini golf in virtual reality with your friends, go to an event there, or collaborate virtually with coworkers, you remember it the next day as if you were really there with them, even though you were sitting in the same office chair as you had been for all those previous Zoom calls.
With all of this in mind, how can we summarize the development that will drive the Metaverse, regardless of where Meta’s stock price ends up?
It is the creation of a whole new social space for a world where the physical and the virtual are merging into one new reality.
The beginnings of this social space are already here. Not perfect yet, but ready to be explored. So let’s stop talking about the Metaverse as something that happens in the distant future. If you still don’t believe it, just ask your kids. They have probably been in the Metaverse for a long time already…
Go — try it out for yourself.
tl;dr
The Metaverse is driven by two long-term trends: transforming the Internet from a lonely place into a social space, and merging the physical and digital worlds into a new reality. We are already seeing this happen today in the many proto-metaverses such as Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft, and through practical applications such as virtual trainings and brand marketing. As the boundaries between physical and digital diminish, the potential for the Metaverse to become an interactive and engaging social space is exciting to explore.
