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Summary: The Metaverse refers to a ‘virtual world’ where users can interact, shop, play games and work online using avatars. There are several different ‘virtual worlds’ that are perfectly poised to revolutionize the way individuals interact online. These virtual worlds have their own digital currencies, which can be used to buy and sell products online.

After Facebook’s announcement about changing its name to Meta, many are wondering how does the Metaverse work? The concept is still in its infancy; however, many companies are working on creating immersive virtual experiences for their users.

Simply put, the Metaverse has the potential to transform the way users interact, shop, work, and play online. The Metaverse utilizes virtual and augmented reality to provide incredible virtual experiences to its users. 

The global VR market is expected to reach $12 billion by 2022. The Metaverse has also created numerous opportunities for individuals to earn within the virtual realm. 

With all the hype around the Metaverse, many big brands such as Gucci and Nike have created virtual spaces for users to interact, play and make purchases for digital and real-life products. 

How Does the Metaverse Work?

The term ‘Metaverse’ was coined by Neal Stephenson in 1992. His book Snow Crashoutlined a prediction of the future where users were represented by avatars and were able to interact in a virtual world. It even featured digital currencies, which are gaining in popularity today. 

His predictions were surprisingly accurate, as this next generation of internet mainly consists of digital currencies and much more. Fast forward to today, and tech giants such as Meta, Microsoft, and NVIDIA have dedicated themselves to developing the Metaverse.

Considered to be “the future of social media,” the Metaverse covers many broad aspects of virtual experiences, such as gaming, virtual events, social interactions, and much more. Users utilize avatars to move around, play games and interact with other users and the environment.

The Role of VR in the Metaverse

Using VR, individuals can step into a virtual world with a 360-degree vision, where they can view stunning landscapes, explore vast new places, attend social events such as virtual concerts, and much more. Virtual reality is crucial in making the entire experience more immersive, as it blurs the lines between the real and virtual worlds. 

Digital Currencies and Virtual Economies

Each Metaverse also has its in-game currency, which can be used to buy or sell digital products. For example, the Sandbox has SAND, Decentraland uses MANA, etc. Users can exchange these currencies for real-life money at cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase, and more. Users can connect their wallets to these platforms to start making transactions.

Most Metaverse platforms allow users to buy, sell and create digital assets. Each platform provides development tools that users can use to create virtual environments and much more!

Real estate in the Metaverse is also extremely popular nowadays, with many investors seeking to get significant returns on their investments within the virtual space. One of the most expensive land parcels sold to date was for $4.3 million in the Sandbox Metaverse.

Celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton have also purchased land within the Metaverse. They intend to launch their Metaverses to connect with their fans. Users can enter these Metaverses to play games, purchase accessories, and interact with other like-minded individuals virtually.

Different Types of Metaverses

There are primarily two types of Metaverses, i.e., Centralized and Decentralized. Before selecting a Metaverse, it is essential to understand the difference between both. 

Centralized Metaverses offer users a chance to interact and share experiences, but they do not have the freedom to control their environment. A single entity runs the entire virtual space, and they have its own set of policies that would have to be followed to be a part of that world. One of the most famous examples of this type of Metaverse is Roblox.

Decentralized Metaverses offer much more flexibility in terms of user freedom. The power to make decisions is passed on to the community. Owners of land within Decentralized Metaverses can shape their environments, buy and sell their assets and much more. Examples of decentralized metaverses include the Sandbox, Decentraland, and much more.

How To Work in the Metaverse

The Metaverse is rapidly evolving, and there are plenty of opportunities for individuals to earn. For those wondering how to work in the Metaverse, the first step is to analyze what skills you possess. 

A job in the Metaverse would primarily involve AI, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Game Development, Blockchain, and other mainstream Web3 Technologies. There are also additional opportunities in platform moderation, customer support, and brand development.

With tech giants such as Meta, Microsoft, AMD, and NVIDIA working on developing the necessary infrastructure of the Metaverse, the demand for skilled individuals is rapidly increasing.

Here’s what you need to do to land a job in the Metaverse:

• Gain the Necessary Skillsetafa

If you’re applying for a 3D developer position, you must be experienced in software such as Blender, Cinema 4D, Maya, and more. Knowledge of Unreal Engine or Unity may also be highly beneficial since many companies use these tools to develop the Metaverse. For example, the AFAR metaverse is using the Unity engine for its development. 

For software engineers, tech companies are looking for skilled engineers with experience in React, Javascript, API integrations, distributed systems, and more. Getting certifications to prove your knowledge of these domains might help you get an edge over other applicants. 

There are also opportunities for moderators or people looking to work on digital currencies and NFTs. 

• Stay Up To Date

Join discord servers, and stay up to date on Metaverse-related news and projects to identify potential opportunities for you to work on. Interact with people and share your thoughts on the space to be recognized. Networking is key when it comes to getting a reliable job. 

You can also participate in contests to sharpen your skillset and get noticed by decision-makers looking to add talented people to their teams. By keeping updated on who is working on the Metaverse, job seekers will be able to find plenty of suitable opportunities. 

• Create A Portfolio

While there are many entry-level jobs within the Metaverse space, it is crucial to keep building your brand by creating a portfolio. You can volunteer for specific projects to gain the necessary experience. 

For example, if you’re seeking a career in software development, create some sample projects by volunteering for someone working on the Metaverse. Or, if you’re looking to get into brand development, offer social media services for free to a new NFT project.

What Companies Are Working On The Metaverse

Several companies are working on developing infrastructure for the Metaverse. These companies are working relentlessly to be a part of this incredible digital revolution. There are different niches for companies to work on the Metaverse. For example, companies can focus on creating 3D development tools, new metaverses, improving VR/AR headsets, establishing virtual economies, and much more.

If you’re wondering who is working on the Metaverse, we’ve listed some of the top ones below: 

• Meta: Meta has silently been making strategic acquisitions to cement its position as a major player in the Metaverse. One of their earliest acquisitions was VR company Oculus for $2 billion in 2014.  

The company is building its Metaverse called Horizon Worlds, where users can interact, attend virtual events, and more. Users utilize avatars to move around the Metaverse to explore different areas and meet new people. 

In terms of hardware development, the company is also researching sensor-based systems to make the Metaverse experience more interactive. This includes haptic gloves, AI-Based Skin, more immersive VR headsets, and more.

• NVIDIA: Even though NVIDIA is widely known for its graphical processing units, the company has been making huge waves within the Metaverse space for its 3D Design Collaboration Platform, Omniverse.

The platform helps developers utilize pre-built templates to create 3D designs and scalable systems. It also has several features that allow users to share their work and collaborate effectively, thus enhancing productivity.

Large companies such as Lockheed Martin and BMW are already testing their Omniverse to create virtual replicas of real-life objects and processes. This allows them to maximize their factory workflows and achieve better results. 

• Microsoft: Microsoft has adopted a different approach towards the Metaverse by focusing their efforts on what they call ‘Mixed  Reality’. The company has been working on reshaping the exciting world of Augmented Reality.

Their HoloLens allows users to superimpose virtual images onto their real-life surroundings. Many large companies such as Heinz and Kawasaki are already testing the HoloLens in their factories to help solve supply chain problems, increase overall efficiency, and much more!

• Unity: Known previously for their games, many companies prefer the game engine Unity as it is easier to find skilled talent to develop solutions within it. The engine allows an “out of the box” way of thinking and helps users interact with the Metaverse.

This gaming engine aims to help developers create 3D content for different Metaverses. End users wear VR headsets to experience the other features the software engineers develop. 

Unity will be highly instrumental in metaverse development as it allows developers to create and edit Metaverse surroundings and assets within 3D.

Conclusion

Remember, the Metaverse is still rapidly evolving. There are many unknowns since the technology just hasn’t caught up yet. However, with the hype around the Metaverse and the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies worldwide, the exciting possibilities within the Metaverse space seem more achievable than ever. We hope this article has helped explain how the Metaverse works; we’ve also included some tips on how to work in the Metaverse. 

FAQs

• How Do I Enter the Metaverse?

First, select a Metaverse platform such as the Sandbox and sign up as a user. You can then begin customizing your avatar. Once your avatar is ready, you can step into the virtual world to start creating new experiences.

• What are the Benefits of Buying Land within the Metaverse?

Virtual real estate is extremely popular nowadays, and users can buy them to sell it for profit. Other benefits include having your own ‘land’ within the Metaverse, where you can shape your experiences and connect with others. 

• Do you need VR to enter the Metaverse?

While you do not necessarily need a VR headset to enter most Metaverses, you will only be able to experience the truly immersive nature of the 3D virtual space once you use the headset to enter.

Quelle:

https://metaverseinsider.tech/2022/09/05/how-does-the-metaverse-work/

Metaverse ist eines der meistdiskutierten Wörter im Internet der letzten Jahre, sei es durch die NFT-Spiele oder die Vorschläge für Virtual Reality und Augmented Reality, dieses Wort verspricht die Evolution des Internets zu sein. Welche Rolle spielt Japan in diesem Universum? In diesem Artikel werden wir alles über das Metaverse in Japan sehen!

Beachten Sie im gesamten Text einige interessante Daten über das Metaverse in Japan, wie die Japaner in die virtuelle Welt eintauchen, was Japans Vorschläge für das Metaverse und sogar einige anime sind, die sich mit dem Thema befassen.

Metaverse ist die Bezeichnung für eine immersive, kollektive und hyperrealistische virtuelle Umgebung, in der Menschen mit angepassten 3D-Avataren zusammenleben können. In diesem Universum wird es möglich sein, Charaktere, Umgebungen, Grundstücke, Häuser zu handeln, Produkte zu kaufen und zu verkaufen wie in der realen Welt. 

Es funktioniert als eine Art Online-Rollenspiel, in dem es jedoch wirklich möglich sein wird, alles zu erreichen und trotzdem damit zu verdienen und zu leben. Einer der wichtigsten Vorschläge ist das Eintauchen in die vollständige virtuelle Realität von Full Dive. 

Das Metaverse ist nicht nur eine neue Art zu leben oder Einkommen für einige zu generieren, es bringt Menschen näher zusammen und bietet Benutzern immersivere Erfahrungen auf eine zugänglichere Weise.

Der Zweck des Metaversums ist es, nicht nur das Sehen und Hören einer neuen Welt zu präsentieren, sondern ein vollständiges Eintauchen in körperliche Empfindungen, von Berührung und Temperatur und sogar von Geruch und Geschmack. 

Einer der Vorschläge des Metaversums besteht darin, es den Menschen zu ermöglichen, in einem Geschäft einzukaufen, ohne dorthin gehen zu müssen, und die Erfahrung beizubehalten, als ob sie im Geschäft wären. Ein weiterer Vorschlag ist, Shows und Events so zu veranstalten, als ob Sie dort wären. 

