The 'Metaverse Primer' recap by MetaPortal - Part VIII
Before we dive into today’s article, we wanted to briefly mention our friends at Metamundo.
Metamundo is a “platform for 3D creators and collectors to buy, sell, mint and license high-end, interoperable 3D NFTs (think buildings, vehicles, interior furniture) ready for use across the metaverse.”
They are currently hiring for a range of roles from an NFT marketing guru to a financial controller. If you want to work with a top team and contribute to the development of an interoperable Metaverse, check them out!
Part 8 of the Primer, and the last piece before wrapping everything up, focuses on the role of Content, Services, and Asset Businesses in the Metaverse. As always, this is clearly defined by Matthew. In this case as:
“The design/creation, sale, re-sale, storage, secure protection and financial management of digital assets, such as virtual goods and currencies, as connected to user data and identity. This contains all business and services “built on top of” and/or which “service” the Metaverse, and which are not vertically integrated into a virtual platform by the platform owner, including content which is built specifically for the Metaverse, independent of virtual platforms.”
So while most of the primer has focused on what allows the Metaverse to exist and thrive, now we dive into the pieces that make its digital economy tick. ‘CAS’ services took time to emerge on the internet, through the likes of Facebook and Netflix. It will likely be a similar story for the Metaverse, but we can still break down the potential today.
Content
By looking to Fortnite as an example, we see how well-known brands will continue to thrive in the Metaverse. The most downloaded skins in Fortnite belong to Marvel, Star Wars and the NFL. The more exciting part however is the emergence of new Metaverse-native brands, enabled by the content itself changing due to the way it’s accessed. As an example, take cable TV, which didn’t just improve visual resolution, but gave rise to HBO and Game of Thrones, among other top quality, high budget TV series. Likewise when games made the leap from arcades to consoles, their quality and depth improved, think Pacman to Zelda.
The Travis Scott concert held in Fortnite is oft cited as an example of what’s coming, but rarely is the impact talked about - 30m people were able to attend, and Scott scored his first billboard #1 a week later (followed by 2 more in 2020).
As Matthew rightly points out, the concert didn’t make use of all the tech available to us in the Metaverse. There was no motion capture, the audience were just spectators and each instance was limited to 50 people. To hit home on the points above, we have a long way to go before figuring out what a true Metaverse experience looks and feels like, but the medium is likely to empower a similar leap as seen by games, TV and music before.
Services
The future of services in the Metaverse might be slightly easier to envision. Today we have Zwift for cycling through virtual worlds and AimLab for perfecting your noscope skills in custom built environments.
As we discussed the jump in content delivery for games and TV earlier, we might expect similar to occur in social services and networks. In the same way that Snapchat is not a simple evolution of instant messaging, Metaverse services will bring whole new ways of socialising and sharing. The example used here is the popularity of game clip sharing site medal.tv, where upwards of 1 million clips are posted every day. Matthew even sees this going so far as to affect how we find a partner, although it’s left to the reader’s imagination as to what that might look like…
Bringing it back to crypto, the creator economy also stands to benefit from this evolution. We might imagine “marketplaces will emerge to commission and sell independently created virtual goods (Etsy, but for skins!), and to hire architects and artists for your digital spaces. Much of this is effectively in place today via Super Rare and OpenSea.”
One sector that stands to gain from this is education. While digital interactions will not replace real life any time soon, there is still the possibility to enrich education via today’s tech. Students can experience history firsthand in a 3D environment rather than from a textbook and underfunded schools might be able to bridge the experiential gap by leveraging digital services. It’s not straightforward though, as Matthew points out, previous attempts to bring this into the classroom have fallen flat.
Finally, as written and talked about extensively at MetaPortal, the future of work is arriving as we speak. The unbounded nature of digital environments and accessibility of blockchain assets create a potential for more than just menial work to occur in virtual spaces.
“The ability to act on the global stage from Akron, or be a card dealer from Manilla, will change who we hire, for how much, and where we live. Increased consumer spend on virtual assets, currencies, land, items, and avatars will also lead to new services and jobs.”
The ‘card dealer from Manilla’ is a particularly interesting example to choose, as we’ve seen Decentral Games hire hosts for their Decentraland casinos. Matthew also predicts service provision arising to keep track, and maintain interoperability between, all our digital assets and achievements. I would say this is vital to a healthy Metaverse, as without it, users won’t be able to take their history with them wherever they go. Similar to the way you can’t migrate your Facebook feed to Twitter and vice versa in the web 2 environment.
Business assets and related business
The Metaverse is not complete without a rich environment of things to interact with. Whether the ground you (virtually) walk on, wearables or the architecture, it all needs to be generated and deployed into the virtual realm.
Linking back to part III of the primer, Microsoft Flight Simulator is brought forward as an example, requiring 2.5 PetaBytes of data just to generate its virtual world. From part III and part VI we can also look at Quixel and Cesium, vital tools in helping to generate mirrorworlds from data-heavy functions like photogrammetry. It’s stated that we will undoubtedly see more companies like these to both generate and manage the immense amount of data required for any suitably immersive Metaverse.
One application for all of the developer and user generated content populating these worlds is the ability to license it out. Your sci-fi armchair might find its way into a Star Wars episode, for example. By creating marketplaces for this content, creators are more easily able to monetise their work, equally virtual worlds can be created more quickly and at a lower cost. By analogising this to what Google achieved by combining years of effort mapping the planet to create Google Maps, it’s possible to show the level of advantage first movers might have here. It also goes some way to explaining why scanning/marketplace/virtual generation start-ups tend to be acquired very early on by larger companies.