meanwhile, is expected to have a public listing later this year. This would capitalise on its huge growth in mobile apps and fuel expansion into much bigger markets than gaming alone. Other gaming ‘worlds’ that are creating their own engines include Minecraft (480 million players) the Roblox platform (160 million players) and Crossfire (more than 1 billion players). Bottom line – the demand and the software tools are already in place for the metaverse. Now, imagine how the metaverse is going to end the internet as we know it. There will be no more Google search because we will have our own virtual assistants doing searches for us. Keyboards will be gone as we will walk and talk just like in the real world. Forget apps – we will just travel from world to world. ‘Screen time’ will be a thing of the past as we will simply be accessing the metaverse via real-world devices. No more storing by IP address, but by time and place in virtual reality. Within the next decade, for better or for worse, this is going to be a reality. The internet and the mobile phone will be just as much of a relic as papers and fax machines are today. How soon will this happen? This has everything to do with hardware. Hardware The metaverse is emerging from the gaming industry, with gamers accessing the virtual world in three main ways: through mobile devices, games consoles and PCs. All three are increasing in power and speed. As 5G rolls out, it will increase
VR goggles are being replaced by smart glasses.
When will this happen? As with all new technologies, it will occur when three key things come together: demand, software and hardware. Demand We have already reached a critical mass of demand for the metaverse. When the internet hit the mainstream in the 1990s, there were only 14 million people online at the time. Today, there are already 2.5 billion gamers online every day. The global gaming industry was valued at $150 billion USD last year. Compare this to just $41 billion USD for the entire movie industry. In this light, our virtual selves are already ready and waiting for the metaverse. Software The software is also already here right now. While the internet was based on code to build websites, the metaverse is built with engines that create a 3D world. The two largest game engines are Unreal Engine and Unity, both of which are already billion-dollar tool kits. Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games and Fortnite , is also the creator of Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine has not only been used to build games like Fortnite , but also games like Final Fantasy , Microsoft’s Gears of War and many of the top Xbox and PlayStation games. It’s also being increasingly used in the movie industry to create hyper-realistic special effects scenes. The Unity engine, meanwhile, is what is being used to build Facebook Horizon and it’s the engine that League of Legends , Pokémon Go and many augmented reality (AR) and VR games are built on. It seems that Unity and Unreal Engine are the metaverse equivalent of Android and iOS. In December 2020, Epic Games closed a $1.8 billion USD round of funding, valuing the company at $17 billion USD. The deal included a $250 million USD investment from Sony which it said would broaden their collaboration ahead of the release of the Sony PlayStation 5. Epic Games wants to use its new funding to play a leading role in the metaverse for new kinds of social and entertainment experiences. If it achieves this vision, its market could grow from the global gaming community to the global internet-connected population. Unity,
Facebook is set to launch smart glasses this year in a collaboration with Ray-Ban. Apple is likely to launch AR glasses by 2022 and Amazon has already launched its Alexa- powered Amazon Echo Frames. While it may be five years before we have a completely seamless experience of our real world and the metaverse, we will already be living, learning, connecting, creating, and playing in it long before then. By 2024, we will be spending more time in 3D virtual worlds than in today’s 2D internet, but whether the metaverse will transform businesses, education, and humanity itself for better or worse remains to be seen.
‘The way we do business, learn and socialise – life as we know it – will be revolutionised’
mobile speeds by up to 100 times, compared to 4G – that’s fast enough to create a seamless link between the real world and the metaverse. Right now, companies
are racing to release faster and cheaper wearable tech products through which consumers
can begin to access the metaverse. From Facebook’s Oculus and Microsoft HoloLens to PlayStaytion VR, clunky
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