DIE METAVERSE IN JAPAN

Die Vermischung des Realen mit dem Virtuellen findet in Japan seit vielen Jahren statt. Japanische Spiele sind im Allgemeinen immersiv Visual Novel versuchen bereits, ihre Spieler mit Beziehungen und Freunden in ein neues Leben zu führen.

Etwas, das in letzter Zeit populär geworden ist, sind YouTube-Kanäle, bei denen die Moderatoren meistens Charaktere im Anime-Stil namens V-Tube sind. Etwas Starkes, da die Japaner Anonymität sehr schätzen.

Vor einigen Jahren wurde mit dem Aufkommen der Virtual-Reality-Brille ein Spiel populär VRchat, wo wir viele kleine Universen voller Anime-Charaktere und realistischer Kreationen finden können. 

Seit 2011 finden Augmented Reality Shows mit Anime-Charakteren wie dem berühmten statt Hatsune Miku. Japan ist dem Metaversum seit vielen Jahren beigetreten, natürlich nicht so, wie sie es vorschlagen. 

In Japan gibt es bereits Dienste, bei denen die Person einige Aktivitäten wie das Einsetzen von Wattestäbchen in die Ohren oder sogar sexuelle Aktivitäten mit Anime-Charakteren unter Verwendung von Augmented Reality erleben kann. 

INFORMATIONEN ÜBER DAS METAVERSE IN JAPAN

Im August 2021 wurde von den beiden vtuber Nem und Mila eine Umfrage zum sozialen Leben in der digitalen Welt bzw. Metaverse in Japan durchgeführt.Sehen Sie einige interessante Informationen zu diesem Thema.

Laut der Umfrage verwenden 90% der Japaner VRChat, aber andere beliebte Apps sind Virtual Cast, Cluster und NEOS VR. Es gibt andere mobile Apps, die für Online-Meetings mit Anime-Charakteren verwendet werden. 

Etwa 481 TP2T der japanischen Benutzer dieser virtuellen Welt sind in ihren 20ern, während 291 TP2T in ihren 30ern sind. Nur 31 TP2T der Benutzer sind über 50 Jahre alt, während 121 TP2T in den 40ern sind und 81 TP2T der Benutzer unter 10 Jahre alt sind. 

Etwa 50% der Benutzer greifen täglich auf Metaverse zu. Andere 25% greifen normalerweise mindestens zweimal pro Woche zu. Fast die Hälfte der Zugriffe dauert normalerweise bis zu 3 Stunden, während 32% von ihnen normalerweise 6 bis 12 Stunden dauern. 

Nur 2% der Benutzer verwenden ihren richtigen Namen in Metaverse, während diese Zahl in anderen westlichen Ländern bei etwa 20% bleibt. Ungefähr 25% der Benutzer ändern ihre Stimme auf irgendeine Weise. 

• 87% – Treffen Sie sich mit Freunden; 
• 76% – Erkunde Welten; 
• 59% – An Veranstaltungen teilnehmen; 
• 53% – Spielen; 
• 34% – Erstellen Sie Welten und Avatare; 
• 11% – Leben machen; 

ZEICHENTYPEN IN DER METAVERSE

Unten ist ein Prozentsatz der Charaktere, die im Metaverse erstellt wurden: 

• 78% – Weibliche Charaktere; 
• 13% – Männliche Charaktere; 
• 9% – Andere Arten von Zeichen; 
• 45% – Humanoide; 
• 43% – Halbhumanoide; 
• 5% – Roboter und Cyborgs; 
• 3% – Monster und Tiere; 
• 2% – Andere; 

VORSCHLÄGE FÜR METAVERSE IN JAPAN

Neben Spielen wie VRChat werden in Japan bereits reale Projekte durchgeführt, um Nachbarschaften in der virtuellen Welt nachzubilden.2020 fanden Veranstaltungen wie Comiket unter dem Namen Comicvket virtuell statt.

ein Netzwerk von Convenience-Stores aus Japan namens Lawson nahm ebenfalls an dem Projekt teil und hat ihren Laden als Stand in der virtuellen Version von Akihabara und zeigt damit das Engagement verschiedener Unternehmen in diesem neuen Metaversum. 

Japanische Unternehmen, die Virtual-Reality- und Augmented-Reality-Dienste anbieten, kartieren bereits die Stadt Tokio und liefern Dateien, die als Umgebungen für Shows und Veranstaltungen verwendet werden können. 

Bereits die Firma NTT Docomo sagte, in der Lage zu sein, Charaktere im Metaverse zu erstellen, die die Bewegungen der Benutzer widerspiegeln. Wenn Benutzer blinzeln oder lächeln, können ihre Avatare dieselben Aktionen in Echtzeit ausführen. 

DIE METAVERSE-PROBLEME IN JAPAN

Seit Jahrzehnten haben wir eine riesige Anzahl von Japanern, die mehr im Internet leben als in der realen Welt. Dieser Lebensstil verursacht am Ende soziale Probleme beim Aufbau von Freundschaften, Beziehungen und Menschen wie Neet zu Hause isolieren.

Als Reaktion auf die NFT-Projekte sind die Japaner bereits schlau und viele sehen diesem Geschäft bereits negativ gegenüber. Obwohl es sich um ein gutes Angebot handelt, wissen wir, dass viele nur geschaffen werden, um wie Pyramiden schnellen Gewinn zu erzielen. 

WEIBLICHE CHARAKTERE? 

Ein weiteres sehr häufiges Problem, ob in Japan oder im Westen, ist die Wahl weiblicher Charaktere in Online-Spielen. Ob in Virtual Reality oder traditionellen Online-Spielen, die meisten, ob männlich oder weiblich, wählen weibliche Charaktere. 

Aus diesem Grund sind viele vorsichtig, wenn es darum geht, eine Online-Beziehung zu beginnen, da sie nicht wissen, mit welcher Art von Person sie sich verabreden. Männer hingegen erschaffen oft Charaktere und geben vor, Frauen zu sein, um sich Vorteile zu verschaffen. 

Nur 9% der Metaverse-Benutzer auf dem japanischen VRChat sind weiblich, aber 78% der Charaktere sind weiblich. Natürlich bevorzugen einige Männer weibliche Charaktere, weil sie nett anzusehen sind (ich sage das, weil ich weibliche Charaktere in Offline-Spielen wähle). 

Ist das der Grund für den Otaku-Anruf? Femboy-Charaktere aus dem Trap-Anime? Das Seltsamste daran ist, dass 75% in einer Umfrage angegeben hat, dass die Kenntnis des realen Geschlechts einer Person kein relevanter Faktor für die virtuelle Beziehung ist. 

Dies ist der am besten geeignete Anime, um zu zeigen, wie das Metaverse in einigen Jahren aussehen wird. Wir können im Anime ein vollständiges Eintauchen in die virtuelle Welt und auch eine Mischung mit Augmented Reality beobachten. 

Der Anime erzählt die Geschichte eines kleinen, dicken jungen Mannes mit dem Spitznamen Haru, der leidet Mobbing in der Schule. Eines Tages wird er einem beliebten Mädchen vorgestellt, das ihn einlädt, ein Spiel zu spielen, das die Welt selbst als Kulisse verwendet und reale Vorteile mit bewusstseinserweiternden Fähigkeiten bietet. 

Dies ist einer meiner Lieblingsanime, der in Japan leider nicht viel Aufmerksamkeit erregt hat. Basierend auf einer Light Novel ist dieses Werk vom selben Autor von Sword Art Online, aber meiner Meinung nach viel interessanter. 

Der Anime folgt der Geschichte eines 30-jährigen Charakters namens Morioka Moriko, der ein volles Leben im Internet lebt und als kompletter NEET gilt. In einem Online-Spiel erschafft sie einen männlichen Avatar namens Hayashi und lässt sich romantisch mit einer weiblichen Figur ein. 

Ich empfehle, sich diesen Anime genau anzusehen, wenn Sie etwas über die sozialen Probleme erfahren möchten, die das Metaverse bei Menschen verursachen kann, und auch über die positiven Erfahrungen, die die virtuelle Welt bieten kann. 

Der Anime baut eine Brücke und spielt im selben Universum wie Accel World eine ältere Technologie sein. Mit mehr als 4 Saisons zeigt Sword Art Online sehr gut die Entwicklung von Technologien, die Virtual Reality und das Metaversum beinhalten. 

In Sword Art Online-Spielen ist es möglich zu essen, zu arbeiten, Häuser zu kaufen, intime Beziehungen zu haben und sogar Schmerzen zu empfinden. Wenn Sie eine Demo des Metaverse in Japan wünschen, Schwertkunst online Es ist ein essentieller Anime. 

Quelle:

Alles über Metaverse in Japan

Dropp has an ambitious plan, concrete aspirations, and a new business partner.

The social aspect of the metaverse has incredible potential to change how we live our lives. The problem is that right now, most social “metaverse” platforms are in VR – meaning that they can only change our lives while we’re wearing a headset. This creates a potential disconnect between our physical and virtual lives rather than an integration. Dropp has a different idea.

Dropp wants to create a social metaverse that uses digital twins of real cities as a virtual scaffolding to build AR experiences. And, today, September 8, they’ve announced the acquisition of just the company to help them do it. To learn more, ARPost talked with Dropp’s CEO and co-founder Gurps Rai.

Meet Dropp

“I would call us a feature-forward Web3 enabler,” said Rai. “The genesis of the company was really around experiential commerce.”

Some of DroppLabs’ earliest claims to fame involved a toolset that allowed viewers to purchase objects in real time by clicking on them in a video player. One of the biggest successes involved recording artists wearing merch in videos that viewers could order for themselves by clicking the clothing item. The service is now offered in AR as well, and has grown in other ways.

“Since then, we’ve also added the capability for artists to create NFTs inside of their music videos, which brought us into the ‘phygital’ space,” said Rai.

The concept of the ‘phygital’ experience has been one that Rai has been eagerly awaiting, even though he wasn’t sure how it would work. Until recently, that is.

“The metaverse is this convergence of the physical and digital worlds,” said Rai. “You can [physically] walk down 5th Avenue and have a similar experience to someone walking down 5th Avenue in the [virtual] version.”

To Rai, Flyy was a missing link.

The “Real-World Social Metaverse”

Flyy operates a “real-world social metaverse company” built around digital twins. “Digital twin” can mean a lot of things, but in this case it’s a digitally reconstructed physical space. In the case of Flyy, these digital twins allow users to post messages tagged to physical locations.

These messages can be encountered on the street through an AR mobile app, but they can also be seen in a thousand-foot view giving live information about an entire area – kind of like some seasonal applications of the Snap Map. Today, Dropp announced acquiring Flyy for a cool $25M.

“I am thrilled to bring Flyy into the Dropp Group portfolio. Collectively, we’re now poised to revolutionize the metaverse and Web3 industries,” Adel Al Massarani said in a release shared with ARPost. Al Massarani is the founder of Flyy and had served as CEO – though following the acquisition he will transition to “Chief Metaverse Officer” at Dropp.

