• Metaverse is currently hyped as its long-term impact is not understood

• It is not just wearing glasses all day and staying in. Rather, it’s immersive and enriching.

• The impact of these immersive experiences is much more than fathomable.

• But this road from hype to utility will be not straight-forward

• Initially, we will see horizontal innovation i.e application specific metaverse - from Apps to Meta-apps.

• This will be followed by an inflection point attained by invention of an immersive and non-intrusive hardware.

• Post the inflection point, mass adoption will come and we will all be living the metaverse-life seamlessly, asking ourselves how did we ever live without it?

Introduction

When we think of metaverse, we think about some sci-fi ‘Black-Mirror’ world where everyone is wearing a headset living in their own universe. We think of a highly disconnected world where we don’t want our kids to grow in.

This is because we are only seeing how the metaverse of today are being built: large open worlds where you can escape your actual life and live a second one as your avatar. The only change in today’s metaverse from the open-worlds such as GTA or Red Dead Redemption, is that now you can also own a piece in these worlds in hopes of earning something. This vision, in my view, is too myopic - and this is also what scares people.

But that’s human tendency: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run (Amara’s law).

It has happened before. We have been through the same cycle when internet was introduced to the world, when mobiles phones were invented and the list goes on. All these inventions were called fads. But eventually mass adoption came - only when people saw utility.

Same cycle will repeat for Metaverse. That is when we will start living the metaverse life.

This three part article is my attempt to show the utility of metaverse and discuss the technological breakthroughs that will enable its mass adoption.

Part 1 - A Sunday in the Metaverse life

Part 2 - From Apps to Meta-apps

Part 3 - The invention that changes all (hint: its all hardware)

Part 1 - A Sunday in the Metaverse life

It’s a Sunday Morning. You decide to do an immersive meditation today.

• You open the Calm3.0 Meta-app on your sleek Portal (just phones but they are rebranded as ‘Portals’ as ‘Phones’ did to ‘Mobiles’ in 2000s) and put on the new ultralight smart glasses - ‘Glass 2.0’ , with built-in earphones connected via bluetooth 7.0.

• You choose between 100+ metaverses by gesture movements and feel like sitting near under that large tree in Kausani overlooking the snowcapped Himalayas today, where you have been when you were 22.

• The app, through immersive AR, transforms your white-walled room compatible will 1000+ Meta-apps, into that spot in Kausani. You meditate for 15 mins in the voice of your chosen and designed 3D NFT avatar based on Morgan Freeman, who is also sitting beside you guiding you through the meditation.

• Once done, you get a notification of earned $CALM tokens for this session. You decide to stake this token rather than selling. You are saving to pay for that therapy session in the meta-app that accepts the same token. It’s a fully functional and circular economy. You can cash out - but why would you, if you are enjoying the experience.

You close the app and get ready for the day - and thank god that some activities are IRL, at least till now.

As you are getting ready, your partner is in the kitchen, on his Portal, projecting that delicious cake recipe from the Masterchef3.0 Meta-app.

• He finalised this recipe after browsing through multiple food-universes in the meta-app from cakes across the globe.

• The meta-app teleports him to the chef’s kitchen where he can see the ingredients laid out with origin and a meta-link to get them delivered in 20 mins, if needed. He adds a few in the cart.

• He carefully pauses and observes the amount of baking powder added (the last time he made the same recipe, the cake was a little soft) and the temperature set on the over to preheat. With the new Glass 2.0, he can, in real time, adjust the changes in his smart oven without exiting the metaverse.

• He sees a notification with the $CHEF tokens he earned for learning-to-cook and a bonus for using the same brand Oven. Finally, he has enough tokens to get on a 5 mins 1:1 chat with his favourite pastry chef - a 12 year-old Lisa based in the northern remote part of Peru, who has 21mn followers, and famous for her Salty dark chocolate tarts.

He exists the meta-app as he sees you coming out, kisses you good morning, and is grateful for doing this IRL, at least till now.

You finally have some time today to buy some clothes for your upcoming trip to Nice.

• You open the AMAZON3.0 Meta-app, put on the Glass2.0, and quickly filter out the options for summer dresses.

• You invite your friend, who is online waiting for you, as decided yesterday over the party.

• You shortlist 5 dresses and go to the virtual dressing room where your 3-D life-like avatar can do a mini ramp walk, checkout the dress from multiple angles, check the fit for different sizes, while getting live opinions from your friends.

• Your friend likes the second dress more. To get a second opinion you project the dress to your partner, where he can see your avatar standing in front of him in the dress without the Glass. He agrees with your friend.

