Rodolfo Salazar is Managing Director of iDigital Studios & CEO at QUDOX. Accelerated Customer Growth│Helping companies become Unicorns.
getty
What will happen when video games meet Web3? When virtual worlds mesh with geolocation maps of the planet? When simulations are so accurate that people feel a minimal difference between virtuality and reality?
During the past year, many people have been talking about the metaverse. Many others are already exploring virtual worlds—the realms of an awaited mixed reality 3D future. The internet and web are starting to provide spaces where we can find our physical selves negotiating goods and services in a new format that widens our physical reality toward different unlimited virtual or extended universes.
There is a significant number of discoveries, consumer trends and emerging technologies that are shaping the reality around us—new rising forms of knowledge, builders and makers, workshops, and industries migrating, starting or at least thinking of finding ways to migrate toward these enhanced and virtual worlds.
The metaverse is a very complex concept that is still in formation. During the past few months, hundreds of concepts have been collected related to the metaverse—from products that virtually amplify everything physical to services that are physically persistent within virtual spaces. These are a fusion of what humanity can do and what humans can boost and create through new technologies and virtual worlds.
The scenarios in the metaverse are very complex and uncertain. In some cases, they are like dreams or visions from a science fiction movie—scenarios unique to humans, businesses and societies. These scenarios will start to behave in cycles that turn into tendencies, and these tendencies will swiftly become realities for many around the globe. They demonstrate how reality within these worlds will be available and how change is going to revolve around our daily physical lives.
The metaverse contains different elements that we can group into four pillars, something I’ve written about previously. The metaverse also embraces technologies intertwined with human aspects and attitudes. A good example is one of the four pillars: mirror worlds, or “augmented reflections of the physical world.” Thanks to technology and sensors that provide a layer of contextual data, these virtually enhanced realities could redefine our trial-and-error processes by using models of our work, life and everything in between to be virtually analyzed and tested against physical options, actions and results—including education, business, love, exercise, health, etc. This could take socialization from rudimentary physical models to very complex ones. I believe society will continue to transform in an even faster way to embrace these new technologies and new amplification abilities.
With the proliferation of sensors around us, in five years, the number of internet-connected sensors around the world is expected to multiply not by 10 but by 100, providing us with intelligence, data, information, and physical and virtual interactions in any scenario. It will also make us independent from certain institutions and professionals in a very tangible way. These new technologies will be everywhere and provide us with links between reality and augmented extensions, allowing “lifelogging” (automatic documentation of life’s sensorial complexity). These techs will also allow us to be able to experience life through the five senses of other people with interfaces that reenact and make us feel what others have experienced.
As described in my previous article, the four pillars will merge in such a way that we will reconsider our physical identity with the options of various virtual identities.
The question we ask ourselves is: How far is this metaverse? Some say we are 10 or more years apart from this new reality; others think we have been submerged in it for 10 years already. I believe the metaverse is in formation, and we are at the center of watching how technology is giving us ways to amplify ourselves physically and virtually every day since the beginning of the 21st century. I’d say that we’re about to start seeing these scenarios through our devices and the new ways of doing things in the next three to five years.
The first thing that may start to hit us is the proliferation of sensors and tools for the analysis of all data that will be available to the human race. Whether we carry the sensors on our bodies or devices, or they are embedded into the world around us, we’re going to have an amount of data and information that’ll lead us toward a new era of hyper-transparency. It’ll be so much harder to duplicate or falsify what is already part of public record, and the development of reputation networks will make it hard for people to have the opportunity of not becoming the best version of themselves.
This will not remain only for one part of society—we will all be able to see transparently where everyone is and what everyone is doing, and I believe this power will provoke a radical change in people. It’ll be harder to live in anonymity, and it’ll be more expensive to keep oneself out of the public light. I believe this transparency and digitalized reputation will cause situations that will commence rising entire virtual communities in favor or against different topics in the world. Many will participate in experiments with social rules under alternative identities. Others will have the ability inside these spaces to have status, capabilities and recognition much bigger than they have in the physical world. Because of this, it’ll be very appealing for some to grow their virtual identity more than their real one. This all, of course, assumes that technologies will work the way anticipated, contributing in a simple way to people’s daily lives.
Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?
