Taking advantage of the metaverse's opportunities
The Metaverse is the shared experience of reality and virtuality. Anywhere you can go in the real world, you can travel there virtually. The Metaverse is not a single place but many distributed spaces around the globe that have interconnected via blockchain technology. Users are able to interact with each other and any other object or entity in the world in real-time through virtual reality headsets or their smartphones.
The metaverse is being lauded as the next generation of web services, supporting ongoing online 3D virtual environments in which virtual experiences, real-time 3D content, and other related media can be linked and accessed via VR/AR as well as traditional devices such as PC or mobile. It is essentially an immersive Web3 internet with Web3 being the concept of a new type of internet service built with decentralised blockchain where users can meet in virtual spaces, represent themselves as avatars, and share virtual objects using this new technology. Gartner predicts that one-quarter of people will spend at least an hour per day in the metaverse for work and shopping by 2026.
In addition, 30% of businesses will have products and services delivered via this new technology. Despite predictions, only 37% of UK adults are confident in describing the metaverse to others.
The metaverse ecosystem, therefore, is evolving into a rich set of interconnected digital experiences that impact our professional and private lives. These experiences are social, commercial, and industrial spaces that are distinguished by their purpose and function. Within each type, we see distinct business value generated through collaborative design, immersive user experiences, and real-world interactions.
Our research within each of these sectors is aimed at better understanding current and emerging practices in each sector, as well as the business value they generate – trends that will shape our future efforts.
It is therefore important to understand the key trends in the emerging metaverse and the benefits they will provide. By blending real-world content with virtual environments, we have studied how each sector (social, commercial, and industrial) leverages digital experiences to improve efficiency, productivity, and collaboration.
Social Metaverse
Dive into New social experiences through metahumans, virtual assets, digital venues, and third spaces
The metaverse is a digital world that revolves around decentralised identity and ownership, including interoperable and immersive 3D environments, “phygital” spaces, digital marketplaces and investments, virtual goods, and photo-realistic avatars known as “metaverse avatars” which will be in the hands of creators to control. If gaming experiences in the metaverse can genuinely revolutionise the industry there will be huge growth and opportunities in how people interact, socialise and purchase assets within this network.
The metaverse provides a communicative platform for users to interact and share content in any capacity they choose. Through the use of user-generated content, we’re advancing towards ever-expanding possibilities – one in which users can portray themselves however they wish. It will produce decentralised ownership of virtual assets, virtual goods, and real estate, creating what we call a new ‘tok economics’ economy.
Commercial Metaverse
An analysis of 3D environments using meta-commerce and metaspace marketing.
Virtual reality (VR) will alter our interactions with brands, products, and services. Consumers in the metaverse will expect an immersive experience with their avatar walking into a virtual store that will list real inventory that can be touched and picked in a virtual world as more people experience virtual reality (VR). As a result, brands operating in the metaverse will need to reframe human-centred customer experiences and reconsider how they design future offerings and customer journeys across industries. The importance of the virtual economy will eventually rival that of the physical economy. Business leaders need to start thinking strategically about how to head into this new commercial metaverse, creating metaverse-only businesses, including virtual worlds and spaces as part of the marketing mix, retrieving real-time data, and expanding 3D analytics capacity via AI to include spatial data, biometric data, and sensor-based behavioural data.
30% of businesses are expected to sell products or services in the metaverse platforms by 2026, as consumers spend time and money in the metaverse.
The role of data will be a critical consideration for organisations operating in the metaverse. User data will almost certainly continue to be in high demand in the metaverse. Customer data is already being used to create personalised experiences, and this trend is expected to continue. “The metaverse will be data collection on steroids,” Mastercard’s chief privacy officer Catherine Louveaux recently wrote in a blog post. But we’re not just discussing contact information here. The metaverse also makes it possible to collect sensitive biometric data. As a result, organisations should not be afraid to address safety concerns and adhere to the ethical standards of these new digital spaces.
Industrial Metaverse
A virtual collaboration, next-generation engineering, and augmented learning for the industrial metaverse
The fact that digital transformation has not been adopted as a mainstream practice is quite surprising for many companies. Yet, with the rise of augmented and virtual reality, manufacturers must think about how metaverse technologies can help drive long-term growth and innovation. The ‘metaverse’ refers to the collection of virtual spaces connected by an online infrastructure. Instead of having separate individual user experiences on isolated platforms, devices, and clouds, people will be able to interact with a company’s brand throughout their everyday lives. This may mean that customers are seamlessly interacting with your business whether they are browsing through a catalogue at home or wearing a headset during their commute.
Technology has continued to progress at a rapid pace, bringing human beings closer and closer to being able to accomplish things that were once considered impossible. Each year, technology has become more advanced with the most recent innovations taking us into the next era defined by virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). This changes everything and is poised to have an enormous impact on business.
The Industrial Metaverse is a virtual world that mirrors real machines and factories, buildings and cities, grids, and transportation systems. Problems can be found, analysed, and fixed quickly in a digital environment by collaborating with people from different countries and continents as if they were in the same room. The Industrial Metaverse is a place where virtual reality (VR) helps people who work on-the-job. A virtual world in which we can travel into the past and even into the future in order to better understand problems and processes and find optimal solutions.
The hype is real. The metaverse property will be a multi-trillion-dollar market by 2028. In the near future, organisations will be able to use new technologies to offer immersive business meetings that include expressive avatars and realistic spatial environments, virtual products as blueprints for production, virtual market testing, and immersive training experiences.
The Metaverse land is thus predicted to be one of the greatest forces to drive both sustainability and the digital transformation of businesses and entire industries. For commercial real estate companies, the metaverse offers a way to build and share immersive spaces that help uphold high standards of safety, capacity, operation, accessibility, and sustainability.
Moving to 4D collaborations and simulations can significantly improve the product development process of ideation, prototyping, and testing for the market in the metaverse. Workplace training can now be delivered virtually, providing hands-on experience in a secure test environment and enabling organisations to easily onboard new employees and upskill existing ones.
Conclusion
Metaverse technologies offer a new form of collaboration and communication. Today, the metaverse is a multi-trillion-dollar market and is predicted to be one of the greatest forces to drive both sustainability and the digital transformation of businesses and entire industries. It will make innovation easier, progress faster, time to market shorter, reduce waste, and help us to use fewer natural resources. It will help to develop better products by empowering people to explore more alternative designs in a shorter time and at considerably lower costs.”
Metaverse is about more than just technology. It’s about finding new ways to think about business and exploring new ways of engaging consumers and employees. The pace of change in our digital lives doesn’t show any signs of slowing down and it’s making organisations rethink everything they do.
Therefore, in order to be successful in a metaverse, organisations will need to embrace the new paradigm of social collaboration as a part of their business strategy. As we move toward the virtual workplace and start to see the benefits of what it can offer to society, we will realise that we have just started down this path.There are no limits on what can be created in a collaborative environment like the metaverse.
The digital transformation journey has reached a new stage, in which the technology that drives it will have to become more elegant, adaptable, and agile.The metaverse is the world of real-time digital applications and data. To be successful there,companies need to deliver a seamless customer experience across all touchpoints, and create firewalls against destructive attacks. They also need to build a metaverse foundation that is agile and adaptable for whatever tomorrow brings.
