What is the metaverse?

Metaverse is a much easier concept than people believe – or try to explain.

In a nutshell, the metaverse is a virtual, 3D world where you can interact with the others as an avatar.

So basically instead of looking at other people’s faces on zoom, you see their tiny avatar moving around. When you get closer, you can start interacting and you can hear their voice, or exchange messages. or communicate in any other way.

You can move the avatar and look at it in your PC, as if you where playing a videogame; or on your phone; or you can even wear virtual reality glasses and become fully immersed in the metaverse.

It is like a first-person shooter (like Doom or Metar Gear Solid) where instead of killing people you interact with them (actually in some metaverses you do kill other avatars, as we will see later).

Yet, this is just the beginning. In the metaverse you can do more things such as:

• Organizing a conference. You can create your own setting – be it an island or the shangi-la palace – and all the avatars meet there. Then there will be virtual stages and on the stage there will be a video.

• You can launch a fashion collection with a virtual fashion show

• You can organize a concert

• You can create buildings and have people experiencing it in the metaverse

But it goes even beyond this. There is a major metaverse economy developing, meaning that some goods are made jsut for the metaverse as electronic objects and are sold in the metaverse, usually in exchange for cryptos. Take, for example, virtual sneakers: they can be unique (guaranteed by NFT) and then your avatar can wear them.

For example, Balenciaga recently launched a collection for Fortnite. Fortnite is a shooter where you kill other avatars, still fashion is a relevant thing!

Point is – metaverse is a big thing and is getting even larger. Branding and marketing will have to master the talent of developing metaverse campaigns. Take for example a furniture designer: he will develop collections for both the real and the metaverse world.

This means that as now we have social media managers in all companies, we will soon have a metaverse manager. This is a new media revolution that will soon eclypse social media as we know it: the 2D interaction will have to make some room to the full 3D interaction in the metaverse.

The usual follow-up question is: where is the metaverse? 

In 2019, WIred published a cover story claiming that “we are building a 1-to-1 map of almost unimaginable scope. When it’s complete, our physical reality will merge with the digital universe.” Actually, if our physical world is “1”, the metaverse world could be million times larger (not just 1 to 1).

Yet, for the time being, there is no single metaverse world. It is dispersed and diverse, based on specialization. There are metaverse worlds that exist for the time of a conference, like digital artificial islands; or metaverses for gaming. The quest for the one, unified metaverse universe is starting now.