The great upside of Flyy – the use of digital twins – is also its largest obstacle. These twins have to be painstakingly produced in order for the service to work properly in a given area. Rai explained that the company’s current phase is “getting Manhattan up and running.” The task is both incredibly large and, in terms of the scale of a real-world metaverse, incredibly small.

But, the plan offers an incredibly detailed solution that avoids many of the problems of other “virtual real estate” platforms. Each digital twin of each building can be sold as its own NFT. The team is still deciding which blockchain they want to use, but before they cross that bridge they still have to think about building out their virtual world.

“The idea is to keep building [Flyy’s] team and build with other developers to scale,” said Rai.

A Few Tall Orders

Without getting into the intricacies of NFTs, the idea of having NFTs of individual buildings is at least as tall an order as having a digital twin for each building. Further, other organizations are already making digital twins of the world, but these are seldom integrated into robust applications in any meaningful way.

But, like every other monumental objective that Drop offers, their approach has some huge potential benefits. The model is intended to operate as a sort of spatial domain for properties. It also means that owners don’t have to purchase whole city blocks like with other virtual real estate platforms.

Further, Dropp is working with the owners of the buildings themselves, rather than setting up the model that anyone can own the virtual stake on someone else’s physical property. This prevents any random person from buying the digital twin of someone else’s building. It’s also required from a software perspective to build the digital twin itself.

Rai also says that NFT buildings will help when the company is ready to explore interoperability with other platforms. But, this may be a sticky situation. As noted, there are other “real-world metaverse” platforms out there. Will platforms that all promote owning the virtual rights to physical land be able to cooperate with companies that have sold those rights to someone else?

And will other real-world metaverse platforms have difficulty with interoperability in the real world because of physical spaces having multiple digital owners? Different AR companies from Darabase to ARIA have different approaches to these issues but the question is becoming more complicated rather than less complicated.

A Complicated Ecosystem

Rai spoke of the metaverse as being a convergence of other emerging technologies and Dropp is a microcosm of that.

By using digital twins, blockchain, and lots of classic Web2 know-how, the company is presenting a model that will take a lot of work but may solve a lot of problems and offer unprecedented utility. But they’ll have to find the right place in the ecosystem to make it all work.

Quelle:

How Dropp Is Building a Real-World Metaverse From Digital Twins

Today I share with my Linkedin community one of my most ambitious projects, trying to shape the future of our lives and the relationships in the metaverse. I’m grateful to have the support of an awesome team of scientists, creative and business colleagues, partners from the scientific field like genetic labs and blockchain experts.

The main concept is to merge our real DNA data with science art and the future metaverse. There are thousands of NFT collections out there, but this is the first NFT project with an artistic interpretation of the user’s genetic data. In the near future, most of us will be surfing the web 3.0 with avatars and our goal is to have something a little bit more human than a “digital asset”, at least that asset will have our own genetic essence which connects our soul with the virtual world. I’m envisioning more than a metaverse, I’ll call it a #biometaverse.

The project called DNAverse aims to preserve the essence of organic life in the digital context and find a way to mix both worlds organically. 

As Gary Vee said once, “everybody will have digital assets in less than 15 years”, so our mission is to make them all able to impregnate a little bit of their soul and genetic essence to their NFTs in this era. 

I’m envisioning that we will be influenced by this approach with a huge impact. In a decade when everything becomes even more digital we will need to identify ourselves as humans with some kind of a geneticized blue check. 

So when millions of users will use social media platforms and create digital relationships based on NFTs and the overall ecosystem will embrace blockchain at a massive scale, many of us will geneticize our NFTs to own something more than a digital asset but to have a piece of us impregnated into it. This comes with a wide variety of benefits but also with a vision of a change in the future metaverse.

I know it sounds kind of crazy but also, how about health recommendations and customized nutrition and fitness based on our DNA-based NFT, even wearing fashionable clothes personalized with a style based on our genetics, or matching on Tinder with a real verified human on the metaverse instead of realizing you were chatting with an IA bot.

A disruptive project like this one will always have skeptical people and haters but also visionary and early adopters and the last ones will be the precursors of a genetic metaverse.

What I could assure is that besides the ownership of all the digital assets and user identities, we all need something that we can relate to in a deeper way and identify ourselves with that digital asset ( NFT ), etc… I don´t mean verify the property, that’s what blockchain is for, I mean something we can be proud of owning, love, feel identified, and connect ourselves with it.

The creative and artistic interpretation of the DNA data extracted from the user’s test kits will be managed with high protocol standards by a specialized genetic test lab in Denmark.

A great community will grow as the ancestors of the #biometaverse, at the beginning just a few visionary people, then it will spread as a trend, and afterward, it will be a massively adopted feature for all of us in our digital relationships in any platform we use.

The project has planned many other features to benefit the community like a decentralized platform, health services, community meetings, business opportunities, etc…

More than a scientific paper I write this article to share opinions since the whitepaper is still under development, anyway you will get updates on the website or discord / twitter.

I would like to invite you all to join in this amazing trip that will shape our future digital relationships.  Waiting for your thoughtful opinions, thanks y’all.

Quelle:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/building-biometaverse-nfts-real-dna-data-javier-m-floren/

Dnaverse 2.0

The big players have founded a “forum”—but will it make the place come to life any sooner?

When Meta (formerly Facebook) announced in October 2021 that it would be developing metaverse technologies, it prompted a flurry of speculation and attendant announcements from other companies. Beyond that, it triggered an avalanche of confusion around what exactlythe metaverseis supposed to be.

Nearly a year later, the concrete details of the metaverse are as opaque as ever. The Metaverse Standards Forum, which launched on 21 June 2022, isn’t trying to wrangle those details—not directly. But the forum sees an opportunity to get everyone to sit down at the same (probably virtual) table and hash out the basic technologies needed. With a more solid foundation, the forum believes, the metaverse can better develop and evolve.

Now, the forum has announced that after two months of hashing priorities, it has a list of initial priority topics that will steer metaverse standards development in its domain working groups. The topics include both straightforward technical problems like augmented and virtual reality standards, as well as concerns around privacy, ethics, and user safety.

“I like the theory that there’s only one metaverse, and you go between different experiences within the metaverse. Because we need an analogy to the Web.”
—Neil Trevett, Metaverse Standards Forum

To be clear: The metaverse does not exist yet, and probably won’t for some years to come. But there’s enough industry interest in beginning the process toward building it—whatever it may ultimately be. So Neil Trevett, the chair of the Metaverse Standards Forum, says now is the time to start standardizing. “I think what we’re seeing, much to everyone’s surprise—including our own—is the level of interest in standards for the metaverse. I think there is a thirst, or hunger, for them.”

The Metaverse Standards Forum is being organized by the Khronos Group, a software consortium developing royalty-free standards around technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, and vision processing. The forum began with just 35 founding members, but its roster has in two months already ballooned to 1,500.

Standardizing the Standards

The MSF isn’t a standards body, Trevett says, so much as it’s a liaison to improve coordination and trust between the big commercial metaverse interests to date—including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and others using the technologies required for the creation, care, and maintenance of virtual worlds—as well as the standards organizations that will define those technologies. 

“What we’re doing is casting a wide net, because some of the companies and organizations in the forum know each other, but there are lots of people that don’t know each other at all,” says Trevett. Trevett is also president of the Khronos Group.

Although there are numerous competing visions of what the metaverse will be, many such visions have common points of connection. Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) tech will probably be involved. As will the drive toward shared experiences—whether that’s something exciting like attending a concert or more mundane like renewing your drivers license.

“I like the theory that there’s only one metaverse and you go between different experiences within the metaverse, because we need an analogy to the Web,” says Trevett.

“It’s going to be an evolution of the Internet as we know it today,” says David Morin, the executive director of the Academy Software Foundation, an organization working to standardize the visual-effects technologies pioneered by the movie industry. Morin says one way to envision that evolution is as a collection of situations to experience—a virtual Amazon storefront in which to browse products, rather than a flat Webpage—with the option to move between one situation and another. The idea isn’t entirely novel, he adds: “Many of these thoughts and experiments already exist in some corner of an industry or another.”

“I think most people have in mind something like the web,” says Dominque Hazael-Massieux, part of the management team for the World Wide Web Consortium standards body. ”You go to one place and another, and it just works, and you can keep some of the data you have from one place to another.”

Making the Virtual a Reality

So how will the metaverse feasibly be realized?

Some see it as a future iteration of (or replacement for) the Internet. But if so, the technologies that make it happen will need to be more tightly integrated than they are now. Beyond standardizing just AR and VR come related technologies like 3D modeling, volumetric video, and geospatial data.

According to Trevett, the Metaverse Standards Forum’s first meetings—held via Zoom—yielded a Google spreadsheet that spelled out the forum’s priority topics, enabling members to garner support for their own preferences.

“We’re seeing a number of domains emerging,” says Trevett. “At the highest level, there’s spatial computing—which is all the 3D stuff and 3D assets—avatars and apparel, geospatial, [extended reality], and user interface.”Trevett points to additional interest in user identity, privacy, ethics, openness, and accessibility concerns.

Nadine Alameh, the CEO of the Open Geospatial Consortium, which is developing geospatial and location data standards, says part of the forum’s appeal is that, beyond the nuts and bolts of technical standards, there simply hasn’t been a centralized place to talk about the vision and implications of the technology. “Because some of these conversations that are happening are not about standards at all,” she says. “But people don’t have another forum to talk about the vision of the metaverse.”

In all, members proposed more than 200 potential topics to prioritize for metaverse development. That list has been narrowed down to eight areas of interest, which will form the first domain working groups for the forum’s members to join. The list includes more technical challenges, such as interoperable 3D assets, user identity, augmented and virtual reality, and user interfaces. Broader challenges are also highlighted, including metaverse ethics, privacy and governance, and education and certification. 

Trevett calls the forum’s approach “Darwinian.” It’s focusing for now on foundational matters like technical standards. Then, how it functions and is used will remain up to member companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and others. 

Many of the forum members that IEEE Spectrum spoke with felt strongly about the problem of metaverse openness. Open standards—as opposed to proprietary ones—make a shared foundation with increased interoperability more likely. By analogy, think of the Worldwide Web’s HTTP protocol. Were it a closed or proprietary standard, multiple “webs” would likely have cropped up with varying user bases as well as technological standards. And whatever the proprietary “Web” would have ultimately become, it’d also likely have taken much longer to develop and blossom, if it ever would have blossomed at all.

As a second analogy, the wireless industry began working on 6G cellular standards in 2019. But 6G likely won’t come to fruition until 2030. Building the metaverse will be a multiyear effort, if not a generational one. “We’re just doing the building blocks,” says Alameh. “It’s really our kids who will actually build whatever that is. We’re just enabling, and I think that’s why you need to inject the ethics and the responsibility, because you’re building something new.”

Quelle:

https://spectrum-ieee-org.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/spectrum.ieee.org/amp/metaverse-standards-forum-2657941529

Virtual reality has become the foundation of the metaverse, but why is it so important?

