Yesterday, I decided to catch up on a book called “Klara and the sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro. Its premise is about an AI robot that matured enough to develop feelings and take care of a human teenager. The book is a marvelous example of a dystopia where humans and bots seem to reach the same emotional baggage, and of course, leads to an interesting reflection upon the ethical limits of AI.
However, even though works like Ishiguro still sound alien and a piece of future imagination, we are clearly not paying enough attention to what’s surrounding us in terms of AI and tech evolution, especially when even South Korea is starting to push laws regarding the metaverse.
Yes, the metaverse. That unknown concept that you have come across once or twice in the news. That concept that is usually the joke on the family table, “Mark is gonna make us all robots”, is something I have heard quite a lot from the boomer members in my family. But seeing how things develop, this can be an actual reality.
The metaverse is often mistaken because most people think that you have to use crazy gadgets to get immersed in it, but a lot of the apps we use in our daily lives are already incorporating some metaverse features.
At the end of the day, the metaverse is a terminology that refers to the adoption of real-life assets in the virtual world. You can access metaverse games currently through a browser or even mobile devices, a clear example are games like Roblox or Minecraft where players develop an avatar on a virtual reality that functions like a human in the real world, where you can build your own world as well as interact with others in a virtual open space, with the possibility of enjoying concerts or events from your favorites brands. This might sound completely insane but it’s even more insane to think that artists like Travis Scott managed to do a virtual concert in Fortnite with 12.3 million assistants or Vans built an entire skatepark in Roblox.
While the metaverse is certainly allowing many fields to develop, including education and healthcare, one of the most prominent fields where it’s been included is in the entertainment industry, especially in gaming.
Gaming is a booming industry and gamers are conquering virtual space. In 2015, the number of gamers was around 2 billion people, showing an expansion of nearly 1 billion people in 7 years.
The fact that gaming is becoming one of the most popular forms of entertainment, calls for more innovation, and here the metaverse is stepping in with strong boots.
Games are a perfect target for incorporating virtual reality and also become even more interesting as a source of business for gamers and investors. The gaming industry is also shifting to a reality where players demand new storylines, features, and a way of living out of their passion. The Play2Earn model is becoming prolific in many initiatives like Axie Infinity or The Sandbox. This model essentially mixes an earning model with an entertaining model through the use of decentralized finances.
All these concepts sound very futuristic and complex but bear with me as we break down what each terminology means.
Decentralized finances include a new form of economics based on decentralization, meaning that users do not use a centralized system (like a bank) to manage their finances and instead can do transactions peer-to-peer with the use of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.
This new model of finances matches with the gaming industry creating a monster (GameFi) that essentially allows users to be able to own in-game assets as well as earn rewards in the virtual space that can be traded easily in the market.
If the monster is already big, adding another head can be disruptive and also revolutionize the world as we know it today. All of these concepts are encapsulated in a new era online called Web 3.0, where virtual reality, augmented reality, and blockchain technology, as well as digital assets, combine to make our world more dynamic online.
And this does not only apply to the entertainment industry, it is a movement that will soon be part of our lives and can be compared to the rise of the World Wide Web in terms of the applications and the impact on social behavior and history.
If we reflect on the insurgence of the WWW, we can see how much our lives are shaped by it, from Social Media to the way we interact with information in the online world. But it’s important to remember that even back in time, Web 2.0 had its enemies and many thought that it was impossible to abandon the way we interacted with data back in the 2000s. Take for example the slow integration of news platforms and media in the WWW in the beginning, with many journalists being completely against the new globalization model of information online.
However, now news is an inherent part of Web 2.0 and its relevance online depends on its presence on different social media channels and platforms. Web 3.0 will soon prove to become as prolific as its predecessor.
Companies are already shifting to this new reality with Apple or Google working on VR initiatives and most importantly, many brands shifting to the new Play2Earn experiences to appeal to their younger audience, for example, Adidas launching NFT clothing assets in the SandBox. And it’s even more relevant when we take a look at the initiatives in big tech capitals like Tokyo or Seul, where metaverse will be a reality in citizen’s everyday lives, take the example of Seoul’s metropolitan government that is currently building a 3.9 billion-won metaverse platform to allow citizens to access public services virtually.
The truth is that like Web 2.0 in its early times, metaverse it’s starting to grab the attention of the big giants in the online world and the brand scene as it happened back in the early 2000s with Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet. The Web 3.0 and the incorporation of AI will be here to stay and new generations will be native to this new paradigm as we, boomers of the future, will sight and have nostalgia for the early internet days with our Web 2.0 and those brand new technologies that were social media.
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— Clara M.
