It feels like a distant memory now, but only this time last year, the metaverse was going to be the next big thing. A revolution in how we work, interact, date and socialise.
Homeworking was the new norm and every man and his dog was launching some sort of metaverse-adjacent project.
Of course, outside of the Web3 bubble, scepticism over this new, barely defined technological concept was widespread.
But that didn’t stop Facebook (NASDAQ:META) from throwing all its eggs into the metaverse basket under a ten-billion-dollar Meta rebrand gamble in a vain attempt to secure its place as the progenitor of all things metaverse.
With Meta’s share price in the gutter and its Horizon Worlds launch met with borderline incredulity, there is no doubt that Mark Zuckerberg’s quest to be crowned king of the metaverse has hit a few roadblocks in 2022.
Meta’s goofy launch of its Horizon Worlds metaverse quickly became a source of ridicule – Source: about.fb.com
Meta put the horse before the cart, if you ask technology analyst and columnist Jeff Kagan.
“The world was not ready for the metaverse when they dove in,” Kagan said in a recent chat with Proactive. “The question is whether they can wait it out and be successful a few years from today, or whether they blew it.”
Time will tell on that front, but in the meantime, early-stage metaverse projects like The Sandbox and Decentraland have fared little better, with the latter garnering the wrong kind of headlines for having a paltry 516 active users in a given month.
No, it has not been a good year for the metaverse industry, but who’s to say 2023 can’t prove the sceptics wrong? Is there hope on the horizon? If so, who are the industry players standing to make good on the metaverse’s promises?
Let’s have a look.
Ahead of its time
When discussing the metaverse with various industry players, one gets the sense that the technology is playing catch up with the hype.
From a marketing perspective, Baruch Labunski, founder of Rank Secure, said: “I see the metaverse as the dot coms were in the 1990s, online news was in the early 2000s, and social media in the first years around 2005.
“It's an idea that is viable but too far ahead of its time. It's got a cool factor but hasn't developed enough practical uses to draw in the mainstream.”
It is an opinion shared by Garret Droege, director of innovation and strategy at IMA Financial Group, which touts itself as the first insurance brokerage to enter the metaverse.
“The reality is that the metaverse that everyone thinks of when the word is conjured is and always has been years down the road," said Droege. “The computing power necessary to deliver 3D worlds at scale with real-time experiences across thousands or millions of users simply doesn’t exist today."
“Rather, we will continue to see the infrastructure of tomorrow being created and tested today in smaller platforms,” added Droege.
Roblox and Fortnight are often cited as the metaverse urtexts, siloed spaces where communities and rudimentary economies are formed.
They also represent a fundamental challenge for the metaverse- if the metaverse really is the next evolutionary stage of the internet as the hypemen would have you believe, the walls of those silos will need to come down.
One company could have the solution.
Nvidia turns to the Omniverse
Make no mistake. The metaverse is fast becoming the playground for tech behemoths with little interest in creating a decentralised, peer-to-peer utopia.
Most of the big techs have their own ideas about what the metaverse should look like, but few have as clear a vision as Nvidia and its Omniverse.
Discussing the US$400bn multinational’s Omniverse platform with Proactive, Jason Southern, Nvidia’s head of enterprise software and visualisation solutions, explained: “NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) Omniverse is a platform that enables users to connect 3D ecosystems and build and operate large-scale, physically accurate virtual worlds, or ‘digital twins’, to help solve the world’s hardest engineering and science problems."
He continued: “Our goal is to enable people to build, develop and create virtual worlds across industries. We’re doing this by building Omniverse to be open to the entire ecosystem- enhancing and extending existing workflows, while enabling access to the latest technology from NVIDIA.”
While Meta exists solely on promises – ‘will be able to’ carries a lot of weight in the firm’s marketing lingo – Nvidia is already providing use cases for its Omniverse technology.
As far back as April 2021, the company was building digital twins of BMW’s factories to optimise production lines.
In March of this year, Nvidia worked with Siemens Gamesa to simulate wind farms in order to maximise energy yields.
Ericsson (BS:ERICAs) called on Nvidia to create digital twins of cities in order to decide where to place 5G towers, while fire-management agencies in the US used the Omniverse to simulate and predict the path of forest fires.
This all sounds very next-gen, but it’s really only the beginning of what the Omniverse is capable of.
At the core of The Omniverse is a little thing called Universal Scene Description (USD), which is a software innovation originally developed by Pixar.
“Just as HTML is the standard language of the 2D web, Universal Scene Description (USD) is set to become the most powerful, extensible, open language for the 3D web,” explained Southern.
He continued: “As the 3D standard for describing virtual worlds in the metaverse, USD will allow enterprises and even consumers to move between different 3D worlds using various tools, viewers and browsers in the most seamless and consistent fashion.”
Perhaps a more tangible explanation is in order. In the 2012 Walt Disney (NYSE:DIS) animated feature Wreck-It Ralph, the titular protagonist found himself travelling between arcade games, visiting and interacting with different characters and environments.
What if such a concept could be applied to the metaverse? Instead of your Horizon Worlds avatar living in a silo, what if it could visit other metaverses developed on entirely different protocols?
Or in a more industrial sense, what if a traffic system built by one developer could be seamlessly dropped into a digital city twin created by another developer?
Such is the tantalising potential of The Omniverse, hence making Nvidia one of the most important metaverse players for the times ahead.
But Nvidia’s industry use cases are only one side of the stablecoin… what about the consumer experience?
Reality may not be virtual
In Meta’s vision of the consumerist metaverse, Zuckerberg wants us completely removed from the physical realm, blindfolded by a clunky virtual reality (VR) headset.
But is that what we really want? One tech behemoth believes the future is not in virtual reality, but rather in augmented reality (AR).
In a conversation with Dutch media outlet Bright, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) chief Tim Cook stated: “I think AR is a profound technology that will affect everything. It’s something you can really immerse yourself in. And that can be used in a good way.
“VR is for regular periods, but not a way to communicate well. So I’m not against it, but that’s how I look at it.”
This distinction exposes a fundamental philosophical rift between the two tech giants. Will the hearts of consumers be won over by fully immersive experiences envisioned by William Gibson in Neuromancer, or in a Minority Report-style augmentation of the physical realm?
A vision of AR, used by Tom Cruise in Spielberg’s 2002 sci-fi film Minority Report – Cruise Wagner Productions/Blue Tulip Productions
Oh and don’t expect Tim Cook to use the word metaverse when describing his company’s vision.
Although Zuckerberg has contended that Meta is in deep philosophical competition with Apple to build the metaverse, the term is not used a single time in any of Apple’s intriguing recent AR job postings.
AR, on the other hand, appears in over 200.
“Do you want to push the limits of the best Augmented Reality platform in the world?” reads one posting for a senior AR engineer.
“Help us push the limits on the next generation of interactive computing for our platform,” reads another.
This could be a visceral battleground for metaverse supremacy in the year(s) ahead which will ultimately be decided by the customer.
Where do you stand?
Read more on Proactive Investors AU
