Metaverse has become a buzzword in the technology sphere. By rebranding its name to Meta, Facebook has captured all the news headlines in a strategic move.
Furthermore, Microsoft has also joined the Metaverse party by incorporating Mesh for Microsoft Teams. It announced that it will blend quasi-Metaverse ability into its prevalent video collaboration tool.
But what is Metaverse? Why is it expected that Metaverse will change the future? Well, it is expected to revolutionise businesses; let’s have a quick precap of the Metaverse in 2022.
What is Metaverse?
Metaverse is a portmanteau of Meta and Universe. It is a virtual world that will work as an interactive internet.
It will support persistent online 3D virtual environments via personal computing experiences and augmented reality headsets. It will revolutionise the next generation web, also known as web 3.0.
It has conglomerated different technological aspects such as video, multimedia, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR).
It will help users co-exist within a digital world. Now, the question is how the Metaverse will change the future and the way today’s businesses work.
According to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, the Metaverse environment will take years to develop. However, people can expect a prototype within the next five years. By 2031, Zuckerberg is expecting to sign on a billion users to the Metaverse platform.
How will Metaverse change businesses?
The Metaverse will render a 3D virtual space where users can come together and interact with digital entities through avatars. These avatars will resemble the person whosoever entered the Metaverse plus mimic their movements and actions as that of the physical world.
It will enable immersive problem-solving abilities across a broad range of industries and businesses.
- Metaverse in retail
In the physical world, users measure the value of an item through various factors. Among these, factors like scarcity, authenticity, and ownability.
With the advent of the Metaverse in retail, consumers can virtually go to the shop and check on all the factors before buying retail items. Metadata will also include NFT (non-fungible tokens) and blockchain for rendering retail item authenticity and ownability, which will then be delivered to your doorstep. This is how Metaverse will change businesses and its approaches. - Metaverse in advertising
Advertising will take a new form in the Metaverse. Organizations will render immersive and clickable advertisements landing customers to their desired brands, businesses, and marketers. Hence, it will give rise to in-world advertising.
In-world advertising will capture more customer attention as companies render ads through digital billboards. Companies will perform advertising through story-telling via 3D models and immersive videos. Consumers will also receive interactive ads based on users’ behaviour & historical datasets. - Metaverse in healthcare
Metaverse in healthcare will bring a revolutionary change through rich visuals and collaboration. Doctors and researchers can train medical students, fellow doctors, and staff members on various critical medical complications.
Through Metaverse, researchers in the pharmaceutical businesses can visualise different chemical compounds while developing medicines. Doctors can experience 360-degree visuals of a patient’s ailment and replicate surgery and other procedures before applying them in the real world.
That is how metaverse will change the future of the healthcare industry. - Metaverse in e-commerce
In today’s e-commerce market, customers can only read the product description before buying it. But imagine a situation where you can hold the product in your hand or try it before buying. Yes, this is how the Metaverse is expected to change the future of e-commerce.
Customers will touch, feel, and wear (through avatars) the item from that virtual shop. Every account will have associated digital wallets, and once the customer buys something online, the amount of money gets automatically deducted from that account associated with the customer. - Virtual property, malls, and art galleries
Metaverse is virtual reality-driven universes that won’t change every time you wear the VR kit and log into it. It will shape the new form of business where people from different parts of the world can buy property, house, rent them, build a virtual casino, hotel, sports stadium, art galleries, etc.
Other OTT and on-demand entertainment platforms will shift their business to 3D entertainment. Such entertainment companies may even create a separate & customized room or cinema hall for providing their shows.
Such a form of business can bring more customers through 3D effects and enriched visuals.
Through Metaverse, innovative, lightweight, and multifunctional VR kit manufacturing industries will grow. IT and other industries can also present their projects or deliver their meetings through this virtual world under one roof, even though they sit at different corners of the world.
The auto manufacturing industries can also leverage Metaverse for planning, strategy building, meeting new automobile engineers across the globe through this breakthrough technology to bring more innovations in the automobile industry.
Various Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) operations can also enjoy the benefit of metaverse by providing virtual meetings, collaborations, virtual webinars, ultimately improving the efficiency of an organization.
Also, Metaverse can bring friends, relatives, and families closer by enhancing business communication through rich visuals, irrespective of their geolocation.
How will Metaverse change the world?
This breakthrough technology draws its potency from a vision where users can work, play, and stay tuned with others or any business. It ranges from conferences, work events, buying & selling, virtual vacations, entertainment, etc.
Risk of accomplishing businesses in the Metaverse
- Different users react differently when it comes to VR sets. It’s because they are bulky, and wearing the headset for a long time can cause visual impairment.
- In the Metaverse, transactions will employ cryptocurrencies or non-fungible tokens by leveraging blockchain technology. And, as we know, cryptos fluctuate to a broad spectrum that might generate a span of economic flux in the metaverse.
- Developing virtual prototypes can be costly unless there is some efficient way of modelling them
Conclusion
The Metaverse can bring people closer and increase business communication irrespective of their geolocation. It will enhance business innovation, advertising, marketing strategies, etc., and make companies predict the manufacturing requirement way before time.