A newly-enrolled student of the University of Buenos Aires Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism, 23-year old Alex sits on a bench in Las Heras - one of the best parks of the city. He’s come to Argentina from Western Europe for his second master’s degree and hopes to start over, enjoying the free and world-acknowledged education. As he takes another sip of his maté from a calabaza, Alex’s gaze follows an enormous old fashioned bus going down the Coronel Diaz Ave and stumbles upon the neoclassical building of the Buenos Aires National Academy of Medicine. The edifice seems so elegant yet sliding into dilapidation. As are many buildings over 30 in this city, and this is sad.
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As he wonders if this should be changed in places so dear to world architecture yet lacking in funds, a 3D model of Buenos Aires springs up in his mind. Every building here is both detailed and squeaky brand new, and apartments may be sold and resold like NFTs for assets. This gives him a clue on his future research topic: what if he abandons the almost set choice to study the history of architectural styles, and picks the digital architecture for metaverses? Will this be a right investment of his youth? Transferring imperfect physical worlds into boundless 3D-reality seems natural, although the idea itself is limited by both software and hardware, as even Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is still striving to bring the metaverse concept into life.
Allocating funds for “metaverses” (which now are only separate digital spaces with no clear perspective to merge) has been much of a trend for companies in 2022. According to a report by Strategic Market Research (URL), in 2022 the world's metaverse market showed a double digit growth (almost 40%), reaching $47.48 bln. The 2030 forecast is also promising - for it to be doubling annually, to finally hit $678.8 bln. The concept’s also getting attention from institutions: the World Economic Forum is now considering adopting a global policy on the metaverse. To do this, not only major market players like Decentraland or Facebook, but also Web3 projects like Shiba Inu, are invited (URL). And by the way, Shiba Inu is now working to release a beta of its platform Shibarium - a layer-2 network on top of the Shiba Inu blockchain, conceived as a space to build a metaverse (as well as to expand the Shiba Inu ecosystem with its decentralized applications - dApps, and NFTs, used with lower transaction costs). On top of that, in January 2023 world’s first public metaverse was officially launched in Seoul (URL).
Isn’t it a hype bubble to pop? Or could it be the right choice for companies pursuing a solid share of the future market, and a way for institutions to stay cutting edge?
One doesn’t exclude the other, as long as we mind the ultimate purpose of such a move. For the time being there’s still much to explore about metaverses, so the hype will last, ascending or staying within a scope of sinusoid. Yet when the dust settles, the approach must end up as a tool that solves real problems.
A tool to sell more?
For now, various metaverses are being increasingly used by companies as a means to sell. Consider getting a new pair of digital Nikes for your Roblox Nikeland avatar, or investing into digital or even physical objects sold for the ERC-20 tokens MANA as NFTs in Decentraland. Today such digital stuff is still viewed as a long-time investment. But the longer the NFT world’s history, the less the overall sense of novelty and harder to pick an item to skyrocket among the pastiche of variants.
** **Tokenizing physical objects to be sold through metaverse marketplaces may attract a more constant attention as long as buyers are satisfied with the conditions - safety, currency (which is usually a crypto), and has a way to show off the unique purchase. Thus, not only digital marketplacing connects the future of metaverse to the trust in cryptocurrencies and the platforms’ safety, but also makes it a vogue. And as trends change, one can’t say if metaverse is to become a classic.
Simple tokenizing to ensure the originality of a product is great but not enough. It must be spiced up with emotions. For now, creating exquisite pieces like the utterly delicious Louis Vuitton anniversary game with little avatar Vivienne seems rather an ad hoc than a pattern break. And although in the coming years sales companies will be getting a share of their revenue due to digital purchases pushed through metaverses, in a while it’ll be dull.
A more tangible way to use the metaverse as an approach is by expanding the use of augmented reality (AR). The Louis Vuitton Digital Nomades collaboration feels like a step in the right way, yet it is too expensive and a bit boring.
Still, let us not underestimate the power of habit. With the bullishness of metaversing, brands are using this space to nurture loyal customers. If today a middle-income mother of three kids may not get curious enough to surf through a collection of NFTs applicable inside a metaverse, her teen kids are already embracing the concept, as it’s full of peers and dopamine. They spend hours in virtual gaming and wish for a new pair of Nikes for their Roblox Nikeland avatar as a birthday present. And they’ll be easily taking on new stuff in web3 as it’s released later on.
