Читать книгу Step into the Metaverse - Mark van Rijmenam - Страница 10

The rise of these massive interactive live events (MILEs) is a first indication of where the internet is heading and the opportunities that come with the next iteration of the World Wide Web. Who would have thought a few years ago that 33 million people could attend a concert at the same time? All could experience it from the best possible vantage point and sharing that experience with friends who are scattered across the globe, creating collective memories in times when physical connections were not possible. Online entertainment and socializing in virtual gaming environments are very normal for Generation Z (those born between mid-to-late 1990s and 2010) and especially Generation Alpha (those born after 2010), even before the pandemic hit.

Already, Generation Alpha, the first generation to be born entirely in the 21st century, will have a completely different perspective on the (digital) world than previous generations. These kids are born in an age when the iPad was introduced, Facebook became the dominant social network, and massive multiplayer online games (also known as MMOs) attract millions of players. You might be familiar with the 2011 video of a one-year-old baby easily navigating an iPad but struggling with a paper magazine because she couldn’t pinch and zoom. To her, the magazine was broken.⁸ Although Gen Alpha is, of course, also very familiar with physical artifacts such as children’s books or coloring books, the fact that these children can so easily navigate the digital realm from an early age is an indication what we can expect as their brains are wired for the digital world from the start.

Ten years later, the baby has grown up in a world where the internet is everywhere, always available at the push of a button, and online interactions are as normal as physical interactions. She looks at the world from a completely different perspective than Millennials, let alone the Baby Boomers who currently run the world. As such, she feels very comfortable immersing herself in a virtual world with endless possibilities and opportunities, despite all the problems that come with that, as we will see later in the book. To her, the metaverse has always been here, and the more advanced our (digital) technologies will become and the more the physical and the digital merge, the better she will be able to navigate this so-called phygital world.

One of the amazing new experiences that the metaverse has brought already is these massive interactive live events. To Generation Alpha, these MILEs offer substantial benefits over real-world concerts. First, they are easy to attend. Children do not need to ask for permission from their parents because they don’t have to go anywhere. They can attend from the comfort of their home. Second, they can appear at the concert in their favorite outfit or character, using the avatar as an extension of their real-world personality, creating the ability for the ultimate self-expression. If your child feels like going to the concert like a unicorn, they can, and it probably doesn’t cost the world to be a unicorn either. Next, their friends from around the world will also be at the concert. Note here that Generation Alpha has friends from all over the world from the start. They have made close friendships with people they might have never met in real life and probably never will meet physically. To them, globalization is not something that is bad, but an opportunity to meet new people and learn more cultures, albeit completely virtually. Finally, they will have front-row seats at the concert, even if they happen to be late for the show. In fact, they can stand next to their favorite singer while he or she is performing, taking a screenshot of the experience and sharing it with their friends who could not be there. Once the concert is over, your children are already home in time for dinner. The best thing is that next week, they can go to another concert, without paying $100 for an entry ticket that allows them to see their favorite artist from afar in the physical world. For many children, the virtual concerts offer as good an experience or even a better experience than traditional physical concerts.

The metaverse will provide benefits like these interactive concerts and many more as portrayed in the fictional start that will be hard to ignore for both consumers and organizations. The metaverse offers a new way of doing business, connecting with customers, and collaborating with colleagues. As we will see, those companies who have already stepped into the metaverse are already benefiting from it, creating increased brand loyalty, optimizing product design and creation processes, becoming more sustainable, and generally increasing their bottom line. Similar to those companies who were first to adopt the internet when it appeared in the 1990s and those companies who were first to venture onto social media when it appeared in the late 2000s, those companies who have already entered the metaverse will reap the benefits from this new trillion-dollar social economy that will be created this decade.

However, as we will also see, it is not business as usual in the metaverse. Yes, the immersive internet is another channel that you need to master as an organization, but it is a channel that requires your full attention. It will require significant up-front investments, trial and error, and strong connections with your community. After all, designing a series of nonfungible token (NFT) collectibles related to your brand or creating an immersive digital version of your headquarters for your customers to explore during the pandemic is a lot more capital- and resource-intensive than creating a social media campaign. In addition, “datafying” processes and embedding operating equipment with sensors to create digital twins (virtual representations of physical processes or assets) that will provide valuable insights to constantly monitor a remote production facility and continuously improve its output is easier said than done. Finally, moving from Zoom or Teams to a virtual reality meeting room where employees from around the world can come together, collaborate, and spend potentially even more time in the virtual world requires a significant change in employee behavior. As we know, building the technology is the “easy” part, while changing user or employee behavior is a different ballgame.

