Why It’s Important to Learn About the Metaverse
What’s at stake
Why should we start learning about the Metaverse now? Because when it arrives, it should be on our own terms. Even given its imminence, there is not yet an overarching definition of the Metaverse, not to mention a specific set of rules, standards, and expectations. Current definitions of the Metaverse vary depending on which company you ask, and their definitions usually happen to coincide with the use cases that they are industry leaders in.² The topic of Metaverse definitions is so expansive that it warrants its own blog post (one that’ll be coming up shortly).
What does this mean for us, as future users of the Metaverse? It means that we do not have to accept a definition of a Metaverse that is handed to us, because there is none yet. If we can understand what the possibilities of the Metaverse are, we can begin shaping our own definitions of it, and by extension, build a version with standards that protect our rights and open up new opportunities.
What’s at stake? I’ll divide it into two; the opportunities and the risks.
The opportunities
Some might say the Metaverse is already here. Pinpointing a time of arrival is educated guesswork at best, and would be based on arbitrary and subjective factors. However, the fact is that Metaverse technologies like augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) have already proven their worth across multiple industries and use cases. Missing out on what the Metaverse has to offer means missing out on substantial business and personal opportunities.
Education and training
The benefits of increased information and immersiveness of AR/VR has reached multiple industries in practice and in training. Surgeons at some hospitals are already using AR to aid surgical procedures, with Timothy Witham, MD Director at Johns Hopkins, saying that “it’s like having a GPS navigator in front of your eyes.”¹ In a clinical validation study at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, Harvard Business Review found that VR training has improved overall surgical performance by 230% compared to traditional training.
VR training is also used in various job skills simulations beyond medicine, such as flight simulators, and is cheaper, more objective, and more accessible than traditional methods. Consider the issue of needing more practice with a particular surgical procedure; with VR, you can repeat that procedure as many times as necessary, from any location, without using up expensive operating room time, equipment, or manpower.
The benefits are not just limited to hard skills. VR training is effective for learning soft skills, including leadership, resilience and managing through change. A study conducted by PwC found that VR learners for these skills were up to 4 times faster to train, 40% more confident in applying what they’ve learned post-training, and 3.75 times more connected to the content than classroom learners.
Digital twins and simulations
Digital twins are already saving us from expensive mistakes in manufacturing, administration and policy. A digital twin of the Hong Kong International Airport was created to simulate the flow of passengers and how it changes with maintenance, runway backups, and other issues. Siemens Energy developed a digital twin to offer predictive maintenance of power plants, and Ericsson is building city-scale digital twins to maximize performance and coverage of 5G cell positionings. On a much larger scale, NVIDIA is building a digital Earth in its Omniverse, which models, predicts and tracks climate change to help scientists find ways to mitigate it.¹
These digital twins help organizations and officials fix mistakes before they happen in real life. Otherwise, those mistakes would be costly, hard to correct, and impact the lives of entire populations.
Digital experiences
Digital experiences is where most of the consumer awareness centers around, whether it be Travis Scott’s Fortnite concert, Snapchat and Google’s AR beauty try-on experiences, or FC Barcelona’s NFT/Metaverse plans.
Brands like Nike, Vans, Adidas, Gucci, and Burberry are taking full advantage of the new marketing medium to advertise and sell virtual attire in multiplayer online games.
Disney is building their own theme park Metaverse experience, and has already gotten its corresponding patent for a “virtual world simulator in a real place” approved in December 2021.¹ The important takeaway here is that the Metaverse is an entirely new medium for opportunities to engage with people, brands, and companies, and for experiences that can eventually surpass what is physically possible in the real world.
The risks
The possibilities of the Metaverse are not limited to what was said above, and all the current use cases are still constrained by our own imagination. Even with such a huge upside, if we do not understand and do not have a say in the rules to play by in the Metaverse, we risk the ownership of our personal data, identity, and assets.
Data privacy
The current problems of Web2, including data privacy and security, will only be exacerbated within the Metaverse if not overseen properly. The more immersive the platform users spend their time on, the more personal data that platform can collect, and the more effective advertisements and campaigns will be on that platform.
Imagine putting on a headset to join a virtual meeting or multi-user game. In order for the simulation to feel immersive for you and for other users in the same meeting or game, the headset might have eye tracking and emotion recognition. You may have opted in to health-tracking wearables, which could also be integrated into your headset to give you on-demand updates on your health. That adds in more data points, like pulse monitoring. When viewing certain materials in the meeting or in other simulations with the headset, this data could be gathered to get a much deeper sense of what attracts your attention, and what you like or don’t like. Without enough regulation and awareness, there could very well be another Cambridge Analytica 2016 election incident, but a much more invasive version in the Metaverse.
Identity theft
A more specific form of data makes up our digital identity. Harassment already runs rampant when most people’s current digital identities are still restricted to text and 2D media. Matthew Ball brings up “revenge porn” as a terrifying prospect in the Metaverse, “powered by high-fidelity avatars, deepfakes, synthetic voice construction, motion capture, and other emergent virtual and physical technologies.”² These same tools can be used to take away the identity of people in other contexts, including the identities of politicians and industry leaders. Without awareness of how to detect and counter these false identities, people will be hard-pressed to know what is real and what is fake.
Asset ownership
Another risk pertains to the question of assets in the Metaverse. By necessity or by social norm, we may come to own digital assets, like virtual houses or cars. If so, we should understand the degree of our ownership before investing our real-world assets into digital ones. If the Metaverse becomes centralized, what’s to say that the central entities in charge of the Metaverse would not take away those digital assets due to shutting down its services, changing its terms and conditions, or responding to other circumstances out of the user’s control?
There has already been an instance where a company has made its stance clear on who owns the assets on their platform. In a 2021 case against a game item trading platform, Tencent said that in-game coins are essentially “service charges,” and that Tencent remains the sole owner of all in-game items, which “have no material value in real life.” But gamers bought those in-game items with real money, and had deducted from their real-world assets in exchange for virtual ones. If users are to purchase more consequential items in the virtual world, such as the aforementioned virtual house or car, there is an even more pressing need for trust in their ownership of those items. Ownership of assets should be negotiated and enforced by binding contracts, with appropriate compensation if the terms are breached. To gain favorable conditions for these contracts, users must advocate for their rights within the Metaverse.
Architects and educated citizens
We only get a say in what the Metaverse will look like if we understand its possibilities, limitations, and threats. The imminence of the Metaverse means that we will be thrown into an entirely new type of governance, and with that comes an opportunity for us to stop being users and start being citizens. We need to either be the architects in charge of that governance, or educated citizens in control of our information, identity, and assets under that governance.
The backbone of all Metaverse use cases will be the set of rules and standards that dictates what should be possible and what should be prohibited. An immediate goal we can strive for, then, is to have an active voice in what these rules and standards are. One step in the right direction is the Metaverse Standards Forum, established just two months ago. Its participating members include hundreds of companies (Google, Microsoft and Meta among them) and standards organizations that will coordinate to make sure the Metaverse is open and accessible. Even so, most of the Metaverse is intended for us, not for any particular company or group of companies — so if we’re not at least keeping an eye on how the Metaverse will impact our rights and opportunities, we should be the ones joining in on creating and influencing it ourselves, as entrepreneurs pioneering new technologies and as journalists calling attention to key breakthroughs and transgressions.
Additional Sources
- “Metaverse And Money: Decrypting The Future”. 2022. Icg.Citi.Com. https://icg.citi.com/icghome/what-we-think/citigps/insights/metaverse-and-money_20220330.
- Ball, Matthew. The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything. W. W. Norton & Co Inc, 2022.
