By: Jan Strandberg
Right off the bat, let me assure you that this is not clickbait. This article summarizes my theory about why all the big companies are going so balls deep on metaverse and why Meta ( Facebook ) is making every dork’s wet dream come true. And why the holy technocrat Elon is betting so much on Neurallink and how this relates to Apple’s next flagship product. I will also paint a picture of what this will do for us – normal dorks, nerds, and not to forget also you normies.
As for me, technology and fantasy have always played a significant role in my life. They have taught me to dream big, they taught me, with the help of storytelling and games, to understand what is right and what is wrong, and also have helped to shape how I perceive some things in life. They have given me heroes to look up to and served as anchors “Luminous beings are we…not this crude matter.”- Yoda. Technology and fantasy have given me a lot of friends, and last but not least, they have taken me on this journey to build the next Internet.
Metaverse has been part of our subculture for a while; we have seen it represented in literature and movies. One of the most famous references to the metaverse is in the film “Ready Player One.” If you saw the movie, but don’t remember, here is a quick recap. This might be a spoiler for the rest of you, so please skip the following three lines. “Ready Player One” premise is set in a dystopian future, 2045. It follows protagonist Wade Watts on his search for an easter egg in a worldwide virtual reality game, the discovery of which would lead him to inherit the game creator’s fortune. We could also say that some of the role-playing games are their metaverses. I wrote a piece last year about how digital land will be more valuable than physical land and the benefits of owning something digitally rather than physically. If you haven’t read the articles, no worries, I’ll give you a simple answer – accessibility.
Accessibility in today’s world is the key. We have finally passed 4.66 billion active internet users out of the 7.83 billion global population.
That number has been growing steadily every year, which means that people everywhere are connected more than before. The steady growth in internet usage also means that the internet as we know it has evolved to more sophisticated measures. I would say the timeline of the progress of the internet looked something like this:
Web 1.0
From 1990 – 2006, the internet was primarily used in the corporate environment. The users mainly distributed content, and almost everything on the Internet was static. But once people started owning more computers, we began to see more interaction thanks to companies like Google, Yahoo, and AOL. We still didn’t have a lot of forums or social networks where we could interact. Phones in the meantime were still old-school Nokia 3310, which meant videos and others were still wearing kid’s shoes.
Web 2.0
2007 onwards was the most significant change; Apple launched its flagship product, the iPhone, and we finally started to see the internet grow drastically in this phase. We could order things online, interact with others, and express our opinions more freely than before, thanks to video and photos. At the same time, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Youtube emerged. We could interact and make groups with like-minded groups and individuals, and content distribution started to flourish. Just look at this graph:
Social media is not the only thing that started to flourish during web 2.0. Our financial habits began to shift, and how we interacted with money became the next phase where some of the top breakthroughs were made. PayPal, eBay and Amazon started to form our consumer habits, which led some brands to break free from the big shopping malls, and the gold rush of e-commerce was born, which is still going.
Okay, now that we have recapped some of the critical events in the history of the web, let’s take a step back and play pretend. I’m the CEO of Apple. I’ve seen how much we consume online and how much data, money, and time we devour on the web. My question would be, how can we make consumers hooked and use our products even more. What if I could make your stay online for five h instead of 1h. Well, here comes the Web 3.0 and metaverse that will do that.
Present
Web 3.0 and the metaverse have been a hot topic during the last year in crypto and Silicon Valley. We have realized how much the web impacts us on both levels: society and governance. Distributed and decentralized have become the wet dream of the government and VCs. The things supposed to give us freedom and connect with family and friends have started to amplify hate and become weapons for governments and companies. Understanding Web 3.0 is simple; it’s a decentralized internet where you own your data, interact with permissionless applications run by code, and have no centralized entity. For those of you that have an attention span of fewer than 2 seconds and don’t understand what this jargon means, no worries, here is a graph that simplifies things:
Source – Graph
Some of the crucial benefits of Web 3.0 are the following:
- Currencies: instead of using a centralized money system, which we the crypto nerds call Fiat, we use Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies that the government doesn’t have access to.
- Data ownership: instead of centralized social media sites or overall centralized products on the internet, you are using decentralized applications that do the same thing as the web 2.0 ones, giving out your data or identity. For many people, this is crucial because of freedom of speech without censorship.
- Security: Web 3.0 uses distributed networks and an autonomous structure with no centralized entity that can fail the system; the security of 3.0 is massively better than web 2.0.
- Omnipresence: Web 3.0 lets you be connected everywhere because of the distributed networks. Applications can access different data sources everywhere because everything is open source, everything is reviewable, and nothing is centralized.
