Value creation in the metaverse – McKinsey
With its potential to generate up to $5 trillion in value by 2030, the metaverse is too big for companies to ignore. … The metaverse will significantly impact our commercial and personal lives: $120b+ in investment has flowed into the metaverse so far in 2022, 79% of consumers active on the metaverse have made a purchase, >15% of corporate revenue is expected to come from the metaverse in the next 5 years according to 25% of senior executives.
Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse vision is over. Can Apple save it? – The Guardian
And then there is the elephant in the room – and the reason why it may still be too early to fully write off Meta’s metaverse ambitions altogether. On 5 June, Apple is set to lift the lid on the worst kept secret in tech: its own virtual reality headset.
Piecing together leaks from the supply chain, reports from California and the groundwork the company has laid with developers, it is clear that the iPhone maker is planning to take a radically different approach from its rival, with a price tag in the thousands of dollars and a long-term goal to create a device that people do not feel the need to take off when they want to speak to people in the same room as them.
This is Meta’s AR / VR hardware roadmap for the next four years – The Verge
Aside from the Quest lineup, Meta also has thousands of employees building future AR glasses and wrist devices for controlling them. The key difference from VR is that the company intends for AR glasses to eventually be worn throughout the day as a replacement for smartphones. Zuckerberg has called them the “holy grail” device that will “redefine our relationship with technology” by the end of this decade.
Elizabeth Arden launches shoppable virtual store to reach new generation – PYMNTS
The Revlon-owned beauty brand created the metaverse shopping experience in partnership with experiential eCommerce platform Obsess and launched it Tuesday (May 16), Elizabeth Arden said in a Wednesday press release. … Elizabeth Arden’s new virtual store’s interactive features allow visitors to immerse themselves in historical photos that tell the story of the brand and its founder, play games and take quizzes to learn about skin care products and regimens, and collect tokens as they browse through the site to win a prize, according to the press release.
Futureverse Manifesto – Futureverse
The future is a collective vision. That exists within every mind on the planet. Owned by everyone. The future is the only truly decentralized idea. Not a place but possibility. The future is everything we’ll create together. With our eyes closed and our minds open, we are already there. Pursuing a vision rooted in love and expressed through technology. A vision that grows alongside the real world, evolving who we can be and how we connect. Where the choices we make matter, and algorithms can’t tell us what to think.
Futureverse combines eight companies in effort to create user-controlled metaverse – Forbes
“Most metaverse companies are simply building a game but calling it the metaverse,” [Aaron McDonald, co-founder] tells Forbes by email. “We truly believe no one can build ‘A’ metaverse, there is only ‘The’ metaverse—the collection of user-owned interoperable identity, data and content that can be used in a whole universe of applications.” … Futureverse has its own blockchain, the Root Network, in line with the philosophy that a—or the—metaverse requires distributed-ledger technology to achieve interoperability among different systems. […]
Non-Fungible Labs announced in June that it was establishing Futureverse Foundation, a charitable organization advised by the artist Alexandra Grant and her friend Keanu Reeves, the actor. The organization plans to provide grants to ”underrepresented artists, creatives, and communities in order to build more diverse, equitable, and inclusive spaces—in both the metaverse and real world,” according to a press release last week that announced the eight-company rollup.
A metaverse music concert brought to you by Active Theory, Yoom, and Dreamwave.
“The transparency, interoperability, ownership, and economic functionalities that blockchain technology brings to the table is fundamental for an open and interoperable metaverse that uniquely empowers creators and users, so it is likewise worth the challenge of developing against it. The key is figuring out which components of these immersive experiences benefit from decentralized characteristics (say avatars, items, currency, and similar creator content) and develop those on-chain while allowing for traditional centralized infrastructure to carry the heavy lift of the rest of the experience.”
Yes, the metaverse is still happening – Harvard Business Review
Metaverse adoption will look different than the past adoption rates of Web 1.0 and 2.0, where consumers played a significant role. Enterprise and industry may play a key role for the rest of us to understand the value of an internet in 3D in addition to the younger generation and gamers who have been playing in a 3D world. … Early data shows much higher metaverse adoption rates in Asia, MENA, and Europe than the United States.
“This story is so funny and so bleak” – Paolo Pedercini: Twitter
This story is so funny and so bleak. But also, this kind of “exploring a dead virtual world” articles used to be written a decade or so after the hype, back in Second Life times.
Jerry McNally