Virtual reality (VR) technology is front and centre to Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverseplans. The CEO of Facebook-owner Meta has made it clear that the next stage of the revolution of the internet will involve more digital escapism than ever before. 

However, the Zuck is hardly alone in championing the advent of the VR paradigmshift. Indeed, technophiles have evangelised the coming of the new VR age for decades. VR has a long history, dating back to 1956. This was when one of the early VR systems, Sensorama was created.

The term VR was popularised in the 1980s and tech bros have awaited the introduction of a techscape akin to that envisioned in Ready Player One ever since. 

Yet despite those endorsements, mass-adaptation has so far eluded the VR industry. This could be about to change. 

The global VR market will be worth $51bn by 2030, a significant rise from an estimated $5bn in 2020, according to forecasts from GlobalData. The research firm estimates that the VR market will expand at a 27% compound annual growth rate leading up to 2030.

What is behind this sudden surge? Where is the growth happening? And, come to think about it, what is VR?

If you’ve caught yourself asking those questions, then you’re not alone. But don’t worry; we’ve got you covered.

How does virtual reality work?

So, let’s start with the basics: what is VR? The short answer it that it’s a shorthand for ways to access digital realms. The long answer to what VR is is a bit more complicated.

“[VR is a technology that] uses special equipment such as headsets or gloves fitted with sensors, sometimes in combination with physical environments or props, to generate realistic images, sounds, and other sensations that simulate a user’s physical presence in a virtual or imaginary 3D environment,” Rupantar Guha, analyst at GlobalData tells Verdict.

User need a VR headset in order to access the these digital realms. The headsets have built-in screens, one to cover for each eye, to eliminate all real world interactions. 

Visuals are rendered on those screens through direct connection with other devices, such as a PC. For untethered devices, visuals are rendered by an inbuilt computer system.

There are projects underway to develop solutions to stimulate the touch and feel of virtual objects.

Microsoft has developed one such project, christened the Claw. It is a handheld haptic controller enabling users to grasp, touch and trigger objects in a virtual world. 

What are the biggest business opportunities in virtual reality?

VR has been singled out as one of the most crucial technologies in Zuckerberg’s metaverse push. Whether or not the Facebook founder would’ve been equally enthused by the technology if the company hadn’t acquired Oculus Rift back in 2014 we’ll leave unsaid. 

What we can say is that the Meta CEO isn’t alone in singling out VR as a key technology. Several industries are already using VR technologies. VR is already used in in retail, aerospace, airlines, oil and gas, education, healthcare, training, collaboration, in innovation and work.

When it comes to end-users, GlobalData believes the consumer VR market has the most opportunities. The market accounted for 71% of total VR revenue for 2020. Consumer VR markets include gaming and retail.

GlobalData forecasts that the enterprise segment will eventually overtake the consumer segment in the VR market. The research firm predicts that the enterprise VR market will account for 62% of total VR revenue by 2030.

Guha believes gaming is “the most fertile ground for VR” in the consumer market. The technology is also gaining traction in social media and live streaming.

“Consumer-focused VR companies are striving for a semi-mythical killer app to make VR a mainstream hit,” Guha says. “Meanwhile, VR companies are increasingly exploring growth among enterprises.”

Why should businesses care about these opportunities?

The pandemic and the jump in remote work accelerated innovation and usage of VR. Analysts believe more people will begin to use VR in the next few years. 

“VR-based collaboration and training will become important use cases for emerging enterprise-grade metaverses in the coming years,” Guha says. “As a result, big companies (e.g., Accenture) are adopting VR for task-specific uses such as employee onboarding, virtual events, and collaboration. More VR-based use cases will emerge as the technology matures.”

Over the next few years, VR will impact the metaverse. The virtual reality industry is set to grow even more, leaving businesses the chance to use this opportunity to adapt and build on the technology to be apart of and contribute to future of the metaverse.

“While it is still in the early stages of development, tech companies are expanding the VR ecosystem and positioning it as a next-generation computing platform,” Guha says. “VR is also a critical enabler of the metaverse, an emerging mega-theme that could revolutionise digital media.”

Quelle:

Foto: Credit: K_E_N/ Shutterstock What exactly is virtual reality and why we should care?

https://www.verdict.co.uk/why-is-virtual-reality-important-to-the-metaverse/

Metaverse is a familiar buzzword today, but few people grasp what it really means. In the simplest terms, the metaverse is an online ‘place’ where physical, virtual and augmented realities are shared. The term, Metaverse, suggests a more immersive online environment that combines elements of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).

Metaverse

Expectations of the metaverse today are largely built on hype. You hear more about future and eventual potential than about the current situation. However, the long-range business opportunities are large enough to get the attention of Microsoft, Google, and other big-tech companies, all seeking to carve out a presence and lay claim to future riches in the metaverse.

The marketplace aspect of the metaverse will be crucial. How eager are people to pay ‘real-world’ dollars for digital items? Successfully monetising the metaverse will help to expand its usefulness, as a tool for non-revenue-generating activities.

Creation of a complex online environment

The looming creation of a complex online environment offers possibilities and challenges

For the physical security industry, the looming creation of a complex online environment offers possibilities and challenges. Establishing identity will be a central principle of the metaverse and various biometrics are at the core of ensuring the identity of someone interacting in the virtual world. Cyber security elements are also key.

On the benefits side, the security market is already taking advantage of technologies related to the eventual evolution of the metaverse. For example, the industry has deployed AR to provide information about a door lock’s status onto a screen, headset or smart glasses as a patrolling guard walks by.

Three-dimensional virtual dashboards

Three-dimensional virtual dashboards will revolutionise user interfaces, by providing information in real-time, superimposed onto video of a live scene. Think of it as a PSIM you wear on your head. Anything that needs immediate attention can dominate the virtual screen. Virtual reality has also found its way into various training scenarios, including security.

“We now have tools at our fingertips to support security in a physical building, including hardware, software applications, and even smart phones,” said Rob Martens, Allegion’s Chief Innovation and Design Officer, adding “The metaverse will become an aggregation point to make it simpler to pull more tools together seamlessly.”

Information aggregated into a ‘virtual workspace’

Today, rather than viewing security data on a laptop, security operators can see all the information aggregated into a ‘virtual workspace’. The heightened level of automation comes with more tools to simplify how operators interact with the data, which is combined into a seamless, customised augmented reality interface that facilitates easy control of the physical environment, using tools in the virtual world.

Elements of the metaverse will enable the physical security industry, among many others, to deal with employee labour shortages. The term ‘virtual workspaces’ can describe the various technology ‘hacks’ that have been developed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

New tools that aid in remote working

In addition to Zoom calls, companies have developed new tools that employees can use to work remotely

In addition to the familiar Zoom calls, companies have developed new tools that employees can use to work remotely. Elements of the metaverse will promote evolution of these tools into a seamless, responsive, real-time system that broadly encompasses more and more of an employee’s work experience into virtual form.

The trend towards working remotely and the development of tools to enable the new trend were accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. As these tools evolve, more employees will be able to work remotely, using the same tools that are driving the metaverse.

Development of more virtual workplace tools

A critical shortage of workers in many industries will also drive development of more virtual workplace tools. Performance of even traditionally ‘hands-on’ jobs will evolve to include remote capabilities with the help of virtual tools.

For example, imagine a warehouse worker who completes his tasks remotely from a computer screen or virtual reality headset that controls and directs a robot to do the heavy lifting in a factory that is miles away. People with disabilities will be able to perform more types of jobs.

Remote patrolling and operation of robots

In the security industry, a similar scenario is possible with the remote operation of robots to patrol a distant building. The security professional can control the robots using tools from the metaverse, such as a virtual reality headset, to direct their activities and to respond to situations, all with complete situational awareness.

Video enables the operator to ‘see’ what the robot sees and the video view is augmented with various datapoints in a dashboard configuration that is completely customisable to any situation. In the virtual world, a ‘button’ can be created anywhere to control anything. In short, the same technologies that are driving the metaverse will enable more workers to accomplish more jobs from home (or the local coffee shop).

Elements of the multiverse

You will see more automation, more robotics, and more remote piloting”

Rob Martens, Allegion’s Chief Innovation and Design Officer, said “Our labour scarcity problems will drive how successful the metaverse is for technology jobs. You will see more automation, more robotics, and more remote piloting. It’s just another way to interact with each other, with companies, with commerce, with tools – it’s just more immersive.”

Elements of the multiverse could also one day replace the expensive need for security operations centres (SOCs). The familiar room full of video monitors and other hardware could be replaced with virtual or augmented reality headsets driven by software.

Virtual Reality approach will save on power and space utilisation

In addition to saving the hardware costs of building the SOC, a Virtual Reality (VR) approach would save on power and space utilisation, rent, and the ability to retain employees. VR headsets further enhance the experience of a security centre operator by incorporating 3D graphics, video, customisable dashboards, and other elements. And everything is seamless.

The greater ability to interact with others in the metaverse promotes collaboration among security professionals and ensures more efficiency. The operators in a security centre would not need to be in the same room, if they are in the same ‘virtual space’, thus enabling them to collaborate even more effectively.

Travelling to various ‘places’ in the metaverse would enable an operator to ‘visit’ any number of remote physical locations and interface efficiently with the robots, and other systems in various places – all from the comfort of their home office. 

Quelle:

https://www.sourcesecurity.com/insights/metaverse-collaboration-efficiencies-security-co-11504-ga-sb.1647264173.html

Marketers have the ability to innovate in ways that were never before possible

By allowing people to interact with one another in immersive, three-dimensional virtual worlds, the metaverse offers an alternative to real-life social interaction. And while it’s still new and evolving, we cannot ignore its potential to disrupt our daily lives.

A perfect example of this is the rising trend of virtual influencers. Fictional characters on social media present a massive opportunity. Though several brands have partnered with virtual influencers and even created their own, it is safe to say this trend will expand even more this year as brands experiment in the metaverse.

Not such a crazy idea

While there are obvious differences between real and virtual influencers, people experience and interact with both in the same way. Most people interacting with Addison Rae, Zach King or Kendall Jenner have never met them in real life. Any connection or relationship between the creator and audiences is digital, and audiences mainly interact with influencers indirectly via the content they create.

A skeptic may say, “Well, theoretically, yes, but we still know that they are real people.” However, for years, most people on social media have been interacting with accounts that are not really a person at all.

These accounts are more commonly known as “meme accounts,” such as @FuckJerry and @MyTherapistSays on Instagram. These accounts have gained millions of highly engaged followers despite not having a persona.

One way of looking at a virtual influencer is the evolution of meme accounts. The only difference is you add a face, tone and POV. This is exactly what the meme account @Litquidity did when it created the virtual influencer, Bart P. Fuchs IV (@thisguyfuchz).

Success boils down to good storytelling.

