Utility Will Make the Metaverse Work — and Pay — With or Without Goggles

It was Oct. 28 when Mark Zuckerberg announced to the world that Facebook would now be effectively a subsidiary of a company called Meta — as in “metaverse” — followed by a string of superlatives about what Meta will create as the metaverse replaces the mobile internet.

In the weeks since then, it seems as if every other tech firm on the planet has already formulated its own metaverse plan. It’s known that the metaverse will be enabled by virtual reality (AR) and augmented reality (AR), and many pundits and futurists are likening it to walking around inside a video-game-like alternate reality — but others have more ambitious visions.

Noting that the first microtransaction took place 20 years ago in an early online game, Seth Gerson, CEO at interactive content firm Survios, told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster that a fully realized metaverse won’t require set of goggles, but it will likely give ordinary glasses superpowers.

“There’s been sort of this great convergence of what I would say are enabling technologies that now have made the cost of compute and heat dissipation incredible, and what that gives rise to is a different way to interact with the internet,” Gerson said.

When asked about how useful the metaverse will be outside of the gaming environments where it began, Gerson said, “We’re building to enable presence, whether that be physics or locomotion, phoneme detection, all of that just enhances our state.”

He said this “enhanced state” could just as easily transfer to “an iPhone or wearing a head-mounted display, [or a] a virtual reality display that shuts you off from the world, or it could be a pair of glasses [where] you’re walking down the street and there’s [a visual] overlay.”

Using exotic imaging technologies like foveated rendering, for example, Gerson said metaverse-era eyeglasses could zoom in on details of a person or object, then show relevant information.

“If I’m walking down the street [and] I see you, [metaverse eyeglasses could] pull up our last five conversations … so I can remember what we were talking about, your wedding, your children’s birthdays, what’s your favorite hobby,” Gerson said. “I can automatically connect more quickly.”

Staying with the glasses concept, Gerson said the right metaverse content, software and hardware will enable eyeglasses to look at a building, for example, and see its history. It’s an always-on, instantaneous and omnipresent version of the internet, with futuristic extras.

“There’ll be interim steps to get there,” he said. “The cellphone’s not going away overnight. But there are a lot of companies hell-bent on being able to own that next generation of compute and being able to own that next generation of device because they lost out the first generation of smartphones.”

See also: Big Tech and Telecom Follow Facebook in Metaverse Ramp-Up

Gaming Concepts Eat the World

As engineers and developers imagine the connected eyeglasses and matching wearables of the near future, at present, the metaverse is very much about gaming — and that’s a big deal.

Noting that gaming is a $200 billion business, Gerson said, “Gaming’s eating the rest of the entertainment industry. When people go to concerts, they’ll go in Fortnight, or they’ll go in another game. Look at music companies, how quickly they’re investing in video game companies. That’s your quickest conduit to eyeballs.

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re a gaming company or a music company or a sports team. Whatever that content is you’re packaging and selling, you need to be able to sell that to the most eyeballs possible.”

For example, calling the gaming platform Roblox “the greatest communication platform for children ever,” Gerson ran through a series of use cases such as children too young to own a cellphone being able to communicate with parents via metaverse gaming systems.

“When you look at Roblox, it’s the basis of a communication platform,” he said. “That’s kind of how I see the metaverse. Each one of those [immersive gaming systems] is a step in that direction to get you to that user interface where it’s always on.”

Pointing to Facebook/Meta’s 2014 purchase of Oculus for $2 billion as a marker, Gerson said, “Other Big Tech companies are sort of making tangential investments, and they’re all around gaming. Amazon bought Twitch, and you get more viewership on that than you do on traditional sports.”

He said this level of investment will continue and grow, so that within seven to 10 years, metaverse devices and experiences “will be as profound as the cell phone,” in terms of societal impact.

See also: Brands Bet Big on Sales in the Metaverse

When Content (and Crypto) Are King

Invoking the old saying about whether distribution or content is king, Gerson said that at the peak of cable television, distribution had the power. In the metaverse, content is in the driver’s seat.

“When you look at technology over time, you get a bunch of … enabling technologies that come together and make magical products, and then you kind of get that step function change. With games, you’re going to find a lot of that,” he said, adding, “I think there’s been a big change just in content. If you look at content, it’s really different than it was, let’s say, 30 years ago.”

What’s more, connected voice and artificial intelligence (AI) will allow fans of touchless payments to engage with touchless metaverse content, hands-free. Gerson sees cryptocurrencies as playing a crucial role in metaverse payments, once they’ve been integrated in these kinds of metaverse experiences.

“For instance, if you and I have a neighborhood in a metaverse, we should be able to have a token that allows us to say, ‘we want the aesthetic of this neighborhood to be … an old Viking village,’ and we should all be able to vote on that,” Gerson said.

“At the same time, we should be able to have NFTs [non-fungible tokens] that are usable and transferable, so I can make money by creating these NFTs, but they have utility, and I can transform them.”

The prospect of fraud in virtual worlds peopled by avatars as anonymous as any on today’s internet casts somewhat of a shadow on spending money inside a metaverse, but Gerson said that’s all the more reason to make cryptos the de facto metaverse currency.

“If crypto or NFTs or tokens are used for what they were created for in terms of utility, that is a way to really advance things more quickly [in metaverse payments], because what you’re doing is, you’re not just creating a game or an experience, you’re creating whole economies.”

See also: Metaverse’s Cryptocurrency Leaps in Price After Facebook Rebrands as Meta