• You buy the dress with the $AMZN token, receive the NFT receipt, and are awarded notification for reward token which gives you discounts on your next purchase. Your friend also receives a part of this reward token to take part in the experience.

Your partner reminds you about finalising the hotel in Nice, which you have ben putting off since a week. You both decide to sit down after eating the hot breakfast with tea that he prepared in the morning. Eating is still IRL, at least till now.

You open the HAUS Meta-app on your Portal.

• You have already shortlisted 8-10 options for your hotel in Nice, now is the time to test them all with the experience test.

• Wearing the Glass, both of your avatars are in the rooms of your selected hotels. With simple gesture movements, which have become second nature now, you can walk inside the room, see the view from the balcony, even hear the noise levels from nearby traffic across time of a day, and see the inclusions in the room.

• You decide to finally book the highest rated one, which is there for a reason. You pay with the $HAUS token and receive the NFT as the ticket. The good thing about HAUS is you can sell this NFT to other verified users, if your plans change.

• You receive the notification of reward HAUS token, which will give you 20% off on the drinks menu.

Just after you book, your partner remembers he has a call with his development team in Romania. And you decide to take a nap on your soft couch, still IRL, at least till now.

He moves to the study room with his portal compatible laptop, wears his Glasses and enters the Romania office space.

• The team is already waiting in the room - a few members, or their work avatars, are sitting on the desk scribbling in their notebooks, while other are standing near the virtual whiteboard.

• His avatar walks near the whiteboard and shares pleasantries with his counter-part in Romania while all wait for the client, a gaming studio, to join the call.

• As the client joins, the junior character artist projects the 3D avatar he created for the client’s game to show to the team and the client.

• Client makes gesture movements to see the avatar from various angles and see how it walks, runs, sits, and dances.

• Client seems impressed, but suggests a few feedback to make it more relatable to their target audience - 13 year old boys.

• As the meeting ends, the notes, auto-recorded through an AI notetaker, are shared with the client and the relevant team members.

Your partner decides to look at the notes and work on them on Monday first thing, exits the meeting and come sleep next to you to enjoy the rest of the Sunday IRL.

As evening comes, you go to the park with you 3 year old twins. You feel a little nostalgic and open the MEMORIES meta-app on your portal.

• The MEMORIES meta-app converts your home videos or any videos into immersive memories for you to travel back in time.

• Among the many childhood memories, you decide to take the one where in you are a 3 year old little girl in a flowery dress, walking, more like skipping, with you grandmother holding your hand.

• You can choose the option between being a 3rd party in the memory or first person. You choose the latter and can see your grandmother, who passed away 5 years ago, holding your hand and taking a stroll on the road of your hometown on a warm summer evening.

You feel a drop of tear rolling from your eyes, and thank god to experience emotion IRL, at least till now.

That’s your typical Sunday in the metaverse life, except that it is called just ‘life’ now. It’s amazing how quickly we adapt ourselves and get used to the technological changes. And to think, in 2022, metaverse was not even a word in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Part 2 - From Apps to Meta-apps

This transition form the current life to the metaverse life, however, will not be straightforward. In my view, it will happen in four steps.

Step 1: Aggregated alternate worlds (2008 repeat)

We are here.

Sandbox, Decentraland etc. have paved the way for the web3.0 metaverse, but the adoption is still low. Despite major brands flocking into these metaverse and their frothy valuations (in $billions), we are not seeing mass adoption. One can argue that we are still early in the journey, but wait, we have seen this before.

This adoption is nothing new from the one we saw between 2006-2008, with the hype of Second Life. Companies including Intel, IBM, Nissan, NBC created their own space inside the Second Life “metaverse” (source). And, by the way, Second Life still has 600k MAU, as of April 2022 (source). This is almost double the number released by Sandbox in the same period.

They key missing angle, in my view, is the experience. Brands want their customers to have a similar virtual experience as it intends to give IRL.

This will push the metaverse innovation to step 2.

Step 2: Horizontal innovation: apps to meta-apps

With the onset of aggregated metaverse, the know-how of building a metaverse experience will become easily available. Brands that are doing trials with aggregated metaverse will soon start realising that the experience is not ideal for their customers. And, they want to control the user experience.

Thus the era of horizontal innovation begins - moving from apps to meta-apps. We have already started seeing that with Bulgari who just launched their own metaverse - a mini Rome to give their customer a similar Bulgari experience as in their offline stores.

This will push hundreds of brands to create their own metaverse. As we saw in 2010s, when brands moved from websites to apps, we will see something similar as brands move from apps to meta-apps. Without asking do we or our customer even need it?

