The Metaverse – What Does The Future Look Like?

Roger James Hamilton, CEO and Founder of Genius Group predicts how the metaverse will impact our lives

 
If you’ve heard people talking about the Metaverse and are wondering what the big deal is, it’s a 3D digital world that is soon going to replace the 2D internet. The metaverse will create a virtual environment, where you socialise, interact, manage businesses and investments, in other words it’s an extended reality.
 

Will it really happen?

 
It already is! The fact that Facebook has recently changed its name to ‘Meta’ might be a good indication. Meta plans to design and build a virtual realm interconnected to the world we currently inhabit. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg has predicted that the metaverse will become mainstream in the next 5-10 years.

Although the metaverse world is still in the making, the impact of COVID-19 has been a catalyst for the creation of a layered digital world beyond the internet.

It’s not only Facebook that is looking in this direction, other tech giants like Microsoft, Nvidia, Niantic and Unity have made big announcements indicating that they’re embracing the concept and actively working towards a world of extended reality.

I believe the metaverse is our future and is going to change the way we live.

This new world will expand far beyond the world we know. We’ll have a digital twin of planet Earth where applications and processes can be simulated before being built in the real world. This will take what used to be computer aided design (CAD) to another level and far beyond.
 

 
I see a future where every new building, infrastructure and advanced technology can be trialled and improved before real time application.

We will see digital creators make more things in the metaverse than in the real world. Every industry and business will be able to collaborate in real time using digital twins to understand their operations, processes and people better.

This is not purely an idea without foundation, it’s already in progress.

• BMW and Nvidia Omniverse created new simulation capabilities to help BMW make critical decisions and automation of the future factory.
• Ericsson is using Nvidia Omniverse to build a digital twin environment to help determine how to place and configure each of their sites for best coverage and network performance. By building city scale models that are physically accurate down to the materials of the buildings to quickly calculate and visualise the quality of the signal at every point in the city.

This isn’t some sci-fi imagined future; the metaverse will leverage digital technology to transform our reality into another dimension. We will not be viewing the metaverse in high definition or ultra-high definition but in reality level definition.
 

How will it work?

 
We’ll have virtual reality glasses and headsets, making it difficult to see the difference between the real world and digital worlds.  This is retina level definition. You can even sleep in your VR glasses, wake up and have no idea if what you are seeing is reality or virtual.

Virtual reality glasses already exist, although, currently, they’re only used by astronauts, car designers and fighter pilots. With enhanced computing power and the cost of these glasses becoming affordable, reality is going to merge with a lifelike digital metaverse through which we can teleport and time travel to anyplace, anytime.

Crypto currencies have already become digital and are now becoming mainstream. They exist only as digital code – and yet have massive value. The meta economy is set to escalate to create billionaires in the metaverse whose net worth will outstrip the wealth of any billionaire today. Digital assets, virtual land and digital products give us an entirely new world where we get to rewrite the rules. The boom in NFTs is linked directly to the metaverse

Digital objects can easily be bought and sold in the metaverse – these include art, collectibles, games, music, property and virtual land. As the metaverse becomes planet sized and linked to our real world, NFTs, tokenisation, digital ownership and digital currencies will become the norm and we will begin to see everything linked to blockchain.

Be prepared for a new world, life is going to take on a new dimension.