Brands getting in the game

It’s no wonder brands are experimenting with virtual influencers to engage their customers. Using computer-generated imagery, they can create avatars with lifelike features and characteristics that partake in the same day-to-day, Instagram-worthy activities as human influencers, reaching similar audiences.

Collaborating with virtual influencers also allows brands to maintain complete control over the messaging and creative process from conception to execution. Marketers have the ability to innovate in ways that were never possible. For example, digital celebrity and Robloxcreator Kai was able to perform in seven different virtual concert venues simultaneously, an impossible feat for a human influencer.

Aside from just partnering with virtual influencers, brands can create the perfect brand ambassador or face for their brand. They don’t have to worry about their brand ambassador going off-script, aging or leaving for a competitor. Examples like KFC’s millennialized coloneland Mattel’s Barbie highlight the potential of having a virtual brand spokesperson.

A way for brands to personify themselves

We live in a world where brands are fighting for relevance and mindshare, and one of the key drivers of relevance is trust. People trust people.

That is why it’s becoming increasingly important for brands to personify themselves. A virtual influencer allows brands to anthropomorphize themselves, so they can be more relatable and connect better with audiences.

And in the metaverse, people can interact with these anthropomorphized characters. Think about the brand mascots we have seen in the past that are multidimensional and have a real persona, values and potentially even a character arc.

Can perfection be engineered?

Influencer marketing is undeniably powerful. With plenty of evidence to suggest that virtual influencers are effective, more brands will embrace their own avatars and take the next steps in building a deeper, richer community.

With virtual influencers, brands can tailor their creations to their audiences and communities, and they can engineer the perfect ambassador. Advancements in AI could provide the ability to go a step further, enabling brands to further engineer the perfect virtual influencer, so lifelike and socially intelligent that it blurs the lines between what’s real and what isn’t in the metaverse.

In the meantime, working with virtual influencers in the metaverse presents a massive opportunity for both new and established brands to build out their communities and establish deeper connections.

Quelle:

Foto: Fictional characters on social media present a massive opportunity for brands.Sanja Djordjevic/Getty Images

https://www.adweek.com/media/the-rise-of-virtual-influencers-and-their-role-in-the-metaverse/?utm_campaign=62d89f564b917c0001e241e9&utm_content=6311019149f32800010f4993&utm_medium=smarpshare&utm_source=linkedin

Introduction

Here at Memori, we think that interoperability will be applied way beyond games, digital apparel, and a few other types of assets. For us, it will become the foundation on top of which rich experiences across all fields will be created and shared.

We think that digital twins, knowledge, memories, conversations will be among the things users will one day transfer between virtual worlds.

TwinCreator, our platform to create complex digital twins and conversational experiences, is built with interoperability in mind, even beyond the metaverse. 

Because, although the metaverse is certainly where interoperability will express its full potential, the same principles can be applied in other scenarios too, even while moving from the digital to the physical space.

Metaverse: potential and challenges

Metaverse has been a bit of an overused (often misused) word, lately. Some define it as a truly revolutionary shift in our society which is about to take us by storm, some see it as a fuzzy concept with no long-term potential.

The truth is: it’s complicated.

To us, the metaverse can be described as the result of many technologies and ideas converging and aligning towards a common vision: creating virtual worlds where culture, work, education, entertainment, social activities, and pretty much every human activity can thrive in new, unimaginable ways.

A new layer for our society that can be seen as the synthesis of the physical world and its digital counterpart, effectively becoming a twilight zone between the two.

But as it often happens, a huge potential is counterbalanced by hard challenges: the metaverse is no exception. And since this revolution could change the world as we know it forever, it should be everyone’s priority in this space to make sure those challenges are being addressed properly.

It’s not only about ‘building’ the metaverse, it’s about building it RIGHT.

Interoperability is the key to a bright future

Among the many challenges, making interoperability a defining property of the metaverse is certainly one of the most critical.

But what does interoperability mean?

Interoperability means creating a unifying system which allows its nodes to be independent AND connected at the same time, making it possible for information and all kinds of user data to be transferable and to travel with their owner from one virtual world to the othereffortlessly.

Imagine buying a new pair of sneakers for one of your digital twins in Nike’s metaverse store, and immediately move to your favorite game and use them without any additional step.

This is just a simple example, we still cannot predict the infinite possibilities lying ahead.

But why is interoperability important?

For many reasons, actually.

It improves the user experience, reducing the gap with the physical reality (in the physical world, if you own something, you can take it with you everywhere), it empowers developers to build faster, it helps creating a fairer future for virtual experiences, where users really OWN their digital goods, the list goes on.

The current situation

The metaverse is a network of virtual worlds, where people can play, socialize, and work. But these worlds are still disconnected today.

Interoperability is simply not here, yet.

Two are the main reasons, one technological, one economical.

The first one is easy to imagine. To make the metaverse truly interoperable, at scale, there are many engineering and design puzzles to solve.

The second might be less obvious, but it’s actually the biggest threat to interoperability. Virtual worlds, today closed and disconnected, need the right incentives to open their gates and allow interoperability to spread. A profound shift in mentality and business models needs to happen. It takes time.

Interoperability might still be an emerging trend but it is steadily becoming a reality.

The gaming industry is a clear example: everyday, new projects are being launched that make games more and more similar to the vision of the metaverse the community is building.

Interoperability and decentralization

Interoperability builds on top of decentralization, and, for this reason, many concepts which are being developed in web 3.0 and other communities apply to it as well.

A system that is decentralized and interoperable puts people and the quality of their experiences at the center. 

Moreover, decentralization and interoperability create more ‘fluidity’ in the system, allowing new ideas to emerge more easily and with lower barriers to entry. 

In the past decades, we saw how closed ecosystems often create monopolies which are almost impossible to beat, even with far superior ideas. Always to the detriment of the users.

We want a future where people are free to switch and try new experiences, without feeling locked in one specific box.

The system should not care about which node people prefer at any given time. It should not care about the communities that are built and who builds them. 

The system should be a new “uncontaminated land”, a network that nobody owns and everybody owns, that simplifies the exchange and movement of goods but also knowledge, where human ingenuity can explore new ideas and really take-off without constraints, like it always did in the physical world.

If you want to start creating digital twins for you or your business, sign up to TwinCreator today:

https://twincreator.com/

You can also check out our consumer product here:

https://memorytwin.com/

Quelle:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/interoperability-metaverse-what-why-matters-memorisrl/?trackingId=oA2Hs%252BrWozg8vx30MrImlw%253D%253D

The metaverse is the new, experiential, immersive internet where we will take our digital avatars to work, learn and play across persistent environments. Whether you think we are heading for Ready Player One levels of immersion or that it’s just a lot of hot air and hype, the fact is businesses are pouring cash and resources into staking their place in this new digital world. And one of the main reasons they are doing so is the opportunities it provides to connect and engage with customers in a whole range of new ways.

Metaverse environments will allow us to talk and interact with brands and with each other, either through our avatars or by directly connecting to video chat portals and voice chat. The truth is no one exactly knows what will become the defining ways that we will use the metaverse, whatever form it eventually takes. Some – such as Facebook (so excited about the concept it rebranded its $100 billion-plus business as Meta), are convinced it will involve virtual reality (VR) and headsets. Others – such as those behind emerging metaverse platforms like Sandbox – say that while VR will play a part, it won’t be an essential part of the experience. To them, the decentralized, user-owned aspect of the metaverse will be far more integral to the experience than the hardware that we use to access it.

So taking both visions – and everything in between – into account, here’s an overview of some of the exciting implications that this red-hot tech trend has for how businesses will interact with and serve their customers in the near future.

The Pandemic and the Leap to Virtual

The global Covid-19 pandemic upended our lives in many ways but none so drastically as the acceleration of the shift to digital. Before the outbreak, we were increasingly choosing to shop, socialize, work and entertain ourselves in online environments. After it struck, this became less of a choice and more of a necessity for many – vastly speeding up the rate at which businesses chose to move their services online.

Many companies that found they were not set up to accommodate their customers’ needs through digital channels struggled, while those that had invested in social media, video chat, online customer service, and emerging technologies like AI chatbots thrived.

It’s these customer-oriented technology trends that are being touted as fundamental to what the metaverse will become. Companies moving into the metaverse – from entertainment brands like Disney to financial services giants like JP Morgan Chase – are banking on customers becoming increasingly happy with the service that they can provide through these channels. As investment grows, we can expect these offerings to evolve to fully leverage the convenience and instantaneousness that digital interaction offers. 

More Immersive and Engaging Interactions

The fact that we now value positive and efficient customer experiences more highly than traditional factors that we used to judge businesses on, like price or quality of products, is key to understanding the value of the metaverse to customer service. The idea of the metaverse is that interactions between users – customers, in this case – and the brands we want to spend money with will be more immersive and engaging. When avatars are connecting with each other – as in Meta’s (Facebook’s) Horizon virtual worlds – there’s the opportunity to observe and measure body language in new ways. This can include hand gestures, facial expressions, and a whole new visual language that will undoubtedly emerge to cope with metaverse social interaction – just as emojis have become a big part of text-based conversations. Three-dimensional metaverse spaces give users a sense of location and being that goes beyond what they are used to experiencing in “traditional” virtual and online spaces.

It doesn’t take a huge leap to imagine that businesses and brands will learn to observe, measure, capture, and analyze these details for clues about how they can most effectively engage with us. Think of it as social sentiment analytics ramped up to eleven – communication in the metaverse could take any form from text to voice, video, and synthetic content like avatars or computer-generated video. Businesses and organizations that make the most of the multi-trillion dollar opportunity the metaverse is said to offer will develop omnichannel approaches to extracting insights from all of this information and using them to make customer experience-oriented decisions. 

Automated Customer Interactions

As AI improves, self-service channels are an increasingly efficient and, therefore, appealing option, rather than having to sit in a seemingly endless holding pattern as we try and reach a human representative. As companies get better at serving customers in this way, they, of course, gather more and more data on how to do it effectively, leading to increasingly accurate automated customer service – that’s the plan, anyway.

AI, in this sense, can encompass computer vision and natural language processing technology – which watches and learns from our metaverse presence (avatar or otherwise) in order to ascertain what our issues are and how the company or brand may be able to help. Chatbots will evolve from the text boxes we’re used to now, with their somewhat hit-and-miss level of success when it comes to understanding our questions and finding the most appropriate answers. As deep learning algorithms improve, the number of occasions leading to them having to call in a human agent to take over the conversation should decline. One piece of research found that between 2017 and 2019, the percentage of chats that were able to handle end-to-end customer queries rose from 20 percent to almost 70 percent. This technology will undoubtedly be deployed by brands as they move into the metaverse space and offer customers quicker and more convenient paths through which to revolve their problems. 

In the metaverse, brands deploy digital 3D assistants to act as virtual tour guides, personal shoppers, troubleshooters, consultants or any of the other roles that their human agents can provide in the real world. And increasingly, they will be able to fill these functions either manually, with human-controlled avatars and one-to-one communications, or in an automated manner via AI agents. 

