The Metaverse is Inevitable
Future of Marketing Institute
Global forum on teaching, research, and outreach on future of marketing topics | Schulich School @ York University
This week we are pleased to have Dr. Louis Rosenberg write a guest editorial for the FMI newsletter.
Dr. Louis Rosenberg is an early pioneer of virtual and augmented reality. He is currently CEO of Unanimous AI, the Chief Scientist of the Responsible Metaverse Alliance (RMA), and the Global Technology Advisor to the XR Safety Initiative (XRSI).
Over the last few weeks, there has been increasing pessimism about the metaverse with many insiders asking if we’re headed for another winter. This is not surprising considering that Meta stock has lost over half its value since announcing its strategic transition into the metaverse, and last week they announced major layoffs across the company.
As someone who has worked in virtual and augmented reality for three decades, I see the current struggles at Meta as a reflection of its legacy business rather than an indication that its metaverse strategy is failing. I believe it will take another year or two before we can really predict if Meta will be successful in this space or if other large players will emerge as the true leaders of the metaverse.
My larger concern is that there’s still so much confusion about what “the metaverse” is and how it will benefit society. Personally, I blame influencers from the Web3 space for creating much of this confusion, describing the metaverse in terms of blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs, which are useful technologies but are no more specific to the metaverse than infrastructures like 5G, GPS, or GPUs.
The metaverse is not about any specific pieces of infrastructure.
I point this out because of an experience I had at the Metaverse Summit in San Jose two weeks ago. During the event, I sat in on a roundtable on the topic of “Metaverse Marketing.” It was attended by executives from many big brands. To my surprise, nobody talked about issues that I would consider relevant to marketing in the metaverse. Instead, they talked mostly about using NFTs for marketing and other gimmicky strategies for appealing to “Web3 natives” and “Degens.” That’s not the metaverse. If the industry doesn’t push back on this confusion, it will continue to struggle.
The metaverse is not about NFTs. It’s about people.
Specifically, the metaverse is about transforming how people experience the digital world. Since the dawn of computing, digital content has been accessed primarily through flat media viewed in the third person. In the metaverse, our digital lives will increasingly involve immersive media that is experienced all around us in the first person.
The metaverse is the societal transition of the digital world from flat content to immersive experiences.
If anything, the metaverse is inevitable.
Why inevitable? It’s in our DNA. The human organism evolved to understand our world through first-person experiences in spatial environments. It’s how we interact and explore. It’s how we store memories and build mental models. It’s how we generate wisdom and develop intuition. In other words, the metaverse is about leveraging our natural human abilities for perception, interaction, and exploration when we engage the creative power and flexibility of digital content. It will happen. The only question is, will it happen soon or will the industry fall back into another long dark winter?
Personally, I don’t believe winter is coming.
I say that as someone who lived through the longest winter of them all. After doing early VR and AR research at Stanford, NASA and the US Air Force, I founded Immersion Corporation in 1993 to bring the natural power of immersive experiences to major markets. By 1995 the industry was on fire. But then came the Dot-com boom and the VC industry abruptly narrowed its focus, dumping every penny into eCommerce startups. You couldn’t utter the phrase “virtual reality” with most investors for over a decade. This submerged the metaverse into an icy winter that lasted from about 1997 to 2012.
That’s not going to happen this time.
The metaverse is no longer driven by startups and fueled by venture funding. Many of the largest companies in the world are now competing to bring VR and AR products to mainstream markets. Some say this will evolve into a narrow industry aimed at gaming, entertainment, and a handful of other targeted verticals, but I believe it will be far broader than that. In fact, I predict by the early 2030s, the metaverse will become a central part of daily life.
Of course, I’m not saying we will spend our lives in cartoonish virtual worlds using creepy avatars. Virtual spaces will get far more natural and realistic. Still, I believe that purely virtual worlds will be successful mostly for short-duration activities similar to how we lose ourselves in TV and movies today. The true metaverse – the one that will transform society – will be rooted in augmented reality, enabling us to experience the real world embellished with immersive virtual content that appears seamlessly all around us. That is by far the most natural way to bring the digital world into our lives. And for that reason, the metaverse is inevitable.
Dr. Louis Rosenberg developed the first functional augmented reality system for Air Force Research Laboratory in 1992. In 1993, he founded the early VR company Immersion Corporation. In 2004, he founded the early AR company Outland Research. He’s been awarded over 300 patents for VR, AR, and AI technologies and published over 100 academic papers. He received his PhD from Stanford and was a tenured professor at California State University.
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Newsletter curated by Divya Maheshwari and Nargiza Islamova, Digital Marketing Specialists at FMI
Digital and Social Media Strategist, LinkedIn Learning Instructor, Digital Marketing Professor, AI Research
2yEnjoyed your perspective Louis Rosenberg about how the metaverse isn't about gadgets and 3D swag. It's more of an experience to be present. I think that's where Mark Zuckerberg gets it right. But, ultimately, I don't want to shut out the real world with VR goggles. I'd much have a more social experience with AR. Thanks!