According to our recent study ‘What Brits want from Promotions 2.0’, 2% of Brits are interested in promotions within The Metaverse. Considering The Metaverse isn’t even built yet that is a fair response rate at these very early stages.
The Metaverse seems to have been overtaken on the 2023 hype train with the new buzz of Generative AI. The Metaverse is still rumbling on in the background though and a lot of big companies are still investing in that area, Nvidia for one, Unity for another, VERY big players in the digital gaming space for those who are aware of that industry, but for those who are not, what does it all mean? What is The Metaverse? Where is The Metaverse? What will happen in The Metaverse?
If you haven’t read a novel by Ernest Cline titled “Ready Player One” or watched the movie adaptation of the same title, then starting there would be as good a place as any. It is set in the 2040’s where the earth has been crippled by an energy crisis from the depletion of fossil fuels and is struggling with the consequences of pollution, global warming, and overpopulation. All these issues add to social problems, create a lot of poverty, and force the world’s economy to grind to a halt. Humans only escape from all this horror is a “Metaverse” called the Oasis.
The Oasis is a virtual reality simulator accessible to players by using visors (or VR Headsets, does this sound familiar?) and haptic technology such as gloves that provide feedback in the form of vibrations, warmth etc. The Oasis functions as an MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) and as a virtual world. We follow a player called Wade Watts who is on an easter egg hunt left by the creator of the Oasis for ownership of said virtual platform. Wade tells us at the beginning that people work in that virtual world and the currency within the Oasis is one of the most stable in the real world as well! In the Metaverse and in the real world, you can use the same currency! This is a very real possibility in our future – we already use crypto currency. As we spoke about online gaming, you could say that gamers have been playing in a sort of Metaverse for years but without the virtual aspect. They have been sitting in lobbies and chatting to 6 other people at once through headphones with their avatars on a screen instead of in a VR Headset. Slight variation, but not too far.
Ernest Cline’s portrayal of a Metaverse is a very good example of what we will potentially see when it is finally ready for people to immerse themselves within it. The original term Metaverse was created for another novel released in 1992 titled “Snow Crash” by author Neal Stephenson. Stephenson described The Metaverse as “a virtual reality-based successor to the internet”. It depicts a world in which humans interact with each other as avatars in a three-dimensional virtual space that uses the metaphor of the real world. A scary and probably fairly accurate description of what it will look like eventually.
So what we have learnt, if early signs are to be believed is that The Metaverse will be a virtual reality world in which we will play, talk, socialise, and potentially work within at some point in the future – it will be accessible through virtual reality headsets – and it will be hosted on the internet.
It might not be long until we’re in the Metaverse on the hunt for easter eggs just like Wade Watts.