Brand Ambassadors

Brands are used to using influencers to promote and show off their products and services across social media. As the metaverse becomes more popular, it’s likely that they will adopt similar strategies in these more immersive and interactive environments. Brands like Nike and Gucci already create digital products designed to let us dress up our avatars in virtual worlds. Just as is the case in the real world, we can expect them to create limited edition releases to hand out to the most popular avatars with the largest audiences. This will undoubtedly impact the world of e-sports – competitive online gaming tournaments which will be held in the metaverse – as well as art, fashion, and music-related events which will find their home there too. 

To stay on top of the latest on the metaverse and wider business and tech trends, make sure to subscribe to my newsletter and have a look at my new book Extended Reality in Practice, which just won the Business Book of the Year 2022 in the Specialist Book category.

Quelle:

Foto:

How To Amplify Customer Relations In The Metaverse – ADOBE STOCK

https://www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2022/08/12/how-to-amplify-customer-relations-in-the-metaverse/amp/

After two years of Zoom classes, colleges are warming to the idea of holding classes in the metaverse. With $150 million invested, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is leading the charge.

Remember the Magic School Bus? In one episode, the eccentric, red-haired Miss Frizzle shrinks her class to the size of a red blood cell and they travel through the gut, veins and nervous system of their unsuspecting classmate Arnold. 

At Morehouse College, biology students are doing the same thing. Strapped into virtual reality headsets, students can step inside a human heart, build giant molecules and visit the Egyptian pyramids without stepping foot outside their dorm room. 

“Teaching in the metaverse is like being able to leave your physical reality and immerse yourself in a complete, digitally simulated environment. It can be anywhere in the world, in any timeline,” said Muhsinah Morris, principal investigator of the Morehouse in the Metaverse project. The historically Black college in Atlanta is one of ten so-called metaversities that offers classes via VR headset in a virtual classroom.

Colleges and universities have flirted with using virtual reality as a teaching tool for years, but until recently, few institutions invested in the technology. The headsets were bulky and expensive, and even with the hardware in hand, creating engaging, effective virtual teaching spaces is costly and requires skilled engineers. This fall, ten universities get a free ticket for entry; as part of its $150 million Meta Immersive Learning project, Meta—Facebook’s parent company—is bringing colleges into their metaverse. 

The University of Maryland Global Campus is one of them. The online-only school—which enrolls more than 45,000 undergraduates—doesn’t have any physical classrooms or student life spaces. Meta has sent the school dozens of headsets, free of charge. A selection of students in its introductory biology and astronomy courses—two of the five pilot courses this fall—will use them. 

“We’ve never had a campus before, and now we have our first,” said Daniel Mintz, chair of UMGC’s department of information technology. “It has a duck pond.” 

Designed by VictoryXR, an extended reality education software company based in Davenport, Iowa, the virtual campus is unmistakably a college campus. Georgian-style buildings with white columns encircle a bright green, grassy lawn. A pair of mallard ducks chase each other through a pond in the center. A rope swing hangs from a tree, and it’s a fun ride if you have the stomach for it. 

But despite having aspirations of creating a leafy college quadrangle, the space still looks and feels like you’re standing in an early PC game. It’s unnervingly empty—there’s no passersby, students playing Spikeball or professors on their lunch break. Moving around the space is jarring; while pressing forward on the joystick, it almost feels like the ground is coming out from beneath you. Users can bypass that feeling—and potential motion sickness—by using a point-and-click feature to teleport to a new location instantly. 

Mintz likened some of UMGC virtual campus’s functions to alternative versions of pages found on its website where users might fill out forms or communicate with a chatbot. In this new “Web3” campus a student could strap on a headset and walk into the administrative building where a financial aid officer’s avatar might meet with the student and answer questions. 

UMGC is offering five courses in virtual reality this fall. The university plans to loan the headsets to students and the courses won’t be any more expensive than a typical class at UMGC, which cost $312 per credit for in-state students and $499 for out-of-state students this year. Mintz admits that if the pilots are successful, scaling the VR offerings could be difficult. He hopes that eventually the hardware could be treated as course materials and covered by financial aid. 

“We can’t be in the headset business,” Mintz said. “We enroll around 60,000 students. If 10 percent took advantage of immersive opportunities—we can’t be shipping around 6,000 headsets.” 

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“We’re a construction company in the metaverse,” says Steve Grubbs of VictoryXR “We’ve made it through the long, hard slog of the early days of virtual reality. Now we’ve got some wind in our sails.”

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That is where Meta steps in, similar to the way Apple began donating thousands of its personal computers to school classrooms in the 1980s. Facebook’s parent company has donated hundreds of Quest 2 headsets—their newest model—to participating colleges through VictoryXR. In addition to Morehouse and UMGC, Meta will be sending its VR headsets to eight other institutions: the University of Kansas School of Nursing, New Mexico State University, South Dakota State University, Florida A&M University, West Virginia University, Southwestern Oregon Community College, California State University, Dominguez Hills, and Alabama A&M University. All of the participating institutions are all holding virtual classes this fall. 

Software provider VictoryXR is the brainchild of Steve Grubbs, a politician turned virtual reality entrepreneur. As chairman of the Iowa House of Representatives education committee in the early nineties, Grubbs passed the state’s first technology funding bill for K-12 schools to bring computers, software and audio and visual equipment to classrooms.

“My father was a school teacher and I tried to improve schools through policy making at the state level,” says Grubbs, 57. “I concluded that until students love to learn, it will always be a struggle to get them to learn. So I set out to create a product that gave students a love of learning.”

After advising several presidential campaigns—including the Iowa races for Steve Forbes in 2000, Tommy Thompson in 2008, and Herman Cain in 2012—and heading up a political consulting company, Grubbs turned to extended reality. He founded VictoryXR in 2016. 

When Forbes spoke with him, he was in Iceland shooting a 360-degree virtual experience for VictoryXR classrooms. The classrooms include a library of virtual field trips—from a visit to the Grand Canyon to an Iowa farm to the Great Wall of China. These are essentially 360-degree photographs that users can step into. VictoryXR has also created about 100 other animated virtual spaces available to colleges and homeschoolers, including a ride aboard the HMS Beagle to the Galapagos Islands, a walk through the U.S. Senate chambers and the Underground Railroad Museum. 

“They can put on a headset and see a glacier,” Grubbs said. “They can see the world—look up, look down at the ground and it’s all there.” 

In six years, VictoryXR has grown from three employees to a full-time staff of 35 with another office in Austin, Texas. The company brought in more than $1 million in revenue last year, and this year Grubbs is projecting to gross more than $2.2 million.

“We’ve made it through the long, hard slog of the early days of virtual reality,” Grubbs said. “Now we’ve got some wind in our sails.”

Colleges contract with VictoryXR to build a digital campus. A typical 5-7 building digital twin campus costs about $50,000, and Meta has helped the participating universities fund the construction. To build the campus, Grubbs’ team uses a mix of Google Earth images, photos from the institution and architectural plans. This fall, they’ll have rolled out a dozen digital universities. They hope to have 100 up and running in the next year.

“We’re a construction company in the metaverse. Our team is replicating every window pane, every brick,” Grubbs said. “If we work fast, we can get it done in eight to 12 weeks.”

In addition to paying for the initial build, VictoryXR charges institutions an annual subscription fee of $200 per student for access to virtual spaces. These include an underwater classroom, a chemistry lab inside a space station orbiting a giant proton, and a cherry blossom-filled clearing at the base of Mount Fuji. As colleges scale up their VR offerings, the company will earn more from access to these already built spaces. 

Meta isn’t currently charging the colleges involved, and a company spokesperson said that right now, “earning revenue from these partnerships is not a priority.”

“Education is an exciting use case for the metaverse, and Meta Immersive Learning will help creators around the world gain skills for the metaverse and create immersive experiences for learners,” the spokesperson said.

But Meta has big plans to turn the metaverse—where the digital campuses ultimately live—into a money-making machine. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the company aims to facilitate billions of dollars of commerce in the metaverse, and hopes to have at least one billion users in the space in the next decade. The company is currently dominating the VR space—a recent International Data Corporation report showed that Meta has captured 90% of the headset market. 

The first Quest headset marked a paradigm shift for virtual reality, said Daniel Coyle, lead software engineer at VictoryXR. Before its debut in 2019, virtual reality systems like the Google Cardboard used only three degrees of freedom, which meant users could look around a virtual space but couldn’t move laterally within it. The Quest, which uses six degrees of freedom, allows users to walk around and move up and down inside the virtual world. It’s also compact and doesn’t require a web of external cameras to track users’ movements.

“The Quest came out and it was $300, which was relatively inexpensive,” Coyle said. “You don’t need a PC, you don’t need a gaming graphics chip. [VR] wasn’t just for enthusiasts anymore.”

By comparison, the HP Reverb retails for around $400, the HTC Vive headsets start at $750, and the Valve Index costs more than $1,000. Meta is selling the hardware at a loss, according to Coyle. The Quest headsets should cost around $600 or $700 a piece.

“The only reason that worked was because Facebook was a big enough company that they could afford to take a massive loss on the hardware sales, and bank on the software sales and focus on getting mass adoption,” Coyle said. 

The virtual reality market was valued at $21.83 billion in 2021, and is expected to grow by 15 percent each year through 2030, according to a market analysis from Grand View Research. The race to develop online learning programs throughout the pandemic had led many colleges to reconsider virtual and augmented reality, especially for students who can’t be in the classroom, said James DeVaney, associate vice provost for academic innovation at the University of Michigan.

“We know that online learning developed in a crisis is not the same as elegantly designed virtual learning,” he said.

None of the pilot institutions Forbes spoke with—which included Morehouse, UMGC, Alabama A&M, the University of Kansas School of Nursing, South Dakota State, and CSU Dominguez Hills—will charge students extra to participate in the program, and they will loan the headsets to students during the pilot this fall. Kesa Herlihy, clinical assistant professor at the University of Kansas School of Nursing, said that headsets may eventually become part of a students’ course materials. Instead of purchasing a $150 nursing textbook or paying lab fees, students could be required to buy a VR headset.

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“Meta has big plans to turn the metaverse—where the digital campuses ultimately live—into a money-making machine. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the company hopes to have at least one billion users in the space in the next decade.”

---

Most classes will spend only part of their time in the virtual classroom. That time will focus on active participation by students, who will be running experiments, drawing in 3D or taking a virtual field trip. The nursing school is planning to use VR to simulate patient interactions.

“Patients are not all the same size, shape or color,” Herily said. “VR provides an opportunity to see patients, one behind the next, who are diverse. It presents more opportunities than you’d have with a single mannequin.”

VictoryXR does offer a lecture hall space, but that’s not what virtual reality is best used for, according to Coyle. As students and faculty get used to the headsets, a time limit is probably for the best. Despite being an improvement over past hardware, the Quest 2 headset still feels heavy and uncomfortable after about an hour. 