Of course, for the metaverse-natives (Generation Alpha and, to a lesser extent, Generation Z), embracing the metaverse is easy. The challenge lies with the older generations who are not accustomed to an omnipresent immersive internet and persuading them that embracing virtual and augmented reality offers new opportunities, including amazing experiences.

This book aims to help you understand the metaverse, what it is, how it will work, how you can benefit from it, and how we should build it. Of course, no book on the metaverse is complete without referencing its origin. The metaverse is a term coined by novelist Neal Stephenson in his famous 1992 novel Snow Crash (Bantam Books, 1992). The novel defines the metaverse as a place where people use virtual reality headsets to interact in a digital game-like world. The novel has enjoyed cult status, especially among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and HBO is turning the book into a series. The same applies to the book Ready Player One (Crown Publishing Group, 2011) by Ernest Cline, which was turned into a movie by Steven Spielberg in 2018, where the protagonist depicts the metaverse as a “virtual universe where people go [..] for all the things they can do, but stay for all the things they can be.”⁹ Both sci-fi books see the metaverse as a digital universe that we interact with using virtual reality. This falls short of the actual metaverse that is being constructed at this moment, where virtual reality is only one channel to interact with the metaverse. In addition, both authors depict the metaverse as commercially owned and as a way to help people escape the dystopian reality of the future world. While this is certainly a possibility for our own future, we do have a chance to prevent a dystopian future where a small elite controls the metaverse and our planet is distraught by climate change. It will be a long and challenging fight—those in power generally are very reluctant to relinquish it to the community—but one we cannot afford to lose. If anything, the dystopian future as described by Stephenson and Cline is not something to look forward to, so we should ensure we build an open, decentralized, and community-driven metaverse and fix the mistakes of Web 2.0.

With this book, I aim to give you the tools to create an open metaverse so that we avoid ending up in a worse version of today. I hope it will help you navigate the immersive internet, and, more importantly, it will discuss how we can build a metaverse that is open, inclusive, decentralized, and not controlled by Big Tech.* After all, we should avoid making the same mistakes as we did when building Web 2.0. When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web, he envisioned it to be decentralized and open, with data to be controlled by the user, but we ended up with silos controlled by Big Tech.¹⁰ Now that we are entering the next phase of the internet, and with the technology ready, we can fix what we did wrong. After all, a closed metaverse controlled by Big Tech or the state will very likely result in a dystopian nightmare that we should avoid at all costs, as we will see.

We will also discuss what can go wrong in the metaverse. Not to scare you from entering the metaverse, but just as cybercriminals are active on the current internet, hackers and scammers will also constantly patrol the metaverse, on the prowl for their next victim. The metaverse will be hacked, and everyone must be aware of how the metaverse can damage society, organizations, and individuals. With more and more devices connected to the internet—it is expected that by 2030 there will be 125 billion devices connected to the internet, with 7.5 billion internet users—there will be ample opportunities for cybercriminals to hack you, your business, and the metaverse, inflicting damages totaling $10 trillion, already in 2025.¹¹ As described in the fictional story, it will be relatively easy for cybercriminals to pretend to be someone else in the metaverse; if someone looks like your sister and sounds like your sister, we are quickly to believe that she is your sister. But even this problem is relatively small compared to a metaverse flooded by harassment and toxic recommendation engines that create immersive filter bubbles, further dividing and polarizing society and harming individuals.

The first chapter will dive into what the metaverse is and could become because a shared understanding of this new concept is important if we all want to benefit from it. What are the characteristics of the metaverse, and how do these impact our experience? We will begin our journey at the start of the dotcom bubble when the internet arrived for the first time. Web 1.0 allowed personal computers to connect, and the internet arrived in our living room, but only sometimes would you go on the internet. Web 2.0 arrived with the smartphone, although there is no set date when exactly the mobile internet started. It brought the internet closer to us, allowing us to be always online, but we still have to make an effort to “go on the internet,” as in getting your phone or opening your laptop. The next iteration of the internet will be an internet that is always there. It is always on, and you are always connected to it, potentially even when asleep, e.g., your Apple Watch tracking your sleep. It will be ready to interact with whenever you want or need to.¹²

This immersive internet requires new hardware solutions, as without augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), we will remain observers instead of active participants of this virtual world. We will discuss what AR and VR are, where we are now, and where we need to go before it becomes mainstream and the physical and digital worlds truly converge. We will also dive into the key characteristics of the open metaverse and how we can create a metaverse that delivers the most value to society.

