Step into the Metaverse. Mark van Rijmenam
metaverse has brought already is these massive interactive live events. To Generation Alpha, these MILEs offer substantial benefits over real-world concerts. First, they are easy to attend. Children do not need to ask for permission from their parents because they don’t have to go anywhere. They can attend from the comfort of their home. Second, they can appear at the concert in their favorite outfit or character, using the avatar as an extension of their real-world personality, creating the ability for the ultimate self-expression. If your child feels like going to the concert like a unicorn, they can, and it probably doesn’t cost the world to be a unicorn either. Next, their friends from around the world will also be at the concert. Note here that Generation Alpha has friends from all over the world from the start. They have made close friendships with people they might have never met in real life and probably never will meet physically. To them, globalization is not something that is bad, but an opportunity to meet new people and learn more cultures, albeit completely virtually. Finally, they will have front-row seats at the concert, even if they happen to be late for the show. In fact, they can stand next to their favorite singer while he or she is performing, taking a screenshot of the experience and sharing it with their friends who could not be there. Once the concert is over, your children are already home in time for dinner. The best thing is that next week, they can go to another concert, without paying $100 for an entry ticket that allows them to see their favorite artist from afar in the physical world. For many children, the virtual concerts offer as good an experience or even a better experience than traditional physical concerts.
The metaverse will provide benefits like these interactive concerts and many more as portrayed in the fictional start that will be hard to ignore for both consumers and organizations. The metaverse offers a new way of doing business, connecting with customers, and collaborating with colleagues. As we will see, those companies who have already stepped into the metaverse are already benefiting from it, creating increased brand loyalty, optimizing product design and creation processes, becoming more sustainable, and generally increasing their bottom line. Similar to those companies who were first to adopt the internet when it appeared in the 1990s and those companies who were first to venture onto social media when it appeared in the late 2000s, those companies who have already entered the metaverse will reap the benefits from this new trillion-dollar social economy that will be created this decade.
However, as we will also see, it is not business as usual in the metaverse. Yes, the immersive internet is another channel that you need to master as an organization, but it is a channel that requires your full attention. It will require significant up-front investments, trial and error, and strong connections with your community. After all, designing a series of nonfungible token (NFT) collectibles related to your brand or creating an immersive digital version of your headquarters for your customers to explore during the pandemic is a lot more capital- and resource-intensive than creating a social media campaign. In addition, “datafying” processes and embedding operating equipment with sensors to create digital twins (virtual representations of physical processes or assets) that will provide valuable insights to constantly monitor a remote production facility and continuously improve its output is easier said than done. Finally, moving from Zoom or Teams to a virtual reality meeting room where employees from around the world can come together, collaborate, and spend potentially even more time in the virtual world requires a significant change in employee behavior. As we know, building the technology is the “easy” part, while changing user or employee behavior is a different ballgame.
Of course, for the metaverse-natives (Generation Alpha and, to a lesser extent, Generation Z), embracing the metaverse is easy. The challenge lies with the older generations who are not accustomed to an omnipresent immersive internet and persuading them that embracing virtual and augmented reality offers new opportunities, including amazing experiences.
This book aims to help you understand the metaverse, what it is, how it will work, how you can benefit from it, and how we should build it. Of course, no book on the metaverse is complete without referencing its origin. The metaverse is a term coined by novelist Neal Stephenson in his famous 1992 novel Snow Crash (Bantam Books, 1992). The novel defines the metaverse as a place where people use virtual reality headsets to interact in a digital game-like world. The novel has enjoyed cult status, especially among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and HBO is turning the book into a series. The same applies to the book Ready Player One (Crown Publishing Group, 2011) by Ernest Cline, which was turned into a movie by Steven Spielberg in 2018, where the protagonist depicts the metaverse as a “virtual universe where people go [..] for all the things they can do, but stay for all the things they can be.”9 Both sci-fi books see the metaverse as a digital universe that we interact with using virtual reality. This falls short of the actual metaverse that is being constructed at this moment, where virtual reality is only one channel to interact with the metaverse. In addition, both authors depict the metaverse as commercially owned and as a way to help people escape the dystopian reality of the future world. While this is certainly a possibility for our own future, we do have a chance to prevent a dystopian future where a small elite controls the metaverse and our planet is distraught by climate change. It will be a long and challenging fight—those in power generally are very reluctant to relinquish it to the community—but one we cannot afford to lose. If anything, the dystopian future as described by Stephenson and Cline is not something to look forward to, so we should ensure we build an open, decentralized, and community-driven metaverse and fix the mistakes of Web 2.0.
With this book, I aim to give you the tools to create an open metaverse so that we avoid ending up in a worse version of today. I hope it will help you navigate the immersive internet, and, more importantly, it will discuss how we can build a metaverse that is open, inclusive, decentralized, and not controlled by Big Tech.* After all, we should avoid making the same mistakes as we did when building Web 2.0. When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web, he envisioned it to be decentralized and open, with data to be controlled by the user, but we ended up with silos controlled by Big Tech.10 Now that we are entering the next phase of the internet, and with the technology ready, we can fix what we did wrong. After all, a closed metaverse controlled by Big Tech or the state will very likely result in a dystopian nightmare that we should avoid at all costs, as we will see.
We will also discuss what can go wrong in the metaverse. Not to scare you from entering the metaverse, but just as cybercriminals are active on the current internet, hackers and scammers will also constantly patrol the metaverse, on the prowl for their next victim. The metaverse will be hacked, and everyone must be aware of how the metaverse can damage society, organizations, and individuals. With more and more devices connected to the internet—it is expected that by 2030 there will be 125 billion devices connected to the internet, with 7.5 billion internet users—there will be ample opportunities for cybercriminals to hack you, your business, and the metaverse, inflicting damages totaling $10 trillion, already in 2025.11 As described in the fictional story, it will be relatively easy for cybercriminals to pretend to be someone else in the metaverse; if someone looks like your sister and sounds like your sister, we are quickly to believe that she is your sister. But even this problem is relatively small compared to a metaverse flooded by harassment and toxic recommendation engines that create immersive filter bubbles, further dividing and polarizing society and harming individuals.
The first chapter will dive into what the metaverse is and could become because a shared understanding of this new concept is important if we all want to benefit from it. What are the characteristics of the metaverse, and how do these impact our experience? We will begin our journey at the start of the dotcom bubble when the internet arrived for the first time. Web 1.0 allowed personal computers to connect, and the internet arrived in our living room, but only sometimes would you go on the internet. Web 2.0 arrived with the smartphone, although there is no set date when exactly the mobile internet started. It brought the internet closer to us, allowing us to be always online, but we still have to make an effort to “go on the internet,” as in getting your phone or opening your laptop. The next iteration of the internet will be an internet that is always there. It is always on, and you are always connected to it, potentially even when asleep, e.g., your Apple Watch tracking your sleep. It will be ready to interact with whenever you want or need to.12
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