All 10 colleges have different plans for their digital twin campuses. South Dakota State will host organic chemistry and anatomy classes in VR. Horace Crogman, a professor at CSU Dominguez Hills, will teach physics in a virtual classroom. Morehouse has ventured outside of STEM courses and plans to offer world history and some English classes in VR. The digital replica campuses are exciting, DeVarney said, but colleges shouldn’t limit themselves to virtual recreations of what they already have.

“Why limit ourselves to what we already know? An urban campus might have certain constraints, and a rural campus might have different kinds of affordances … but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be extending our environments further,” DeVarney said. “This is a space that’s going to be in a fair amount of flux for the next five years. I don’t see it going away, but what’s going to be interesting is separating initiatives that are hype versus those that are following a more methodical R&D approach.”

Quelle:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/deloitte/2022/06/20/stemming-the-flow-how-to-keep-women-in-finance/?sh=595f00a833dd

Rap artists Snoop Dogg and Eminem performed as Bored Apes for MTVs first-ever immersive awards show

The MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) Metaverse-fuelled programme saw its viewings rise 3 percent on Sunday evening, attracting 3.9 million viewers compared to 3.7 million from the previous year.

The VMAs launched its “Best Metaverse Performance” category to attract viewers interested in the spatial communications platform as a medium of art, which nominated major artists such as Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, and others for hosting their performances across virtual platforms.

Blackpink, a South Korean girl group, took the first award at the event, with a Meta Platforms spokesperson tweeting their excitement on the groundbreaking win.

According to an MTV spokesperson speaking to ITK,

“[MTV] saw the opportunity to highlight and honor some of the best, most impactful executions of this — and celebrate artists who have found creative ways to use these spaces — which led to the addition of ‘Best Metaverse Performance’ category this year”

Eminem, Snoop Dogg Join the Otherside

At the ceremony, hip hop superstars Snoop Dogg and Eminem also performed their hit title, “From the D to the LBC” to commemorate their hometowns of Detroit and Long Beach, California, respectively.

Technologies from the Otherside metaverse platform and MTV’s partnership with Yuga Labs created the immersive experience, where the duo performed as Bored Ape avatars.

According to its website, the Otherside is a “gamified, interoperable metaverse” that combines massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) mechanics and Web3-based virtual environments, along with non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

The virtual world will also allow users to use Otherdeed virtual world land plots ahead of the launch of the virtual space, where a total of 200,000 are set to launch. 100,000 released on 30 April and an additional 100,000 will be awarded to ‘Voyagers’ contributing to the platform’s development.

Bored Apes and Mutant NFT holders can host their digital assets on Otherside and allow users to buy and sell Otherdeeds with the former’s ApeCoin cryptocurrency.

MTV Goes Phygital for the VMAs

The news comes amid a downturn in awards programmes on cable television due to lower interest from audiences over the last few years.

A recent Nielsen poll found that video streaming services had surpassed cable and broadcast television in July, with the former taking nearly 35 percent and the latter two 34.4 percent and 21.6 percent, respectively.

To boost participation in the winning picks for the ceremony, the VMAs allowed audiences to join games and vote for their top picks in a first-ever immersive experience via Roblox. The 2022 Grammys also recently launched an NFT collection for viewers, reports read.

MTV’s awards ceremony nominated artists hosted on numerous metaverse platforms such as Fortnite, Minecraft, Wave, Roblox, and PUBG: Mobile. Snoop Dogg, a longstanding advocate of the Metaverse, recently launched Snoopverse land sales on The Sandbox amid a massive boom in virtual real estate.

Artists such as MUSE, Travis Scott, David Guetta, Steve Aoki, Grimes, and 22Gz have also made headlines for their immersive stage performances across genres, leading to a huge spike in interest for immersive entertainment solutions and integrated Metaverse platforms such as Decentraland and Monkey Kingdom.

Quelle:

MTV VMAs Debut Historic XR Metaverse Show

In the metaverse, users will actively engage with 3D content using extended reality (XR). Such XR platforms can stimulate a revolution in health communication, moving from information-based to experience-based content. We outline three major application domains and describe how the XR affordances (presence, agency and embodiment) can improve healthy behaviour by targeting the users’ threat and coping appraisal. We discuss how health communication via XR can help to address long-standing health challenges.

The predicted arrival of the metaverse has given rise to heated public debate. Critics of the metaverse argue that companies’ economic self-interest is primarily responsible for the hype surrounding the metaverse and that such a platform would be difficult to regulate. Some critics argue that the metaverse poses a ‘terrifying danger to humanity’¹, potentially leading to a surge in harassment and manipulation². However, others contend that the metaverse could ‘unleash amazing creativity and open up new frontiers and horizons’³, providing a platform for new tools to learn, socialise and collaborate in cyberspace.

Adding to the debate, we focus on the tremendous potential of the metaverse to revolutionise health communication. Public access to the Internet marked the first revolution in health communication by diminishing the role of the general practitioner as the sole authority and source of health-related information. The metaverse can stimulate a second revolution, allowing users to engage actively with tailored health-related information from an interactive first-person perspective. In other words, we will witness a transformation from information- to experience-based health communication. We argue that by creating theory-driven and evidence-based health communication content using immersive technologies, the metaverse can significantly promote individual and public health. In addition, we outline how future efforts in this domain can address long-standing challenges to public health and point to new challenges arising from this transformation.

What is the metaverse?

The term metaverse was used for the first time by Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash⁴, where he describes people using avatars to interact with each other in virtual worlds. This vision resembles virtual worlds that we already know, such as Second Life, Fortnite or VRChat. The metaverse adds extensive use of 3D graphics to this, allowing users to permanently access online content using extended reality (XR)⁵. XR technologies encompass a wide spectrum of immersive technologies, from augmented reality (AR) to mixed reality (MR) to virtual reality (VR). These technologies differ in how much of the outside world is included in the experience, with VR at the end of the immersive spectrum, providing users with a virtual experience that almost completely shuts out the external environment. Although XR technologies have been available for many decades, the metaverse would allow us to bring them together and make them accessible to everybody anywhere, all the time.

How does XR in the metaverse facilitate effective health communication?

There is abundant evidence indicating that XR, in particular VR, can create realistic experiences that produce genuine emotional, cognitive, social and behavioural reactions^6,7. The content presented and experienced in XR can be modified in such a way that it is particularly useful for effective health communication, with three main application domains (Fig. 1). First, XR allows people to experience phenomena that they could not experience in the real world (e.g., visualising how otherwise unobservable viruses or bacteria spread)⁸. Second, XR can overcome limitations of space and time by communicating the negative consequences of unhealthy behaviours that are temporarily distant from the present behaviour, such as obesity or smoker’s lungs^9,10. Third, XR makes it possible to experience the world from other perspectives, including those of vulnerable individuals, thereby eliciting empathy and compassion¹¹.

According to Protection Motivation Theory (PMT)¹², a prominent and widely adopted theoretical framework for disease prevention and health promotion, successful health communication requires improving threat appraisal and coping appraisal. Threat appraisalencompasses two aspects: threat severity (i.e., perceived level of severity of the threat to health) and vulnerability (i.e., perceived level of susceptibility to the threat). Coping appraisalencompasses response efficacy and self-efficacy. Response efficacy refers to an individual’s belief as to whether a recommended coping behaviour will effectively reduce a health-related threat; self-efficacy describes the confidence that the individual has in his/her ability to perform the recommended behaviour. Compared to cyberspace and social media accessed using standard media (i.e., computers or mobile devices), which already play a crucial role in health communication¹³, immersive XR has specific affordances of presence, agency and embodiment¹⁴. These affordances can be addressed in health communication via the metaverse, for instance, by providing immersive environments for patient support groups, expert-moderated health communities¹³ or health-aware pre-programmed agents and immersive health messages to facilitate health-related behaviour change more effectively than standard media (Fig. 1)¹⁵. Although these XR affordances are empirically related¹⁶, each affordance can conceptually be linked to specific health-related perceptions, that is, threatand coping appraisal, which we discuss below.

Presence

According to PMT, low threat appraisal of temporally distant consequences of current unhealthy behaviours frequently explains people’s reluctance to adopt health-protective behaviours. This idea is supported by construal level theory¹⁷, which states that events, including threats, that are temporally, spatially or socially distant, are perceived as abstract and therefore as less relevant. As compared to the standard text, image or video interventions, XR technology can elicit higher presence, a feeling of being ‘there’ in the simulated environment¹⁸. Presence is comprised of three sub-dimensions: physical presence (i.e., place illusion), self-presence (i.e., perceived authenticity of our self-representation in the virtual environment) and social presence (i.e., perceived realness of virtual others)¹⁹. Being highly present in the virtual environment makes scenarios, such as experiencing the consequences of unhealthy behaviours⁹, feel more imminent and therefore increases threat appraisal²⁰. Experiencing the consequences of behaviours is also crucial for coping appraisal, particularly response efficacy, as it allows the individual to vividly experience the impacts of such behaviours from a first-person perspective instead of reading about them.

Furthermore, as we are social creatures, and others largely influence our behaviour, high social presence, which results in increased social influence²¹, plays an important role in behavioural change. In health communication, avatars are often used to exemplify health consequences and influence our decisions. We can be affected by the presence of others via social norms and conformity²², such as the presence of ‘health-aware’ programmed agents (e.g., interacting with an agent who engages in exercising and healthy eating could influence the user to do the same). In a similar vein, self-efficacy, which plays a major role in adopting new behaviour and closing knowledge-behaviour gaps²³, can be enhanced not only by our past experience but also by observing others similar to ourselves succeeding in the desired action²⁴.

Agency

According to Bandura, personal experience of success is the most influential source of self-efficacy²⁴. As compared to immersive videos or more fixed scenarios that do not allow users to take their own courses of action, a highly interactive XR environment elicits the feeling of being in control of one’s actions (i.e., a sense of agency). Agency provides the user with a first-person interactive experience of success, i.e., mastery experience^14,24, and is crucial for promoting self-efficacy and, in turn, the intention to adopt healthy behaviour. For example, Fox et al. showed that individuals who experienced positive effects of their own physical exercise on their virtual selves in an XR environment undertook more exercise in real life²⁵.

Embodiment

Although PMT and similar theories focus on the protection of the actors themselves, the health behaviours of individuals can provide social externalities to others, for example, by indirectly protecting others by increasing herd immunity via vaccination²⁶. The XR affordance embodiment refers to the illusion of ownership of the virtual body¹⁴. The embodiment allows users to experience the world from someone else’s perspective, including someone of a different gender, race or species, and, in turn, influences our attitudes towards them²⁷. The successful embodiment can promote positive health-related decisions by making the experience more personal, increasing the user’s perceived own vulnerability but also the vulnerability of others. For example, being embodied as a vulnerable person and therefore experiencing health threats from that person’s perspective, as well as the impact of others’ behaviour on the person’s health, can affect other-directed threat and coping appraisal, motivating the user to engage in behaviours that benefit not only their own health but that of others⁸. Due to such an embodied vivid perspective-taking experience, XR, particularly VR, has been labelled the ultimate ‘empathy machine’¹¹. In line with this perspective, studies have shown that embodying users in the body of a person who is vulnerable to COVID-19 increases their collective responsibility to get vaccinated and, in turn, vaccination intention^8,28.