Then, in Chapter 2, we will explore how we can achieve an open metaverse that empowers its users instead of enslaving them and what the benefits of such a metaverse will be to society.

In Chapter 3, we will explore the rise of avatars and digital humans —2D or 3D representations of our identity in the digital world—and how these digital identities will redefine what it is to be human. We will investigate how avatars will change our identity and why reputation will become even more important in the virtual world. Of course, avatars cannot walk around the metaverse naked, so digital fashion and digital products will explode in the coming years, offering brands a new approach to connecting with their customers in ways that are sustainable and environmentally friendly.

Once we understand who we can be in the metaverse, we will discover what we can do in the metaverse in Chapter 4. Humans have always tried to escape reality, be it using story telling around a fire to reading a book, but now for the first time, we can create our own space and invite anyone from around the world to join and have a social experience away from daily life. Of course, users who prefer a solitary immersive experience can also find that in the metaverse. There will be millions of metaverse spaces similar to the current internet, and knowing your way around the metaverse will improve your experience. Therefore, we will dive into how to traverse the metaverse and have an immersive experience while listening to music, gaming, playing sports, shopping, and learning.

Of course, the metaverse will not only be for fun. For organizations, it will mean serious business. Increasing brand loyalty, developing digital twins, collaborating in virtual reality—the future of work will revolve around the metaverse. Chapter 5 will discuss how brands can step into the metaverse, including numerous examples of brands who have already ventured into it, and what brands can do to become successful in the metaverse. Chapter 6 will explore how location data and the Internet of Things (IoT) will be the driving force to propel homes, offices, factories, supply chains, and entire cities into the metaverse. Although many enterprise metaverse environments will be closed walled gardens to provide privacy and security, the consumer version of the metaverse will work only if the metaverse is an open and inclusive space controlled by users instead of Big Tech. Zuckerberg might have claimed the metaverse with his rebranding to meta, but he should never own and control it.

In Chapter 7, we will cover the economics of the metaverse, including nonfungible tokens. Already in 2021, there were multiple million-dollar digital real estate deals and exchange of digital assets, and that is just the beginning. With an infinite supply of digital land across various metaverse spaces, you would expect low prices, but that is not what is happening. Prices are at an all-time high, and the more the metaverse is in the news, the more this will probably continue. However, there is a caveat: this early gold rush will most likely, and should not, continue if we want to ensure the metaverse is inclusive and reduces inequality instead of enlarging it. How does digital real estate work, how does it impact the metaverse economy, and is it a good thing? What other aspects of the metaverse define how the economy will work? To understand how the economy of the metaverse will work, we will take a deep dive into NFTs: what they are, how they work, why they are so important, what the challenges are of NFTs, and why the current hype of selling JPEGs for millions of dollars is important, though not where NFTs’ true value lies.

Finally, before finishing the book with a look into the future of the metaverse in Chapter 9, we will explore the dark side of the metaverse. Similar that the existing Web has a Dark Web, the metaverse will inherently come with negative aspects that harm citizens, organizations, and societies. What are these problems, and more importantly, how can we prevent them from happening? We will discuss the dangers and ethical challenges of the metaverse, the most likely (mental) health impact on its users and the numerous privacy and security dangers. The metaverse will be fun and useful, but only if we build it right. Chapter 8 will discuss how to go about this and how we can fight back to keep the metaverse a pleasant environment that does not further destabilize society but drives humanity forward.

Our society and what it means to be human will change drastically in the coming years. We are at the cusp of building an alternate reality that is not bound by the laws of physics and where anything is possible. In this world, magic will become a reality. I hope that this book will give you a complete understanding of what the metaverse can become, how you as a consumer can enjoy it, and how organizations can benefit from it, without harassing and following those same consumers as organizations do on the Web today. If we get it wrong and don’t learn from our mistakes, the dystopian metaverse portrayed by Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash will become a reality. However, if we build it right, a world of abundance is upon us. Let the journey and magic begin; let’s step into the metaverse.