Industrial metaverse to advance
While releases about entertainment and art, like Waves Ducks (URL) or Roblox Championships (URL), seem ridiculous for those who use computers mostly for Office and messengers, the metaverse tech's getting serious attention from industrial whales. In an industrial metaverse there’s no problem with privacy among the peer users, which is raised in connection to the “Metaverse-as-a-Service” (MaaS - solutions to digitize companies’ working process) or addiction - the scourge of gamified metaverses.
On the contrary, it’s a boon of support in taking decisions, traceability, transparency and predictability, all brought by 3D-digital twins assisted with the augmented reality (AR). The increasingly digitized product manufacturing process allows to integrate operators into a new generation of Human Cyber–Physical System (URL). Simply put, using this is going to reduce production costs while bringing the decision making to its best. The data is getting more precise and easily accessible, being combined in 3D. That’s why in a November 2022 report by Molex (URL) the industrial metaverse was referred to as a "productivity force multiplier”.
That’s why one might doubt the usefulness of fitting another AR luxurious sofa into the apartment, but none would argue the benefit of a super-precise AR image displayed on the tablet, uncovering the inner side of an aircraft engine. The easily accessible exact data on the conditions of its components, delivered by the RFID tags, will support the quality of the production or repair, meaning the economic benefit and saving people’s lives.
As coined by Siemens - a pioneer in creating, using and selling AR tools to other industrial companies - it shifts production to a new level of automation, from Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) to Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM). For example, the Siemens “Digital Mockup and Virtual/Augmented Reality” is supposed to immerse the design teams into high-level digital prototypes. Another example of industrial AR is Safran’s Diota augmented reality tool which reduces the time of the maintenance and repair of turbines.
AR tools for industry are part of broader industrial solutions - digital factories. Sound examples of those include a partnership by Siemens and NVIDIA aimed to game change the industrial production by creating the production metaverse (URL), or the virtual factory by BMW (URL) - nowadays the fullest implementation of the industry 4.0. As a whole, a decent digital copy of production, with the Internet of Things and AR goes in line with the industry's long-desired automation.
And here one should mind that “metaverse” means a tool for the human-centric industry transformation, so it is merely a high-tech aid to produce better. In the case of MaaS or digital marketplaces, the positive effect is far less undeniable.
Other beneficiaries of metaverse
Surely enough, the industrial metaverse is not only about civil production, as the military use of metaverse is not limited to the sphere of production. The metaverse technologies are to be tested (and, probably, enjoyed) by the military: take the Pentagon’s Joint Warfighting Concept, that’s living through its third iteration (URL), or the “loyal wingman drone" Ghost Bat by Boeing. Also applicable is the freshly released partnership by NVIDIA and the F-35 fighter jet integrator Lockheed Martin, aimed to create a virtual replica of Earth (URL): along with weather monitoring, this digital twin might be a helpful tool for intelligence.
Some concepts of metaverse might be brain-bursting even for the tech savvies, leaving the Siemens industrial metaverse to look conservative. Take Elon Musk's idea of "Metaverse Space Fabric" - a metaverse based on the high-speed satellite internet Starlink integrated with the Neuralink implantable brain–computer interfaces (URL). By now it feels more like another Musks's marketing attack. Still, this is a challenge to accept. When the 18th century French ophthalmologist Jacques Davies was making the world's first cataract extraction surgery, who believed in the possibility of a lens replacement surgery?
Healthcare metaverse approach is awesome anyway. A more resultative medicine may be achieved by redesigning the interaction between patient and doctor, and the way health data is obtained, stored and processed. Examples of this are a project by Thumbay Group - a Metaverse Hospital in the UAE, Alder Hay Children’s Hospital in the UK, or an “experience zone” of Indian Yashoda Hospital within the Decentraland Metaverse. As it grows more sophisticated, using such infrastructure will help patients subjectively - by reducing anxiety, and in an objective way - by the advantage of turning the physical health data into a personal big data, thus by personalizing treatment.
A decade away from now, the UBA graduate Alex may be lucky enough to make it into Zaha Hadid Architects as a metaverse architect, with an expensive medical insurance package including a metaverse hospital in it. His job may make him rich, and the tailored medical approach may save his life from a timely discovered cancer. By this time he will probably have invested in some digital art and have even failed once or twice, but got the overall experience to rule his digital assets. Meanwhile, his research papers will be tokenized and turned into soulbound tokens no one could fake.
No matter where the metaverse technology evolves, it'll be taking place. The popping bubbles will bear more elaborate projects. And, as usual, some will be using them to gain more health and money, while the others - just to get new shots of dopamine.