The Metaverse carries unlimited potential and hyperbole.
Business leaders and marketing teams are all abuzz about the next advent of the Metaverse, built on an assortment of 3D technology, real-time collaboration, and decentralized finance tools. It promises to change how we work, play, and interact on the internet.
What is the Metaverse?
At a broad level, the Metaverse represents the intersection of 3D immersive experiences, persistent shared environments, and the ability to move identity, assets, and history across virtual worlds.
Management consultancy McKinsey and Company predicted the metaverse economy could, in aggregate, “generate up to $5 trillion in impact by 2030 – equivalent to the size of the third-largest economy today, Japan.” Much of that impact is seen in e-commerce, with other market impacts in virtual learning, advertising, and gaming.
Other efforts to quantify individual metaverse technologies, like virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D games, and digital twins, suggest metaverse tools will generate far less annual revenues. Markets, for example, predicted that the demand for 3D metaverse technology for entertainment, media, art, fashion, and retail will reach $426.9 billion by 2027, while Gartner placed the enterprise digital twins marketplace at $183 billion by 2031. Meanwhile, other estimations have pegged the Metaverse at roughly $1.5 trillion by 2030 when blockchain and decentralized finance technologies are included.
Awareness around the Metaverse has exploded over the past two years. A survey from Wunderman Thompson Intelligence, with respondents ages 16 to 65, shows awareness grew by 131% between Q3 2021 and Q2 2022.
This monumental change signals to enterprise companies that 2023 is their year to get ahead of the curve, develop innovative programs, test their efficacy, and launch new products and solutions.
In 2023, companies will view the Metaverse as a tool to unlock value. It will become more of a means to an end. We expect to see clear intentions around business value before organizations dive in. For example, the use of Metaverse may replace brick and mortar. Still, companies will participate in immersive training with A-B tests and cost comparisons that act as proxies for forecasting.
Alex Howland, Ph.D. Co-Founder & President at Virbela, Alex Holland, is president and co-founder of Virbela, a virtual world platform for work, learning, and events. He says, there’s no shortage of naysayers around the Metaverse, and we expect that to stay the same in 2023. We remind everyone that change frequently follows a J-curve; performance in some areas may drop before a sustainable upward spike.
Companies positioned to accommodate this curve are likely to start with lower-risk Metaverse programs to build value across teams. Then, as the Metaverse becomes second nature, we’ll see them add complexity.