Now that we covered what Web 3.0 is, it’s time to move over to metaverse. It is crucial to understand that the metaverse is not the same as web 3.0, even though they are connected. Metaverse is a layer on top of web 2.0 and 3.0. This means that the metaverse is something that the user can interact with, and Web 2.0 and 3.0 is the entire architecture. This connectivity is why the tech companies and web 3.0 are pouring billions of dollars into the metaverse, as it lets users interact with each other in a new way, anywhere in the world, and in a distributed manner.
By looking at how dramatically COVID-19 changed our work, education, sports and medical sectors around the globe. We will understand why the companies are pouring so much into the metaverse.
If you had told me three years ago that working anywhere in the world in the Silicon Valley company would be possible and that you could get hired, despite not being in the valley, I would have laughed. But now, this has become the new norm. Going into the office has become a laughable matter among us nerds and normies. Why would you go somewhere physically when you literally can do all the meetings online and never see your team. This has become the norm in education, sports and the medical industry.
This might be challenging to understand for normies, but let’s look at how this connects to the grand plan of things and how metaverse is connected to all of this.
This is how Meta has taken dramatic steps to ensure its place in the metaverse.
Last year, the biggest news around the Silicone Valley was Facebook’s rebranding and changing its name to Meta. This should have already told you something about how serious the tech people in the valley are about the metaverse. Let me quote what our Techie Mark’ Eye of Sauron’ Zuckerberg said (this is his actual nickname among meta workers, lol ) “Over time, I hope our company will be seen as a metaverse company.” This is a CEO of a company that is one of the richest, with more than 2.9 BILLION DAILY ACTIVE USERS. That is over half of the internet, the world’s largest social network. Suppose this is not enough to show you how serious Meta and the Eye of Sauron are about the metaverse. Let’s take a look at how much Meta spent on R&D last year alone on the metaverse, and this is a quote from WSJ “Meta spent $10 billion on the metaverse in 2021, dragging down profit.”. That is a massive amount of money and a big bet from one of the biggest companies in the world.
Meta plans to bring you Virtual Reality and AR products, which are the first steps in getting into the metaverse and one of the Flagship products that Meta is going so hard on. So what are the products that Meta is pouring so much R&D money on and betting so much that they ensure that we stay online longer, we stay connected with our family and friends, and we can interact with our co-workers? Also, recommend checking their about page. They are not kidding.…
You might say that Virtual Reality has been around for a while, and yes, you are right. But the number of users has started to increase, which is one of the reasons Meta has taken this drastic step to ensure it is there when VR becomes the new norm, the same way as with phones dramatically, and this is where metaverse comes in.
Let’s look at some VR and AR stats and why the potential is so significant.
Statista “Global market size for AR and VR reached USD 30.7 billion during 2021. Also, the augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) market has the potential to grow by USD 162.71 billion during 2021-2025 (Statista, 2021).”
This is a dramatic growth Y-o-Y, and looking at the gaming market, we can see the same kind of pattern.
It is no surprise that Meta has taken these dramatic steps to become the VR and AR leader, which is why the metaverse has become so popular among VCs and angel investors. We might not understand yet how much our lives will be affected by these things, but it is good to look at the use cases and see how VR and AR can change habits and what this industry is already going through.
Retail
Virtual reality and 3D printing are changing the way we shop. With VR retail experiences, shoppers can try on clothes in a virtual world before buying them to see how that specific style looks with their body measurements! This creates an efficient shopping experience and helps customers find clothing better since there won’t be any surprises when trying them outside of what has been seen online or by friends who already possess those particular items.
Healthcare
The use of virtual reality has been proven to be an effective teaching medium in the medical field. Junior doctors, orthopedic surgeons and other healthcare professionals can practise their skills on VR devices that recreate human bodies with more detail than ever before, allowing them insight and visceral feeling of what it’s like when you’re performing surgery.
Education
VR has the potential to provide engaging and affordable training for people who want a risk-free space in which they can learn through experience. This is crucial in parts of the world where teachers and schools are not close by. The potential is enormous.
I could go on, but you get the picture. The metaverse will be here to change our culture and habits drastically. The potential is already there; now, it’s just about building.
Apple has also taken drastic measures to get into the metaverse, one of the reasons that the next flagship product they announced will be a VR / AR headset.
Okay, and what about Holy Elon? He has been taking even more drastic steps than Apple and Meta. Elon launched Neuralink in 2016, and if you don’t know what Neuralink is, let’s look at the description. “Neuralink Corporation is a neurotechnology company that develops implantable brain-machine interfaces.” This is not VR or AR. This is implanting a chip in your head to be able to be connected to the internet. The following is a quote from an interview he gave “Long term, a sophisticated Neuralink could put you fully, fully in a virtual reality thing,” he said.”.
One of the reasons that Elon might be so bullish also on metaverse is his vision of us being able to do interplanetary travel. This is not far-fetched, and we could see this happening in 10 years’ time.
After all this, we can all agree the metaverse is coming, but the bigger question is; when?
