What artificial intelligence (AI) was from the late 90s until the last decade, "Metaverse" is for now. Ever since Facebook renamed the parent company, Meta, in 2021, metaverse moved from the domain of tech geeks to the mainstream; and since then, there have been numerous opinions on what will its implications be like and how will it shape the way people interact; more precisely, how advances in AI will affect what it means to be human, to be productive and to exercise free will.
Every time a new technology appears, it takes time for people to adapt to it because any new concept requires a behavioral change. It transforms how the system in a society functions; and once it is widely adopted by its users, it becomes the new normal. This evolution is radically changing human relationships. Sometimes, the technology does not just augment our skills, but substitutes us, when algorithms can perform specific tasks with remorseless precision. With the advent of the metaverse, we are about to enter another phase, where virtual interactions play a pivotal role in shaping the way we collaborate and connect.
Virtual Reality platforms that allowed people to interact, collaborate and work remotely, enabling formal and casual meet-ups, have been the stepping stone or the ground that proliferated the tech market and built the base for metaverse to materialize.
Adding to this, the pandemic that brought a lot of economical and emotional loss for humans, but it came with an opportunity to experience the world in a new way. Remote work initiated virtual reality meeting platforms like Zoom and Teams, to name a few, that were welcomed by people and businesses, as they helped them carry on their operations and set the economic wheel back in motion.
What makes metaverse different from VR platforms is its ability to give users the freedom to interact within an immersive world through their 3D avatars; almost similar to video games. In fact, metaverse is a conglomeration between Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality, along with some elements of blockchain technology, to bring into life a virtual ecosystem that can be accessed through the internet.
Similar to when we started using internet-based search engines like Google to find solutions, the metaverse's wide implications is every field, will definitely affect our interaction with the physical world. In education, these technological advancements are about to flip the way lectures are provided and the whole concept of university degrees on its head. When homework was still a very manual process, calculation problems required more than 10 pages to solve and when we had to produce a hand-drawn graph, it was all on paper. Nowadays, a major shift in education evolved, making search engines and internet access available everywhere; a teacher can explain the working of a complex element to an engineering student through a 3D model, sitting miles away; or even, an organization can now conduct training sessions to its staff working remotely without incurring huge training costs. Technology is becoming part of the process of learning, not a threat to educational institutions.
"Try before you buy" concept in a metaverse store has been a major topic in Marketing and Advertising; adding to it the immersive product display that brings convenience for the users and lowers the costs incurred for setting up a brick and mortar store with product demos.
A unique attribute of metaverse is providing equal opportunities to people regardless of age, sex culture and more specifically physical abilities. In real life, people limited by their physical capabilities are not bound by the same in the metaverse. Talking about Travel and Leisure industry, using metaverse will allow people with disabilities and those who cannot travel due to other problems, experience the world similar to any normal human being simply journeying touristic destinations worldwide from their homes; a completely new and life-altering experience for everyone.
Whether it is to meet, work, play, learn, or shop, metaverse will be about consuming content in real time through virtual experiences; they represent the shift from a place to share experiences, to a place of shared experiences.
But, nothing comes without its challenges. As the technological foundations are still evolving, many large-scale platforms will need to adjust their business models in order to operate within an inter-operable metaverse. Privacy and data security will also be crucial, given the large quantity of sensitive personal information involved. Other concerns revolve around mental health, if virtual worlds lead users to shy away from real-world responsibilities and interactions.
The metaverse is indeed an interesting technology, but its economic benefits are still distant and won't be realized as fast as many would hope. Trying to assemble all the necessary tools in an open ecosystem is difficult, at least in the early stages of development, leaving plenty of questions unanswered.
In the realm, a virtual space race to the "metaverse" has begun with human creativity that has virtually no limits. While we tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies, we also tend to underestimate its long-lasting influence on the competitive landscape. As technology makes its way into different aspects of our lives and becomes part of our daily interactions, we are now more open to acknowledging the fact that its true potential for the advancement of humankind lies in our ability to quickly adapt to such tectonic shift.
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