Since the advent of the Internet, there has been a constant quest to create the most realistic online experience possible.It can be used in online shopping, education, commerce, healthcare, travel and everything else. . So far, there have been gaps in the user experience. In e-commerce, just like in the offline world, you can’t try and check products online before you buy. Images and preloaded videos are not very useful. Now, technology’s newest buzzword, the Metaverse, promises to change this by bridging the physical and virtual worlds in ways never seen before.

In fact, this is the promise of the Metaverse, and it’s no exaggeration to say that Metaverse Mania is unfolding all over the world. The Metaverse is set to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual worlds and deepen the virtual-physical connection.

The term Metaverse was first mentioned in the 1992 fictional novel Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson. In the book he talks about a world where people create his 3D virtual world that resembles the real world. Over the past few years, the Metaverse has also been pushed by big tech companies, including Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who are calling the Metaverse the future of the internet itself.

In this new world, called the Metaverse, users will transition from a 2D experience to a 3D experience represented by an avatar, allowing them to interact with the entire world. They are free to do it both offline and in the real world, but with the advantage of being able to do it in a more interactive and real-time way. You can go to the bank, watch his future T20 World Cup games at the stadium, or learn new skills. While sitting on the couch at home!

Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2026, at least a quarter of internet users will spend an hour a day in the metaverse. People live their lives in the Metaverse (like today, they work a few hours on the internet each day). Avatars are stored in the cloud on his server. The Metaverse will be a place to trade using cryptocurrency, whether it’s buying land, furniture, test driving a car, or learning a new skill.

There are opportunities to co-develop virtual worlds to maintain AR/VR services for gaming, healthcare, social media, e-commerce, real estate, or advertising clients. Global companies such as Deutsche Telekom, Gucci, Nike, Audi, Nestle and P&G are using the Metaverse to find new ways to interact with prospects and add value to prospects and retail partners.

Investment bank Goldman Sachs sees the Metaverse as an $8 trillion opportunity to help IT companies expand their offerings into deep technologies such as artificial intelligence, data analytics and augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) . metaverse. According to Statista, the global metaverse business will reach $38.85 billion in 2021. This is expected to grow to $47.48 billion in 2022 and by 2030 he will surge to $678 billion.

Metaverse in play
In fact, the metaverse is impacting fields as diverse as education, e-commerce, travel, and banking. Kookmin Bank, one of his top 5 banks in South Korea, created KB Financial Town on the metaverse platform Gather. This is a virtual branch where customer avatars can interact with bank advisors. Earlier this year, JP Morgan became the first US bank to open a lounge in the metaverse, Decentraland. His Decentraland, which utilizes the Ethereum blockchain, allows users to purchase land with his MANA cryptocurrency.

According to JP Morgan, the Metaverse offers opportunities in almost every sector and has a potential market size of US$1 trillion in annual revenue. People will experience trading, socializing, creating, owning (assets such as NFTs), and living in the Metaverse as they would in the offline world.

3D, virtual and online, the Metaverse needs technological innovation to evolve. Today, I’m wearing an uncomfortably heavy and expensive VR headset to experience the Metaverse. Do normal glasses help users participate in meetups in virtual worlds? Many innovations are being made in this area to improve the user experience.

Compared to the current 2D Internet (web pages), the Metaverse is a paradigm shift that uses a 3D virtual world to give users visual depth. A developer should think about 3D when he creates a metaverse. They need skills in 3D content creation, spatial computing, and expertise in areas such as computer vision, machine learning (ML), and deep learning. Creating these persistent, continuous rendering environments requires the use of a 3D rendering engine such as Unreal or Unity.

It will also require integration with several underlying distributed ledger infrastructures and protocols to ensure interoperability and seamless user experience across virtual worlds. Even faster 5G networks will significantly improve the quality of user experience, but they are not the only important criterion for further expansion of the Metaverse ecosystem. In addition to network requirements, a multi-layered security model is essential to providing users and their avatars with a secure metaverse experience. All of these are rapidly converging to not only enhance our virtual lives, but also bring our real lives a little closer to goodness, health, and prosperity, shaping a world where people are happy and positive, and dreaming. We are enabling the co-creation of a respected global ecosystem.

About the author:

Rishi Ahuja, Founder and MD, Sunovatec