In The Next Four Years, A Quarter Of Us Will Be Living For At Least An Hour Of Our Lives In The Metaverse

A Quarter Of Us Will Be Living For At Least An Hour Of Our Lives In The Metaverse

The Metaverse is an ever-expanding term, beginning to cover more and more virtual experiences with each day. It can be described as the virtual equivalent of our physical world. With the increasing need to streamline our lives, to make our work more efficient, and our relationships easier to keep up with, the Metaverse offers an interesting solution. It can be used not only for work but also for play. A recent report by Gartner, a data insights firm, states that by 2026, a quarter of the Internet’s users will be spending at least an hour per day in virtual reality. So what is this Metaverse, really, why does it have the potential to boom?

Metaverse: the basics

The term ‘Metaverse’ appeared first in the science fiction novel “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson in 1992. Set on a futuristic backdrop, the story unfolds humans’ interaction with each other and with software agents (as avatars) in an online-enabled virtual space similar to the present-day internet. Stephenson named this virtual space the Metaverse. It represented his vision of the future evolution of the internet on the lines of virtual reality technology. Currently, the features of Web 3.0 - continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, and objects - empower it to grow at the current scale of expansion. The Metaverse marks an advanced chapter in our cultural and digital history. It offers innovative ways and alternative modes of storytelling, thereby shifting the bridge between the physical and virtual realms. Video games like Robolox or Fortnite, in which players can build their own words, have metavere-adjacent tendencies. If you are working in a virtual reality-enabled workplace, you are working in the Metaverse. There is no single Metaverse space, however. It’s Metaverses.

The current consensus

Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist and essayist, believes the Metaverse to be not a virtual world or a space, but “a sort of successor state to the mobile internet”- this ties with the idea of Web 3.0. There “will be no clean ‘Before Metaverse’ and ‘After Metaverse,’” he says. 

“Instead, it will slowly emerge over time as different products, services and capabilities integrate and meld together.” Mark Zuckerberg, on the other hand, shared his own view of the Metaverse recently on CNET: “We want to get as many people as possible to be able to experience virtual reality and be able to jump into the metaverse and to have these social experiences within that,” he inferred, referring to the company’s VR environment Horizon, propelled by Facebook’s Oculus headsets. What future awaits us? We believe that these are the key trends that have the potential to succeed by using the power of AI and Metaverse. 

These will also be the reason why people will spend more and more time in the Metaverse as years progress. 

• Use of the Metaverse in the Tourism industry to create multiple new experiences when you visit a city, a resort or want to research where to spend the time of your life; 

• Metaverse use and scale in property for creating better experiences for property city development and increase better experiences and relationships between developers, investors and, finally, clients’ buyers. 

• Metaverse use and scale in creative industries: creators, not just game developers will increasingly use the metaverse to create new revenue streams and expand their brands out of the scope of the digital global monopolies that don’t reward, for example, their follower base; 

• Even when it comes to the crypto space, Metaverse tokens have been among the most successful coins on the markets: Axie Infinity (AXS), The Sandbox (SAND), and Decentraland (MANA) outperformed Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2021.

A world of future possibilities

The Metaverse research shows that humans will utilise the technology in major ways. Marty Resnick, research vice president at Gartner, said: “Vendors are already building ways for users to replicate their lives in digital worlds - from attending virtual classrooms to buying digital land and constructing virtual homes, these activities are currently being conducted in separate environments.”

He added that “Eventually, they will take place in a single environment - the Metaverse - with multiple destinations across technologies and experiences.”

The tide is turning. Will we see users spending an hour in the metaverse on average by 2026? It looks likely. However, as was often the case, the pace of technological development may even be underestimated. Our Metaverse-based lives may soon prove to be the primary means of communication and interaction. The future is here.