The opinions expressed by entrepreneurial contributors are their own.
Metaverse: An immersive virtual world that can be interacted with using smartphones, PCs, special glasses, or VR headsets. Until recently, the digital world enjoyed great buzz and excitement around the potential to bring similar opportunities to both businesses and consumers.
The Metaverse has brought a variety of investment and money-making opportunities where users can purchase various digital goods and services for their avatars and their virtual experiences. You can buy everything from branded accessories to cars in the virtual store and even virtual land. The NBA’s Brooklyn Nets made sports history by being the first professional sports team to broadcast a game on the Metaverse.spoiler.”
Big bets were also made early on for the Metaverse. Meta has spent an eye-popping level of money on its Metaverse play. Reality Labs, the division within Meta that houses the Metaverse project, about $24 billion From 2021 to 2022.
Related: What is the Metaverse and why is it important for entrepreneurs?
Not as popular as expected
But just as fast as the hype around the Metaverse builds (around the same time Mark Zuckerberg made the big announcement about Facebook’s future being connected to immersive 3D worlds and rebranding the company to Meta). , interest has likewise waned. Evidence of this can be seen by looking at his Google search traffic on the Metaverse, which has dropped significantly in recent months, returning to pre-announcement levels.
Over the years, the tech and entertainment giants have invested heavily in building this virtual world, only to find that most of us aren’t very interested in the Metaverse. It seems that the leader is much more attached to reality than he first thought. Retail and air travel statistics show that we are returning to the real world after the Covid-19 lockdown. Most people still don’t understand what the metaverse is, how it works, or what it means. Given the huge investment and media coverage this space has received, this could be classified as a pretty serious failure.
Meta is aggressively slimming down its virtual world operations. disney and microsoft Both are closing their metaverse divisions. While Apple seems to have pretty much given up on virtual reality headsets, Tinder just announced it’s abandoning its plans. virtual world dating.
What once could have been an exciting business and investment opportunity has become a very expensive gamble that has so far seemingly largely failed. , appears to be turning into a corporate catastrophe, with billions of dollars of investment at stake and reputations affected.
Technology innovators and leaders tend to think in terms of the hype cycle. So it’s been a roller coaster journey from concept to widespread adoption. For now, it looks like a lot of investor money is being spent on technologies whose potential is not yet realized.
Most recently, Mark Zuckerberg announced to the market that Meta has a new focus on AI. This could indicate that the Metaverse project is being quietly discontinued and away from its huge investment in this technology. Zuckerberg notes that Metaverse is a long-term investment for Meta, and promised to scale back the Metaverse rhetoric, but the gamble increasingly looks like an example of corporate arrogance.
Related: Why Businesses Need to Prepare for the Metaverse
The Metaverse is over, AI is here
Generative AI has stolen the Metaverse’s lightning. OpenAI’s real-life application of his ChatGPT is hard to compete with at the moment, and rightly so. It has immediate and very real and meaningful uses that are very helpful for individuals and businesses.
AI goes far beyond ChatGPT. Currently, it can be categorized into four areas:
- automatic intelligence: Automate manual routine and non-routine tasks.
- assist intelligence: Help people perform certain tasks faster and sometimes better.
- Augmented Intelligence: Help people make better decisions.
- autonomous intelligence: Automate decision-making processes without the need for human input.
Whether it’s machine learning, smart applications and appliances, digital assistants, or self-driving cars, AI has very real reach across the global economy now and in the future, and has been tagged as a passing fad. help avoid. As a result, it is considered a safer and less risky investment.
What do I need to change for the metaverse to recover?
Consumer education needs to be at the forefront and core for the Metaverse to have any chance of success at some point in the future. Unraveling the mysteries surrounding virtual worlds and their applications for both consumers and businesses.
The enormity of the challenge should not be underestimated. From a user experience perspective, the Metaverse requires hyper-realistic 3D display technology delivered through ordinary glasses. This virtual world is currently considered a dangerously speculative and risky investment, as it is still too early to have any real impact.
The Metaverse isn’t going to die out overnight. As time goes on, we no longer use funny avatars to spend time in virtual worlds, chat with friends, or play in purchased digital lands. Be natural and real. And that’s the key factor: time.
As it evolves, I think it will likely become more widely adopted in a more narrowly focused way. Perhaps short bursts: product launches, concerts, conferences, education and training, socializing, and other truly immersive experiences. , is not an inaccurate or unrealistic notion of somehow spending much of your waking day inside a virtual world.
RELATED: 5 Metaverse Trends Shaping the Next Decade
Is the metaverse dead?
Your investment in the metaverse is as valuable as the demand for the technology involved. When the hype peaked, there was debate (albeit a dangerous one) about the value of investing in virtual worlds, but once the hype dried up and the speculators left, the investment would quickly disappear. It loses its value.
Meta has confirmed to be a long-term focus, with large companies such as Siemans, Proctor and Gamble using Metaverse technology for a wide variety of business-related applications, but with its magical applications and experiences. No one has brought it to the table yet. Probably because the hardware devices needed to make this happen don’t exist yet.
Is the metaverse dead? i don’t think so. Not yet. It’s too early to make that call. It’s not that the real world is back and the online world is a thing of the past, it’s that the two run side by side. It’s not that the online universe is dying out, it might be reaching its limits for now. If you have significant risk based investments, a passion for cutting-edge technology, and an appetite for highly speculative betting, there may be an angle to explore in the metaverse, but be advised and be very cautious Please act.