How can the metaverse address long-standing challenges in health communication?

Public health is plagued by several challenges, intensively discussed in the literature, that are difficult to overcome with standard health communication methods. Here, we outline how these challenges could be tackled by combining XR affordances with social aspects and the future accessibility of the metaverse.

Health inequity, which leads to unequal health outcomes and arises from economic, societal and environmental barriers, is one such challenge²⁹. Two crucial factors contribute to health inequity: systematic differences in accessibility to evidence-based health information and the ability to process such information (health literacy)^29,30. The metaverse could help address both of these factors. First, with the increasing accessibility and affordability of XR devices, individuals worldwide, including those in developing countries, could participate in the metaverse in the next decade. Second, as noted above, the metaverse represents a shift from information- to experience-based health communication. XR affordances provide visceral experiences that are easy to interpret and intuitively understandable. Therefore, XR can assist in the information processing of abstract health concepts. For instance, instead of processing complex scientific evidence about the relationship between (un)healthy eating, obesity and cardiovascular disease, users can be embodied in an avatar that allows the first-hand experience of this nexus. Such experience-based learning can overcome health inequity related to poor health literacy, something that has been shown to undermine the effectiveness of standard health communication methods³⁰.

Another challenge in health communication is that current health campaigns targeting the general public typically have weak effects on actual health behaviours because people perceive them as unrelated and unengaging³¹. In contrast, there is increasing evidence that health interventions that are tailored specifically to a recipient’s characteristics and needs are more effective than generic messages³². Standard interventions usually allow customisation based only on broad characteristics, such as gender, race or age. In the metaverse, it would be possible to tailor health interventions based on multisensory health-related data, including body movements or health measures within or outside the metaverse, for instance, by linking virtual experiences to data from trackers or wearables. Such ‘dynamic tailoring’ of interventions rather than ‘static tailoring’ would allow interventions to be created and adapted specifically for individual users. Furthermore, it could improve threat and coping appraisalamong population groups (e.g., young males) that are usually less responsive to standard health communication³².

Conclusions and outlook

It is predicted that the metaverse will have a major influence on how we behave and interact, with 25% of us spending at least 1 h a day in the metaverse by 2026³³. Despite the challenges arising from the potentially massive impact of the metaverse on our lives, it offers great potential for a paradigm shift in health communication. Indeed, current evidence from ‘lab-in-the-field’ experiments shows the promise of XR health communication in effectively improving healthy behaviour, even when self-administered²⁸ or when administered in a non-laboratory environment, such as in public parks⁸ or afterschool³⁴ or community settings³⁵. Ultimately, the metaverse could revolutionise health communication by providing novel solutions to long-standing and pressing challenges in the field of public health.

By utilising the metaverse in health communication, new challenges arise. For instance, collecting and linking data within and outside the metaverse creates issues with data privacy. There is a need to find solutions to address these issues and develop guidelines and legislation on what and how information is used, including the problem of misinformation³⁶. Lessons learned from classic social media are important and useful in this regard¹³. We also need to reach an agreement on ethical issues relating to the exploitation of the technological potential of the metaverse and our interactions within the metaverse. A useful step in this direction is the GuestXR project³⁷. As part of this project, VR experts from academia and the private sector apply machine learning in XR to create virtual agents that can mediate information and social exchange in the metaverse and therefore limit harassment and conflicts in the metaverse.

Only when we find solutions to how health communication can be adapted to XR environments in ways that are both evidence-based and ethically responsible can XR platforms, such as the metaverse, truly have a positive impact on individual and public health.

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

This research does not report on novel original data.

Code availability

This research does not rely on any code.

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Foto: Note: The figure depicts three major application domains and XR affordances and shows how they can improve healthy behaviour by targeting self- and other-directed threat and coping appraisal.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-022-00682-x

Santa Monica, California, and Seoul, South Korea, are among the cities exploring how metaverse technology can improve city services or boost businesses. Some fear it could leave residents behind.

From Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to Seoul, South Korea, to Santa Monica, California, a growing number of cities worldwide are exploring how they can deploy metaverse technology to more effectively administer public services, engage residents, and boost activity with businesses or downtown areas.

Last year, “nobody was talking about the metaverse. Now, I can’t go a day without a conversation about it,” said Steve Zoegall, industry lead for global cities, transport and critical infrastructure with Accenture, and a fellow with the World Economic Forum. 

The metaverse is an immersive virtual world in which people don’t just look at what’s online, but interact virtually to engage in many of the activities they do in the physical world, such as socialize, take classes, make purchases, and even travel. In Facebook’s buzzy rebrand to Meta, the company’s stated mission remains one of bringing people together — some city leaders might say the same about metaverse initiatives.

The technology is in the “novelty and strategy phase,” Zoegall said. For some cities, metaverse technology remains a novelty, while others are actively evaluating it and identifying goals.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government in late 2021 announced its intent to “establish a metaverse platform … to start providing a new-concept public service,” as part of its Five-year Metaverse Seoul Promotion Master Plan. The city stated that the platform will “create a metaverse ecosystem for all areas of its municipal administration,” including economic, cultural, tourism, educational and civic service.  

For instance, starting in 2023 the Seoul Lantern Festival and other events will be held in the metaverse so they’re available around the world. The city stated it will also use the platform to develop services for the socially vulnerable, including safety and convenience content for people with disabilities, and will expand the platform to all areas of municipal administration to boost efficiency.

Dubai announced its own metaverse strategy last month, which aims to turn the city into “one of the world’s top ten metaverse economies” and “a global hub for the metaverse community.” The strategy also aims to foster innovation, attract new companies to Dubai, support metaverse education, and apply Web3 technology to create new governmental work models.

Modeling cities, supporting businesses and more

Cities with less ambitious plans can also utilize the technology in different ways. The pandemic demonstrated the importance of having easy ways to share information with citizens, whether informing about a public health crisis, or the date of the next farmer’s market, says Lena Geraghty, director of sustainability and innovation with the National League of Cities. 

“By moving into the metaverse, information becomes even more interactive and feels more personalized, so end users are better able to receive it” she said.  

Today’s metaverse initiatives often draw on and bring together technologies that have been in place for a while. For instance, several years ago, the Boston Planning Department created a digital twin, or virtual replica, of the city. Previously, city planners had used wooden models to help them design the city’s future and show residents the impact of infrastructure changes before they occur. However, the models were labor-intensive and couldn’t simulate the impact of sun or wind, also according to Esri, a provider of geographic information software (GIS) that worked with the city on its digital twin.

The city of Los Angeles created a virtual model of its Sixth Street Viaduct bridge, which it replaced and opened to the public this summer, to help “generate excitement” for the project, said Michael Zyda, professor of engineering practice at the University of Southern California.

Metaverse technology could streamline approvals for residents’ building and renovation projects, said Zyda. For instance, in a situation when a resident needs approval to install a new roof: “If a resident could first create the new roof in the metaverse, that might make [the process] easier,” Zyda said.

Cities could also use metaverse deployments to boost interest in physical businesses. The city of Santa Monica is partnering with FlickPlay to launch a play-to-earn metaverse app. Users of the app in the city’s downtown can unlock digital collectibles and rewards and then redeem physical items at local retailers.

Furthering inequities?

Despite the potential benefits for cities, some experts say the deployment of metaverse technology could leave some residents behind. “If not properly planned, the metaverse can further exacerbate inequities,” said Hemant Desai, chief information officer with the International City/County Management Association. For example, virtual reality headsets, which enable users to fully experience the metaverse, some of which can cost hundreds of dollars.

This concern will be especially pronounced in cities where a substantial minority of residents aren’t online. “If you’re 95% connected, you can tackle the other 5%,” Desai said. That becomes harder in cities in which only 70% or 80% of residents are connected. Intentional collaboration between residents and city leaders, along with public-private partnerships could start to address this challenge, he added.

City leaders also can engage the community to identify how they see the metaverse impacting them. “Make sure it will be useful and usable by people with different abilities and circumstances,” Geraghty said. 

Some cities are planning metaverse initiative implementation periods of five to seven years, Desai said. Taking a phased approach by, for instance, conducting a pilot and gathering and reviewing feedback before moving forward with a major launch can reduce the risk that an initiative excludes some residents, he added. 

Even cities that aren’t actively planning for or implementing metaverse technology will want to get up to speed on it, Geraghty said. “Push past the buzzwords to better understand what the technology can bring to bear” on city services, she said.

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Foto: Some cities are deploying metaverse technology to more effectively administer public services, engage residents, and boost activity with businesses or downtown areas. KanawatTH via Getty Images

The XR solution will provide critical training and infrastructure amid Dubai’s Metaverse Strategy Launch

Extended reality education firm EON Reality Inc announced on Sunday its partnership with Axelrod Holdings to launch its EON Metaverse Builder platform in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Asia-Pacific.

EON Reality will provide its novel XR solutions to Alexrod Holding to create its future Smart City economy, support students and employees, and open the nation’s Knowledge Metaverse, it explained.

EON Reality’s metaverse tools will also boost the efficiency of training Axelrod Holdings employees and affiliated institutions, and will additionally slash costs for infrastructure and allow the UAE to explore further possibilities with bespoke “hands-on” upskilling experiences at institutions and enterprises.

The solution will also allow users to develop metaverse content and immersive experience with little to no technical skills.

Dan Lejerskar, Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive for EON Reality, said in a statement the partnership would “enable the knowledge metaverse to expand fast and efficiently” across the UAE.

He added,

“Excellent partners that are able to maximize the benefits of EON Reality’s solutions are the only thing that allows for national rollouts like this. I have no doubt that the simplicity of using our products and Axelrod Holdings’ level of commitment will result in an amazing delivery for students, trainers, and other users across the nation”

The platform, which is compatible with major immersive tech providers such as Magic Leap, Meta Platforms, Microsoft HoloLens, Apple, HTC VIVE, Ready Player Me, and Google recently provided the University of Glasgow with an EON-XR Centre to train and engage students with the XR tool.

It began offering virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) training, software, and infrastructure in October last year across devices for students in medicine, engineering, sciences, and other

Other institutions such as Florida State, Michigan University, Wharton School, Portsmouth University, and Queen’s University of London have also opened immersive spaces for blockchain research, medical training, Metaverse programmes, XR development, and metaverse lectures, respectively.

The UAE’s latest venture in the Metaverse comes as Dubai launches its ambitious Metaverse Strategy, which aims to grow 40,000 new immersive tech jobs and generate $4 billion for the city’s economy in five year’s time, as well as facilitate and implement numerous emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, 5G, and decentralised finance (DeFi).