You know we’ve already stepped into the 4th Industrial Revolution?
And why 2022 is critical for its development
Beam me up, Scotty.
Have you ever heard that quote? If yes, we can clearly state you’re a Star Trek fan.
Otherwise, don’t mind! To sum up, that line was the command captain Kirk told chief engineer, Montgomery Scott, to transport him back to the starship Enterprise.
Generally, that is a quote that also has a different meaning: to stress the fact that something looks retrofuturistic.
Whether Star Trek represented just sci-fi, it seems there’s a kind of similar fully digital environment that is coming up: The Metaverse.
Until last year, almost nobody knew anything about it. A common and shared belief was that was almost impossible to create a totally virtual environment, where people from all over the world, no matter how they were each other far from, could engage in a real-life world way.
Nevertheless, this kind of universe seems soon to get off the ground.
Not only it’s likely to be created, but it’s also going to be the major industrial revolution ever seen.
What is Metaverse about?
“Metaverse” is a world that spread started back in October 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced worldwide the prominent name change of the holding Facebook into Meta.
Yet, the Social Network Facebook will obviously continue to exist, the only factor that was subject to change is the holding company. (A similar event occurred in 2015, In which Google and Alphabet were involved)
By the way, a metaverse is a digital environment where all the users can interact with each other, enjoy meaningful experiences and get in touch with anyone involved within it. Besides this, an additional important features metaverse wants to bring is to make all these people appreciate digital-related experiences, also more than real-life world ones.
Some useful to know features
Even though we’ll precisely know what a metaverse clearly is just in the future, some of its common features are:
- Metaverse is infinite: What? What does it mean? It’s designed to be an extension of the real-life world and, for this reason, it has no boundaries. There is no end to the metaverse.
- Metaverse is Syncrounous: With it, perhaps, the client-server time could reach their end. Another characteristic of the metaverse is the possibility to connect all the people around the world, making billions of them around the world interact simultaneously.
- Metaverse is a thriving economy: This matches the first point. Since it’s limitless, it’s a place where people can share their own ideas, can co-operate together in a startup, or, simply, start creating something fungible together. For this reason, metaverse can be seen as a profitable type of economy as well.
Who is going to join the Metaverse rush?
Also, big known brands are starting to invest in this unprecedented “environment”. Just to name a few, Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, stated that the Company is working on building the enterprise metaverse.
Not only almost-obvious tech giants are about to think about how to implement this kind of technology, but there’s also the game industry which is looking for ways to enhance their products thanks to it.
Bear in mind, Epic Games closed a $1 billion round of funding to support its long term vision for the metaverse. Furthermore, there’s Niantic, Pokemon Go creator, who was capable to raise $300 million in November 2021, in order to build “the real-world metaverse”, as he described.
Even environments and companies which are not-so-metaverse-related started to implement different strategies for it, mainly for law and wealth management-related ones.
For instance, Law firm Reed Smith released a guide to approaching the metaverse back in May, covering legal issues ranging from intellectual property to privacy to competition.
To sum up, Metaverse is undoubtedly one of the upcoming major trends of the next years, perhaps for the next decades as well.
Just think there are already-completed online platforms that provide this unreal experience. When it comes to Metaverse, two of the most popular related internet portals are Sandbox and Decentraland.
Some international artists such as Famous DJ Steve Aoki and Rapstar Snoop Dogg already partnership up and joined the Sandbox portal.
Eventually, the Metaverse phenomenon will be hands down one of the most prominent events which will occur in the future.
The competition to make, define and own it has just begun.
Whereas in the 1960s there was the Space race, nowadays…
There’s the Metaverse race.
