The Metaverse is an Interstate Construction Zone
The metaverse isn’t ready yet, but that doesn’t mean your business can afford to ignore it.
Yesterday, Facebook parent company Meta announced a new marketplace for its metaverse platforms, a place to buy and sell virtual products. It joins a growing host of competing platforms that allow people to buy and sell virtual items in an emerging market for metaverse commerce which is expected to reach $5 trillion by 2030. Brands like Balenciaga and Prada are already signing on to sell virtual clothing and accessories.
However, some experts, as well as many customers, are still wary of the metaverse—a virtual space where people can meet and interact with life-like accuracy, with a recent Axios poll slating more than three times more consumers (32%) as being scared of the concept of a metaverse compared to those feeling excited about a metaverse (7%). With such mixed signals from experts and consumers, it’s important for business leaders to take a step back to realize what the word metaverse means for business in a broad sense, and how metaverse technology may have more practical use cases in the future than are clearly realized right now.
To do this, we’ll use an unlikely analogy.
The Internet is an Interstate
Think of the internet as an interstate highway. Each lane, corridor, and exit connects people from starting points to destination points, just like the internet. Contrary to popular belief, websites are not the destination point in this analogy. People don’t use the internet just to visit websites. Rather, people use websites on the internet more like they use an interstate lane, just one of many other lanes or verticals that connect them to the content they want to see. So the focus, then, is on content and connectivity.
As technology improves, newer lanes connect to previously unreachable places. The introduction of photo and video-sharing platforms like Instagram and TikTok constituted the next big addition to the previously text-based internet.
The metaverse technology we have right now is the next step, or lane, beyond video-sharing. Essentially, it’s a version of video content that allows users to interact with and affect what they see. Metaverse technology will not be finished all at once, and it was not designed to be. It’s a messy, chaotic interstate construction process. But eventually, roads will converge to create a host of platforms and technologies that help people connect online better than they could before.
A New Opportunity To Connect
So what is the final destination, the end goal of the internet? Mark Zuckerberg spent most of his life studying this question, and he concludes that the internet lets us “connect and express ourselves more naturally.” According to Zuckerberg, “we’ve gone from desktop to web to mobile; from text to photos to video. But this isn’t the end of the line.” It’s all about in-person interactions.
Until now, the internet primarily helped augment our in-person interactions, especially in business applications. For example, Amazon’s website has for years helped connect online shoppers with physical products at scale, and Facebook’s mission since its founding has been to help people build better connections with their close friends and family. The next logical step in this trajectory — of which the current metaverse is but an inkling — is to make online interactions as close to in-person interactions as possible. Creating a space to take those in-person interactions online is the ultimate goal, from work meetings to university lectures to clubbing on the weekend.
Of course, these developments should not eliminate the need for in-person interactions, but rather they will make it easier and more life-like to connect online during the inevitable times when physical interactions are less efficient or impossible. For brands, this translates to more ways to reach customers and vastly expanded opportunities to connect physical and e-commerce revenue streams.
Meet the metaverse.
5 Ways for Your Business to Use Metaverse Technology Now and in the Future
- Communicate a brand’s story to new customers in an immersive way.
- Sell virtual products.
- Build a sales funnel between e-commerce and physical spaces.
- Help internal teams communicate in a life-like way during times when in-person interactions are too costly or inconvenient.
- Get customer feedback on products before investing in physical versions.
