The Metaverse Started With Expressions of Love Sent by Telegraph
Ever since expressions of love were sent through an old timey telegraph, technology has served as a proxy for in-real-life (IRL) interaction. The metaverse will be the next step in a long history of virtualizing our social and interpersonal relationships such that it’s the next best thing to being there.
Technology has been essential for disseminating news to the masses and for intimate 1-on-1 communication. How readily do we smile ear-to-ear into an inanimate brick of plastic, wires, and silicon chips when that electronic device is the bearer of an “I LOVE YOU” message on it’s LCD screen? Remember when in the early 90’s you received a beeper message (i.e., “page”) with the digits 1–4–3 on your two-way Motorola pager? This was an encoding for “I Love You” because that’s the character count in each word within the phrase. This could easily elicit a giggle and an enraptured twirl in the dormitory dining hall from a college co-ed when she received it and the sender was, in fact, across campus in his own separate dormitory building (the girl could be sending the message and the boy could be receiving it with the same reaction, too, to be clear).
Technology has never been solely transactional or used for business-only purposes. Instant messages, gaming, social media posts, and collaboration apps have the ability to invoke gut reactions and amplify emotions — for the sender and the recipient. In reality, the participants are not even in the same room, but the reactions are real enough. Emoticons and real time avatars further enhanced these communications, closing the gap for how these messages might be misinterpreted because the text part of the communication could now be imbued with human expression. The emotional intent of the communicators could be more accurately interpreted because it mapped to digital renditions of a real life circumstance or a real life human face.
The next stage of being there, without actually being there is the metaverse.
Combine advancements around spatial audio, three-dimensional objects, and environmental physics with a virtually rendered world that can offer something more frictionless and time-saving than the real one, then you’ll have sub-populations of folks gravitating there one at a time until it reaches main stream adoption.
Does digitally-rendered NFT art, clothes, real estate, and vehicles purchased with cryptocurrency on the blockchain stand a chance at attracting a significant amount of real-life spending? According to research performed by Sensor Tower, the Candy Crush franchise earned a total $1.5 Billion in 2018, or $4.2 Million per day. This is in-app money spent on digital booster items that will help the player solve puzzles and pass more and more advanced stages of play. This is real money spent on digital outcomes for entertainment purposes.
Will there be the same willingness for metaverse “players” to spend on items to improve their virtual identity, impress others, and survive within a wholly virtual world?
The persistent worlds of massive multiplayer online games are the closest things we have to the metaverse today, and while hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on game purchases and subscriptions, true in-game economies have not been fully evolved to mimic real-world scenarios. There are simply not enough third-party vendors participating in those gaming environments to create the market dynamics that are envisioned to take place in the metaverse.
There is a certain amount of human psychology at play here and the psychological response could already be well-demonstrated by our visceral adaptation to technology and the spending that is already occurring to achieve purely digital outcomes. The format and architecture still needs to be sorted out, but just because the metaverse isn’t the “real world” doesn’t mean we won’t be invested financially and psychologically in it.
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Jerry Bui is Managing Director of Digital Forensics within FTI Consulting’s Technology segment focused on forensic technology and risk & compliance issues (all opinions his own). Jerry is a Certified Fraud Examiner and has over 20 years of experience in digital forensics, ediscovery, automated risk assessments, dashboard compliance monitoring, and investigative analytics. Jerry’s team provides evidence acquisition, expert witness, and strategic consulting services to law firms and corporations. Connect with Jerry on LinkedIn, Twitter and TikTok.
The Digital Forensics Future (DFF) podcast is also available on the platforms below.