We are also seeing this with the onset of gaming metaverse. Open world games will soon start calling themselves Metaverse, where user can explore an open land, buy stuff, play different type of games, and do all this while earning tokens.

Don’t confuse that with breakthrough innovation. We are still moving horizontally. These web3.0 metaverse are still running on our Operating Systems (OS) and Hardware that are made for web2.0.

Between the two, OS will be an easier puzzle to crack, which will push us to Step 3.

Step 3: Aggregation 2.0 - application specific metaverse

As we have learned in web2.0, users don’t like to install multiple apps. They would rather have a single bulky app that does all. We might see something similar in web3.0 metaverse.

We could see application specific aggregated apps which gives users access to multiple brands.

Example - One app that gives access to all the Music metaverse, other to all the shopping metaverse. Similar aggregators can exist with applications such as banking, videos, or even social media.

The idea behind these aggregation will be having a single avatar that can jump across these multiple metaverse:

• When you go to shopping, its the same you going in all the shops - hence, it would make sense to have a same avatar (a life-like you) doing online shopping for you.

• When you go to banking, what matters is your identity - KYC, Credit score etc. So it would make sense to have a single avatar jumping between banks and financial solutions.

• When you go to social media, your interest across all these social media platform is still the same. If you like watching F1 videos on youtube, you tend to watch and follow F1 players on Insta too.

  You get the gist.

This will increase the adoption as it makes it easy for the users by having a single avatar, wallet, username, and authentication for a single use-case.

But real innovation which leads to mass adoption and the real reason why we started building metaverse will only be achieved through hardware innovation. This will push us to Step 4.

Step 4: Hardware innovation - the real deal

I will keep it short first and then long - as it needs a whole segment for itself to go in detail.

Websites :: PC

Apps :: Mobile

Meta-apps :: ???

To people who think VR headset is the answer, I respectfully disagree and have one just question - Have you ever wore the headset for more than 30 mins and came out without feeling dizzy or a headache?

Let’s deep dive into the hardware limitations and innovations needed to lead to mass adoption of metaverse/meta-apps.

Part 3 - The invention that changes all (hint: its hardware)

Mass adoption for metaverse is not going to be driven by big brands flocking in, better graphics, strong gameplay, great earning models, or any other factor except the big H.

Hardware, and only hardware, will bring mass adoption to metaverse. Period.

(at least, that’s my prediction)

The current hardware landscape is not suitable for metaverse.

• Metaverse on mobile still have a 2D feel

• PC metaverse feels more like games and gets boring real soon

• VR headsets are not suitable for long engagement as they are highly invasive and, frankly, not comfortable.

In my view, the hardware gaps will not be fulfilled by just one device. There are three major hardware required to make metaverse a truly immersive and low intrusive experience:

1. Handheld device - I would like to name it - THE PORTAL™. Our current mobile phone hardware is perfectly suitable for the apps we have. It can do a lot given its foam factor. But to truly experience the metaverse in its intended immersive way, you need AR and VR compatibility. This means a newly designed chipset to run these power-intensive features, camera and projection devices to visualise the metaverse and step into it from the comfort of your living room, and many more such tweaks. Hence, the name Portal - as it will take you from your universe to the thousands of metaverse.

2. Lens - lets’ call it - THE GLASS™. A light foam factor which is not as invasive as the VR headset and can easily be worn for couple of hours. This will also have built in audio without the need of wearing any bluetooth earphones. The glasses will also have in-built privacy, so that the metaverse becomes your safe space. And last but not the least, compatible with your Portal device.

3. Hand-gesture controller - let’s call it - THE RING™. A small device that will let you control your movement and all the hand-gestures in the metaverse through your own two hands.

This holy trinity of hardware will deliver a truly immersive experience that the metaverse of today are pitching for. The non-believers of metaverse will have no option but to adopt it - as that’s how the world functions now. You will feel paralysed without this holy trinity as you do now without your phones.

Without the hardware, we will not be able to begin our METAVERSE LIFE.

Conclusion

The metaverse of tomorrow will be different from that we are seeing today. They will have a better UI/UX and have a real utility behind them. The adoption of these metaverse will be slow and horizontal initially. In this phase we will see something similar to what happened when the websites of the world moved to mobile apps, without even asking do we or our customers even need it. But then there will come an inflection point that will change how metaverse is perceived and consumed. This point will be brought in by a ground-breaking hardware that is both non-invasive and highly immersive. And that is when the metaverse life begins. Until then, breathe and relax, we are not going to be a part of that black mirror episode.

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