Metaverse 101

Are you ready for the metaverse?

Fear not, its still a future or two away. But financial analysts predict the metaverse market could surpass 1.5 trillion dollars within the next decade, so it serves our purposes to pay it heed.

Before we begin, this being another crypto-related term we have more defining to do. The Metaverse is a space in which users can interact within a computer-generated environment with other users. This type of immersive experience has been around for a while in the name of virtual reality. The original virtual reality was an artificial environment created with software, appearing to the user in such a way that users suspend belief, accepting the computer generated environment as real.

We come to know the world through our senses. In school, we all learned we have five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight and hearing. These are however only our most obvious sense organs. Through our various sensory inputs, ensure we have a rich flow of information from the environment to our minds.

Everything that we know about our reality comes by way of our senses. In other words, our entire experience of reality is simply a combination of sensory information and our brains making sense of it all.  If you can present your senses with made-up information, your perception of reality would also change in response to it. You would be presented with a version of reality that isn’t really there, but from your perspective it would be perceived as real, an environment we have come to refer to as virtual reality

In science fiction, futurists described the metaverse as a possible realization of the internet as an immersive virtual world, facilitated by the use of virtual and augmented reality headsets. In layman's terms, the metaverse would emerge as a network of virtual worlds focused on social connection and interaction. This new immersive media earned its name from its ability to immerse people within an experience of an environment. When one is interacting with immersive media, you’re not just viewing a picture confined to a screen.

Of course, Video game aficionados (Gamers if I may) have known this for years, having long used immersive reality technology to enhance the gaming experience.

Diving a little deeper, The Metaverse (or Immersive media) comes in several forms. Virtual Reality is the most commonly referenced content in immersive media. It involves using a virtual or digital environment to replace a real-world space. Virtual reality fully immerses the user in a digital world through head-mounted displays and sensors.

Augmented reality, or AR, brings the digital content into a real-world environment. This allows for the enhancement of live video (take a football game broadcast and all the colored graphics on the screen)  rather than the replacement of your physical surroundings.

Mixed reality blends the real and digital world in an environment where they can co-exist. Mixed reality experiences can include things like holograms as they allow for a much deeper level of interaction than AR or VR.

By making our online experiences more immersive, experts can create interactions between people and machines that we never could have imagined before. For instance, a company could create a duplicate product allowing engineering and production teams to experiment with designs and ideas on how to enhance that object. A group of VR experts could then work together on that digital twin in real-time, adjusting without relying on any heavy machinery or material resources. The result is a much faster and more efficient creative process for everyone involved.

It’s not just creativity that benefits from access to immersive media either. Immersive technologies can allow people to experience virtual guided tours of a location or a travel landscape before ever visiting. In real-estate, home buyers can do virtual walk-throughs of a future home before it’s ever built. In the AR environment, healthcare professionals can use smart glasses to get guidance on a patient’s circulatory system or other issues.

As people continue to look for more ways of leveraging the digital world, the demand for immersive media will continue to grow. No one knows for sure what the next level of immersion might look like, but Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame has some thoughts, going so far as to rename his flagship social media site from Facebook to Meta for the anticipated merger of social media and immersive reality.

Now what does all this talk of the metaverse have to do with cryptocurrency?

For starters, they are both integral parts of the emerging Web3 technologies.

As the metaverse becomes more popular, more and more of our lives will be spent online, as we work in virtual offices or play games with our friends, impacting sectors like education, tech, health, and gaming. With companies like Facebook and Microsoft already alert to the possibilities the metaverse presents, now nearly every Silicon Valley investment firm is getting in on the future of the metaverse. And this makes sense as there appears the metaverse will be next big space for digital growth, a space free from the trappings of web2 and its centralized control.

The reality which is beginning to take shape is exciting. Hailed as the next iteration of the internet, the metaverse sits at the intersection of the web, augmented reality and the blockchain. Until recently, you could only experience the internet when you go to it through a browser or app. The metaverse, with its wide range of connectivity types, devices and technologies will allow us to experience the internet on a huge variety of devices, from commonplace screens and cell phones to VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality). Ultimately, the metaverse will allow us to play games, shop, trade, chat, work or even attend concerts. All within a virtual world of our own creating, full of NFT's from our collections all paid for by our cryptocurrency of choice.

 Covid-19 forced a number of these changes upon society. One of the biggest changes was to force social activities, the world of work, entertainment and almost everything else online. This digital trend of enabling people to connect in the way they want, where they want, and when they want is here to stay.

The pandemic showed the world how feasible it is to operate remotely. Many industries have expanded their work at home capacity, at least for the types of jobs where this makes sense. Then there are the individuals who remain vulnerable for a variety of reasons and struggle to reintegrate as quickly as others. They too will see the benefit of better systems for working off-site within the metaverse.

"When you combine these needs with the growing possibilities afforded by the metaverse, it's clear to see this stands to be huge in the coming years," explains Shrey Singh, head of the gaming and NFT ecosystem at Polygon. "Web 3.0 offers even more functionality and interoperability than any of the preexisting services, so the possibilities for remote work, teleconferencing, telemedicine, remote socializing and so much more become profoundly enhanced. I would say it is reasonable that the metaverse will become a significant part of the regular individual's life in the coming decade and beyond."

The metaverse is being built around activities you'll enjoy with your friends and coworkers, and a whole host of entrepreneurs are already seizing opportunities to place their businesses front and center in this new digital ecosystem. As previously stated, Facebook is already planning to pivot into the metaverse by combining its myriad products into virtual communities, where users can communicate, work, shop and play in one space, all monetized by their commercial products.  With the pace of change in tech and the metaverse accelerating with each passing week, the metaverse will undoubtedly become a bigger part of our lives in the coming years.

As cryptocurrency becomes the main medium of exchange for people buying and selling in the metaverse (remember, this is all happening on the blockchain) its users will become increasingly comfortable with methods of acquiring, handling, and storing it. This means it will be more frequently used outside of the metaverse, too, for sending money to friends and family, particularly if this involves the money crossing national borders, which, with traditional currency, can often incur heavy fees if even possible at all.

This, in turn, will mean that banks and other existing financial institutions are likely to step up their efforts to facilitate cryptocurrency or blockchain-derived financial models. In order to remain competitive in an age of borderless, middleman-free financial systems, they will need to streamline their own infrastructure. While some have foreseen that cryptocurrency could eventually spell the end of banking as we know it, in the near term, it's likely that businesses, in particular, will still want to hang on to the layer of protection and regulation that banks and central banks bring to transactional networks. 

But it seems likely to me that the ones that thrive in this new environment of digital currencies and peer-to-peer finance will be those that are flexible and forward-looking with their own policies when it comes to cryptocurrency adoption. Paypal and Mastercard are examples of payment systems that are now fully engaging with cryptocurrency and both have said it is because it’s clear crypto will play an important role in the future of payments.

Nobody can state with any certainty what form the metaverse will take or when and if it becomes fully integrated into our lives. Not even Mark Zuckerberg. But from past experience, one thing we can say for sure is that businesses will use it to make money and consumers will need crypto in order to spend

When it comes to establishing the currency of the virtual world, cryptocurrencies are clearly a natural fit. And because this ground-breaking technology is also in its infancy, its development will likely be influenced by changes in the way we live our lives. For better or worse, we as a society are choosing to spend more of our time online, and that's only likely to accelerate as the online world becomes more immersive, entertaining, and engaging. This also means that cryptocurrency will play an outsized role in these transformations as the metaverse develops into a daily part of our lives.