Only one of my apps still thinks Metaverse is a spelling mistake. That won’t last long since the Metaverse is not just a real word. It’s a very big deal.
Big name tech companies, venture capitalists and engineers investing their brains and vast wallets into the Metaverse make it a very big deal indeed. Despite billions flowing into creating the Metaverse, no one has yet to nail down a perfect definition.
- Epic’s founder & CEO Tim Sweeney calls the Metaverse: Realtime 3D social medium where people can create and engage in shared experiences as equal participants in an economy with societal impact.”
- Dentsu describes Metaverse as: The future of all digital media and commerce and the successor of the internet.
- Roblox calls Metaverse: Persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces in a virtual universe.
- Mark Zuckerburg calls Facebook a Metaverse Company (does that scare anyone?)
- And legendary tech investors Andreessen Horowitz call the Metaverse: A persistent, infinitely-scaling virtual space with its own economy and identity system.
First, The Metaverse is the biggest infrastructure project in the world. You might quibble over the choice of words, but virtual infrastructure that leverages physical reality is—in our view—infrastructure, especially if it is creating a new economy and identity system.
Second, the Metaverse is inevitable. Why? Because the billions spent on AR/VR technology were really built for the next internet (i.e. the Metaverse). And the success of NFTs have already proven that a new economy is coming (more on our views about NFTs soon).
Third, all of this infrastructure and virtual real estate are being built by hundreds and eventually thousands and millions of Metaverse property owners; each with the expectation that people will come to visit. You and I and millions of people will enter the Metaverse to play games, shop, socialize, work, and be entertained. And when we do, we will be avatars and virtual humans that radiate personal data; while simultaneously expecting to migrate instantly from one digital property to another without being asked to stop and accept a whole new set of terms and conditions each time we cross a virtual border.
This massive inevitable multi-billion dollar virtual infrastructure project demands a new identity system.
A Metaverse built on old broken assumptions about privacy and data will not work. A Metaverse clogged by constant consent roadblocks and border patrols candidly doesn’t sound fun (that’s not what Ready Player One looks like!).
At iVirtual, we own—and invest in—avatar tech and virtual human creation. Yes, we think it’s very cool stuff. And we admire many other companies and engineers also creating the tools to make it possible for people to enter the Metaverse as a virtual human or lifelike avatar. We are on this journey together.
What makes our contribution to the Metaverse different is that iVirtual is embedding privacy and identity management into the DNA of everything we do, including our virtual human tech stack. A real time 3D social medium where people can create and engage in shared experiences knowing that their data is safe and secure while zipping from one realm to another. Now, that does sound like a lot of fun.