One of the biggest and most unexpected news items in the tech industry in 2021 was Facebook’s announcement that it will be renaming itself to “Meta,” indicating the company’s ambitions to evolve its current social media offering to a much more expansive, interactive, and immersive product. This in turn has generated significant hype across the industry and also made “metaverse” the latest buzzword, with many companies rushing to link their offerings with the metaverse concept in order to generate media activity. Important media figures are also weighing in on the metaverse, such as Bill Gates, who recently said that most company meetings will happen in the metaverse within 2 to 3 years, and rapper Snoop Dogg, who recently made headlines after someone paid US$450,000 to be his virtual neighbor in the Sandbox metaverse. Yet as with all buzzwords, beyond the media attention, there are very solid technologies behind the concept of a metaverse, which in fact have been in development for many years, and although it will likely take considerable time to develop, the metaverse is indeed something that IT departments should increasingly pay attention to for long-term business planning.
What Exactly Is the Metaverse?
The first step in analyzing how the metaverse will impact the industry going forward is to define exactly what it is. In simple terms, the metaverse can be defined as a 3D computer-generated environment where users can interact with their environment and other people. In fact, several services already exist which can be considered early versions of a metaverse, including social games such as Second Life and SK Telecom’s Oksusu VR. More recently, Facebook has opened its metaverse platform Horizons World to all users over the age of 18 in the US and Canada, which allows users to interact via avatars and visit virtual settings and play games in a social environment via an Oculus headset. More futuristic ideas of the metaverse even include features such as advanced sensing, which will bring new sensory perception, such as touch, smell, and even taste, to an online environment, and will deliver a significantly enriched experience when compared with today’s online experiences. So, given that these offerings already exist, what is missing to create a real metaverse? Two aspects are missing which are needed to realize a complete offering: massive scale and advanced functionality. As seen in the exhibit below, integration with devices and services is required to create a robust metaverse alongside interoperability across different environments to create a massive multiplayer online game-like environment.
