Is the Metaverse Dead On Arrival?
2022 is coming to an end, and it’s shaping up to be the year where the world called the Metaverse’s bluff. From the crash of crypto to the decline of Meta, cynics rule the day when it comes to the Metaverse and Web3. Even the venerable Berners Lee is decrying Web3 as the poor cousin to his ‘Web 3.0’ plans which offer some of the same privacy features without the underlying blockchain architecture. Where did it all go wrong?
It starts with the muddled definitions. Few people seem to be able to coherently articulate what the Metaverse exactly is. One of the most authoritative and upbeat voices on the topic is Matthew Ball, who just released a book called The Metaverse And How It Will Revolutionise Everything. He describes it as ‘a massively scaled and interoperable network of real time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications and payments’. So much for an elevator pitch.
Zuckerberg, frustrated by the failure of his crypto experiment Libra and throttled by Apple’s privacy controls that limit his ad revenue, is all in on a VR Metaverse. So he is pumping billions into hardware to overcome VR’s current limitations and make the Quest into the iPhone of VR headsets: a category defining product. And if the Quest defines VR, the Quest App Store can then replace Apple’s store as the dominant platform when the web moves from 2D phones to 3D headsets.
Apple, for its part wants to build on its AR experiments with the iPhone and iPad, so Tim Cook rubbishes Meta’s efforts with VR and claims it’s too complicated for ordinary consumers. He defines the Metaverse as primarily AR based, providing a layer of data on top of the real world. Epic Games, the maker of Fortnight and Unreal Engine, thinks the Metaverse is simply a massive multiplayer game that transcends the gaming use case and becomes a place for people to hang out and tinker with their avatars. NVIDIA emphasises open standards because it wants to sell graphics cards and it wants as many Metaverses as possible so more people need more powerful graphics. Satya Nadella from Microsoft will tell you that the Metaverse is all about cloud based collaboration and digital twins.
With so many competing and self serving definitions it’s hard to know if the Metaverse is even worth paying attention to. But to worry about this is to be missing the point as spectacularly as those who dismissed the internet in its early days, when boo.com exemplified startup excess and dial up modems made the internet feel slow and pointless. The difference between those who dismissed the internet at the turn of the century and those who rode the wave to multi billion dollar success was not an ability to precisely predict the future but a willingness to experiment and be bold.
Today, code d’azur as a Brand Experience company exists to enable brands to be bold, and define the future rather than predict it. We are working with brands like Polestar to define the future of car buying. This is currently largely built on Web 2.0 infrastructure but includes 3D visuals embedded in the core experience. At the same time, we are looking to the future of loyalty for the brand and proposing new ideas to enable a community of progressive consumers to rally around the core brand values of Design, Performance and Sustainability with Metaverse experiences.
We are not new to moving beyond the screen and exploring immersive experiences. We enabled KLM to start experimenting with voice as far back as 2018, delivering services that broke out of the web 2 paradigm of 2D visual UI. We created an AR escape room for ABN Amro when phones only just started offering AR capabilities. And we designed a retro futuristic VR headset for Tele2 long before the Quest was a twinkle in Zuckerberg’s eye.
We did this not just because we love to think of bold new ideas for our clients, but because we understand that for them, being at the forefront of new technologies and creating new experiences for consumers helps build real brand value. Sometimes it’s entertainment and PR value and sometimes it’s services or social value. But our clients understand that to focus on the future, to experiment and to be bold will put them in the position of being one of the winners of the next iteration of the internet, and to convince and convert the next generation of consumers. Regardless of what Zuck, Nadella or Cook believe the Metaverse will turn out to be.
