Metaverse

The Metaverse is coming and it’s a Very Big Deal.

In artificial intelligence, there is an idea of “the singularity”. It’s a moment in time where AI becomes smarter than humans. The moment when artificial intelligence > human intelligence.

Metaverse is a point in time when our digital lives become more important than our physical lives. For many, this is already a case.

This is not an overnight change. Or an invention by some Steve Jobs type. It’s a gradual change that’s been happening for 20 years. Every important part of life is going digital. Work; from factories to laptops, boardrooms to zooms. Friends; from neighbors to followers. Where do you find like-minded people; Twitter, Reddit, etc. Games; more kids play Fortnite than basketball and football combined. Identity; filters are the new makeup. Stories are your personal billboard to broadcast who you are.
What matters more? What do you look like in real life? Or what do you look like on Instagram? The pic is what they see, so it’s what matters.

Imagine if you go back to the 1990s, at the beginning of the internet — before it birthed the world’s biggest companies — what would you have done? Something much bigger than the Internet is coming and it will end the Internet as we know it. 2D search-based internet is being replaced by a fully 3D immersive world that mirrors our world. This we totally change the way we live, learn, earn and connect and all this is coming much faster than we think.

Let’s imagine how Metaverse is going to end the internet as we know it; no more Google search as we have our own virtual assistants doing searching for us, no more keyboards as we walk and talk just like in the real world, no more apps, as we just travel from world to world, no more screen time as we simply accessing the Metaverse by wearable devices, no more storing by IP address but actually by time and place in virtual reality. Markets, entire economies, and even countries will grow up in this virtual world. And we’ll use it to access and enhance our existing world. Whether you experience The Eiffel tower in real life or in a virtual world or in real life by the eyes of a robot while you’re in the metaverse in another part of the world; that’s going to be entirely up to you. In the next decade for better or for worse this is all going to be a reality. The internet and mobile phone will be just as much a relic tomorrow as pages and fax machines are today.

Fortnite has in three years attracted a mind-boggling 350 million players. They are spending over three billion hours a month in this virtual world. Marshmallow’s live concert in Fortnite attracted a world record of 10 million people last year and Travis Scott more than doubled that in April with 27 million attending his virtual concert. Now imagine a world like this connected to our real world, where you can meet, shop, work, go to school, play games, be creative and be whoever frankly you want while teleporting or time traveling to where ever you want. That is the metaverse.

Will Facebook’s Horizon Worlds be the first step toward the metaverse? The excitement around the metaverse is growing and it’s not just an idea from science fiction anymore. Horizon Worlds, a user-generated virtual reality world might be one of the first steps toward creating one. While Fortnite is a 3D game on a 2D screen, Horizon Worlds is experienced in 3D virtual reality. Think of it like a first-person Sims, where you can create your own world, meet, socialize, share experiences, play games and work together. As the metaverse takes over the internet, Horizon Worlds is gonna take over from the 2D Facebook that we’re all using today.

So when exactly will this happen? As with all new technologies, it happens when all three things come together; demand, software, and hardware.

1. Demand; we actually already reach a critical mass of demand. When the internet hit the mainstream in 1995, there were actually only 14 million people online at the time. There are already two and half billion gamers online, experiencing the virtual world every day.

2. Software; software is also already here. While the internet was based on code to build websites, the metaverse is built with engines that create 3D worlds. The two biggest — Unreal engine and Unity engine are already billion-dollar toolkits. Unreal engine has not only been used to build Fortnite but games like Final fantasy, Microsoft’s Gears of War, and many of the top Xbox and Playstation games. Now it’s being used more and more by Hollywood films to create hyper-realistic special effects scenes. On the other hand, the Unity engine is what Facebook is building Horizon Worlds with and it’s the engine that League of Legends, Pokemon go and many mobile games are built on. And that includes everything from Activision’s Call of duty to Nintendo’s Super Mario Run. So basically Unreal Engine and Unity are the metaphors equivalent of Android and iOS. And there are other worlds that will meet in the metaverse, that are creating their own engines. So for example Minecraft has got 480 million players, Roblox with 160 million players, and Crossfire has got over a billion players — all having their own engines.

3 Hardware; as you see — metaverse is emerging out of the games market and the world’s 2.5 billion gamers are accessing their virtual worlds in three main ways; 45% by mobile, 30% by cames console, and 25% by PC. All three are increasing in power and speed and as 5G rolls out it’ll increase mobile speeds by up to 100 times 4g. That’s fast enough to create a seamless link between our real world and metaverse. Everyone is racing to get faster, cheaper wearables to access the metaverse; from Facebook’s Oculus, Microsoft HoloLens, and Sony’s Playstation VR — these clunky VR goggles are now
being replaced by smart glasses. Facebook is launching smart glasses this year with Rayban. Apple is likely to launch Apple glass AR glasses by 2023 and Amazon has already launched with its Alexa-powered echo frames.

And while it may be five years away before we have a fully seamless experience of our real world and the metaverse, we will already be living, learning, connecting, creating, and playing in it long before then. By 2024 we will be spending more time in 3D virtual worlds than today’s 2D. So maybe you will be reading this article on a wall of the Metaverse or on the wall of a cafe bar through your smart glasses or I’ll be transformed into a 3D bot in your virtual world and tell you all that I wrote above.

Meanwhille there is also a lot of ways how to earn in the Metaverse, but that is not a topic of that article. Let’s just mention that you can invest in truly mind-boggling Metaverse projects. Check some of them on Coingecko under categories Metaverse; https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/metaverse