Matthew Belge, president and chief UX designer at Vision & Logic, a Massachusetts-based design consulting firm, said, “I imagine the metaverse will be used for almost everything people are currently doing, from social gatherings to business meetings, sex, gaming, medical work and simulations. I think the most provocative areas will be where it’s too difficult or too dangerous to do this in “real life.” For example, virtually climbing Mount Everest, driving a vehicle in space or diving to the ocean floor. James A. Danowski, Chairman of Communication Sciences and Technology, predicted, “People don’t need extra bandwidth to communicate with other people for most types of work. By 2040, the metaverse and social media will be gone from everyday life. Direct interaction through digital media will still be important, but there’s already enough or even too much social presence with current video apps like Zoom. Jon Lebkowsky, former CEO and founder of three technology companies, now an activist writer/blogger focused on strategic foresight, cyber-openness and digital culture at Plutopia News Network, commented: “My three decades of experience working and playing online have taught me that generally the simplest approaches prevail. For example, the strong preference of simple text messages for communication. Many people play immersive 3D games, but many more don’t. Second Life has had a fairly dedicated set of adopters, but it never got off the ground in a big way. Olivier Crépin-Leblond, founding board member of the European Internet Governance Dialogue and board member of ICANN’s European At-Large Organization, wrote: “Many activities will take place online by 2040 using more immersive interfaces than the current web, for example, e-commerce options where you feel like you’re walking down a shopping path, full virtual reality meetings and fully immersive virtual reality or holographic fitness options. The technology already exists today, it just needs to be made sophisticated, error-free and user-friendly and affordable. “Many people first saw the power of the metaverse in the Second Life online community, but even before that, computer scientists created virtual reality experiences in labs using expensive specialized hardware and software. In science fiction literature, Neal Stephenson wrote about the metaverse in “Snow Crash,” and a decade earlier in “Neuromancer,” and one of William Gibson’s protagonists, Case, enters and leaves cyberspace. Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition is about a female protagonist, Cayce, and the line between the real and the virtual was completely blurred. It should be noted that on June 21, 2022, after these experts wrote their answers, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, PlayStation, Sony, Epic Games, Adobe, and dozens of other large, medium and small technology companies joined large open standards groups, including the World Wide Web Consortium, the Open Geospatial Consortium, the Web 3D Consortium and others to announce the creation of the Metaverse Standards Forum, a group that organizers said was designed to ensure interoperability in the metaverse.
There are tangible and exciting developments in the field of digital world-building. Many companies that have jumped on the metaverse bandwagon also envision a kind of new digital economy, where users can make, buy metaverso tecnologia and sell goods. In more idealistic visions of the metaverse, it’s interoperable, allowing you to carry virtual items like clothing or cars from one platform to another, although this is harder than it seems.
While some proponents argue that new technologies like NFTs can enable portable digital assets, this just isn’t true, and bringing elements from one video game or virtual world to another is a hugely complex task that no company can solve. Kids who are obsessed with Roblox and Fortnite want immersive digital experiences as they grow up. “The metaverse has its own brands that are specific to the metaverse and more important than traditional brands in real life,” says Janine Yorio, CEO of a landowner and digital developer named Everyrealm. Sneakers from RTFKT, a digital fashion company, are more coveted than virtual kicks made by Adidas, he noted.
About half of these expert respondents supported the idea that the metaverse will be a fully immersive aspect of daily life for many by 2040. Many of those who expect augmented reality, mixed reality and virtual reality to progress significantly predicted that that progress will come from a natural evolution of the current innovations underway. They noted that people have always been motivated to push boundaries and explore new experiences, to advance and improve their daily lives, and to seek profit and power.
“I’ve spent about 17 years from time to time experimenting as an avatar and exploring virtual spaces and experiences within Second Life, and I’ve found that this has significantly changed my perception of myself in my real life. The whole experience can be summarized as liberating. Virtual worlds dissolve social and geographical boundaries, and in them we are able to communicate and establish relationships with people we would otherwise never meet. R “Ray” Wang, founder and chief analyst at Constellation Research, said: “We just released a report outlining the expectations for monetising the metaverse economy. We see many components for the development of the metaverse. Interfaces: Headphones, glasses, human and gesture-based APIs. Worlds: Every studio, esports, gaming platform, digital twin and social network will create a world as a distributed autonomous organization to establish rules for membership, governance and voting rights, symbolic economic models, funding mechanisms and balance between centralization and decentralization. “As more and more corporate control was imposed, internet-based technology began to subtly invade our personal spaces in exchange for the Faustian bargain of a new set of technological ‘conveniences.’ Now, Big Tech not only wants to extend this intrusion with technologies like Alexa, but make life impossible to live without… hence the concept of metaverse. “Having experienced a number of iterations of technologies that have great potential to improve our access to knowledge and provide a wider range of virtual experiences, I have fallen less in love with the technologies themselves and more intrigued by the questions of 1) how these technologies are merged into systems and services that provide experience opportunities for users and 2) who the users are.
Proponents of XR and the development of more advanced and immersive 3D online worlds say its rapid evolution is likely to benefit all aspects of society: education, healthcare, gaming and entertainment, arts, social and civic life, and other activities. They believe that the infusion of more data into people’s experiences, advances in AI assistance systems, and the creation of entirely new spaces and experiences for technology users can enrich and expand their lives. Of course, as with all digital technology, there are concerns about health, safety, privacy and the economic implications of these new spaces. This has stimulated a lot of speculation about what the maturation of XR and the metaverse will look like and what that means for society.
Device-dependent interactions will be phased out and new types of interactions and business models will emerge across multiple applications. Examples of early-stage solutions include gaming, virtual collaboration, navigation apps, social media, and fungible and non-fungible tokens. In addition, the real-time multilingual skills of conversational AI will break down language barriers, facilitating interaction in the globally connected metaverse. The metaverse allows companies to connect, communicate and incentivize customers to create new value exchanges and revenue streams.
The experts who participated in this survey wrote hundreds of pages of thought-provoking ideas about the potential future of augmented reality and how these tools and society might evolve over the next 18 years. They were fairly evenly divided on whether or not metaverse will be a much more sophisticated and truly immersive aspect that works well for the daily lives of half a billion or more people around the world by 2040. Reducing bullying and protecting children from bad online actors has become one of the emerging concerns surrounding the immersive virtual reality and augmented reality platforms that make up the metaverse. Current game reviews, as well as abuse reporting systems implemented for console games, have generally helped to keep 2D video games viable as a growing entertainment platform. As pioneers, gaming companies have built an early prototype of the metaverse, and their position as early adopters is well known across all industries. For example, the much-played Minecraft and Fortnite games, as well as the popular roblox gaming platform, have incorporated many aspects of the metaverse, including virtual worlds where players come together to play and use social features like in-game chats.