There is a lot of talk about Web3 technologies, and the metaverse is one of the most marketed use cases in the next iteration of digital innovation.
The Metaverse is a digital destination, a fully rendered 3D immersive space where users can explore new experiences for fun and practical reasons. With complexity on top of that, think of the Metaverse as a world for digital users to enter, interact with, learn from, transact with, create and experience.
With so much innovation and opportunity happening around the Metaverse, it makes sense why Facebook rebranded to Meta to support its Metaverse-focused strategy. With that in mind, here are six reasons why you’re ready for the metaverse. good.
1. Social media at an inflection point
I first started my social media journey on Myspace. Myspace has been a fun place for myself and my friends. Top 8 lists, HTML tile backgrounds, profile page songs, emo poems, and more.
Then came Facebook, first available to Ivy League schools, followed by colleges with strong engineering departments, and finally all college domains. We poked each other and posted silly pics. Finally, Facebook opened its doors to all registered and verified email addresses. Fast-forward to ubiquity, controversy, acquisitions, and Hollywood movies, and the story continues to be written.
Then LinkedIn changed everything. Users who are not interested in social media suddenly find reasons to join social networks. LinkedIn brings you closer to your co-workers, makes it easier to find jobs, and educates you with targeted and professional content. A whole audience of users not interested in having fun in social networks found an adult reason to participate.
This is the metaverse’s inflection point towards 2023. Social media has reached its demise and the only difference between platforms is the length of text and video and the social media platform allows or encourages it. itself. The way users interact with social media hasn’t changed since the advent of smartphones. And as social media continues to rely on smartphones, it will become less important over time.
2. Smartphone in terminal state
The metaverse is as rich as the devices you use to access it. While the metaverse has blossomed, it is currently being held back by a massive market adoption cycle for smartphones and the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) that make them. Smartphones are a dead end of technological innovation. You can make it smaller or bigger, add a stylus, fold it up, add a better camera or memory, but at the end of the day, it’s just a touchscreen slab that ties into the app store. As we iterate and perfect the way we interact with our smartphones, the door is opening for something new. A smartphone is just an input device, like a keyboard and mouse, or punch cards before that. A new path opens up.
3. Wearable technology in maturity
Have you ever talked to someone about smartwatches? They might be into it. The reason is clear. Smartwatches are stylish, sophisticated and practical. Do you still have VR headsets? No, but tiering and affordability are starting to impact the wearable headset market. Did you know you can buy a headset for $5, load it into your smartphone (purpose reinvented), tether a $2 Bluetooth controller, and enter the metaverse? is the method adopted by Oculus/Meta Quest style headsets are still expensive and, frankly, overkill for most use cases and applications.
This newly burgeoning industry is at an interesting maturity point as it waits for major player Apple to enter the space. Especially in the American market, Apple is driving the adoption of smartphones, smartwatches and Bluetooth headphones. In fact, Apple is the world’s largest headphone maker, but many people don’t realize it.
Many in the industry expect an announcement and release in 2023. Apple AR and VR headsetswhich could spur mass adoption, as the company has done in other categories.
4. Education: 21 Businessesst century
Humans learn through experience, but the science of education (pedagogy) remains deeply misunderstood and unexplored. Why is this important to the metaverse?
As an education professional, I am familiar with the 80/20 rule that applies to learning. This means that if I train someone in a lecture with traditional audiovisual (AV) support (slideshows, videos, graphics), they will retain his 20% of what I say. This leads to the practice of interval training. Interval training consists of short and consistent reinforcement of training material to increase knowledge retention.
luck We conducted a study of medical professionals using VR training and traditional AV training as control groups. We then tested the student after a year to see what knowledge retention looked like: his conventional AV training had predictable results of about 20% retention after one year Got it.
Users who adopted VR training achieved an 80% knowledge retention rate after one year. Hands-on, experiential learning has a non-negligible cost and workforce impact.
5. Teleconferencing education is a stopgap measure
If you have school-aged children or took an education course during the pandemic, you probably aren’t a big fan of virtual education. , we are left with a simple fact: Audiovisual training is suboptimal in terms of learning effect.
When students can fully immerse themselves with their classmates, be themselves, interact with spatially connected shared objects, and collaborate in real time, it removes some of the biggest barriers to education that exist in today’s system. . This is the metaverse promise.
Benefit from a central model for democratizing information for diverse cultures and peoples around the world, curated learning, support for people with disabilities, and those experiencing hardships away from home. Add in that and you get the inevitable model of distributed learning that educational institutions exist. It’s no longer the focus, it’s the users themselves.
This means that educational institutions face turbulent times ahead, unless they start carving out their own path within the metaverse and AR/VR technology to prepare their future students.
For the record, these future students are already here. They are already fed up with outdated Learning Management Systems (LMS). I used them when he went to college 20 years ago and have built multiple of his LMS instances during his professional career. Like smartphones, devices are in a final state, only content and APIs are updated, interactions and endpoints.
The real obstacle here is the institution and its understanding of how knowledge is acquired. High schools still use multiple-choice scantron-style tests. This is not because it’s how students learn best, but simply because “this is how we’ve always done it.” If funding is tied to these outdated assessment methods, the real enemy will be to decouple the dollar from outdated methodologies that are not student or learning outcome centric.
6. Waves of demographic change
Twenty years from now there will be more gamers on the planet than there are today. It’s a simple demographic, as many of the older generation aren’t good at video games and don’t play them. These older generations leave and are replaced by younger generations who enjoy gaming and social interaction.
It’s not uncommon to find gamers Learned history in Assassin’s Creed This is for a very good reason. they have experienced it. They walked the streets of Jerusalem and hopped on the rooftops of revolutionary Paris, experiencing immersive worlds and learning about the people and culture of the time.
This is why Microsoft agreed to create it. Largest acquisition in the history of the entire organization— For video game studios, Activision/Blizzard. Microsoft didn’t buy Call of Duty. They’ve entered a scramble for the talent of a 3D rendering artist to build their own metaverse and now have one of the best video game design teams on the planet.
Metaverse is now, augmented reality is the future
As with all new technology movements, the first stage of strategy is to normalize the foreign experience of technology. This is why we see so much Metaverse marketing before we see high adoption rates in the ecosystem. The goal is to make the term “metaverse” as ubiquitous as possible. This will ensure your child doesn’t go crazy when she comes home with a headset instead of her iPad from her first day of school.
Players and users are already spending a ton of time within ecosystems like Second Life and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). These ecosystems do not have a specific business or educational component, but it is likely that people will spend a lot of time in virtual worlds if the experience meets their specific needs and offers a communal aspect of play and relationships. clearly proves the building.
Building an open, decentralized ecosystem is clearly easier to write than running with private and public companies vying for postage stamps on the lawn. Again, users are the heart of what makes this whole Web3 movement possible.
Users need to truly bring Augmented Reality (XR) to life. XR integrates AR and VR technologies into his one seamless experience, where users drive the type of experience and level of engagement they want. This means users can choose an AR or VR experience depending on their preferences and the hardware they have. Think of it like a hybrid car with a choice of battery or combustion engine, or both. This power of choice drives the largest number of users as long as the opt-in economics passed on to them are fair.
Would you like to join the discussion on the Metaverse and other innovative technologies? Learn more CompTIA Local Communities.
David Landsberger is Director of Training and Events for TBI, providing dynamic training nationwide.
CompTIA is a content partner of WRAL TechWire.
(C) Comptia
