The metaverse will allow us to do things that we can't do in reality, much like video games. We can destroy things and kill people without fear of punishment or retribution. We can be daring and push cultural and social norms beyond traditional boundaries, disguised by anonymity and invincibility in the metaverse. We can fly, experiment with drugs, and cheat on our partners.
The metaverse will be trippy and hallucinogenic at times. We can live our best, ideal lives in a body-like avatar and quickly return to our real lives without changing locations. We can parachute in and out of this world in seconds, seamlessly incorporating multiple different realities into the natural rhythm of our lives.
Janine Yorio is head of real estate at Republic, an online investment platform for retail investors. Zach Hungate is a game director at Everyrealm, a metaverse innovation and investment company. This article is part of "Metaverse Week" and is the second of a two-part series.
Cryptocurrencies are becoming an invisible layer of infrastructure that facilitates micropayments and secondary sales, making it easier to move money in and out of metaverses and games. There will be many metaverse tokens, but there will likely be a supercurrency that can be used in almost all metaverses - probably a stablecoin pegged to the USD.
Tokens are essential to a decentralized metaverse because they solve problems such as fluctuating exchange rates between local currencies and political problems such as sanctions, and because they enable the exchange of goods within the metaverse. The need to transact outside the metaverse, or to verify or regulate transactions through intermediaries, will reduce the economic opportunities of this world.
Crypto-based economies will therefore create real jobs that pay well enough to supplement or even replace traditional sources of employment.
The real metaverse
Just as there is no one Internet, there is no one metaverse. Current platforms like Decentraland have benefited from the recent wave of interest in metaverse technology, but Decentraland is more of a proof-of-concept for the addictive and superior experiences the metaverse has to offer. Shopping in Decentraland today is probably worse than shopping on Amazon. Music concerts in Decentraland are probably worse than on Zoom.
That's because Decentraland is primarily an attempt to create a digital twin of the real world, building spaces that simulate experiences we already have offline, but in novel ways.
Decentraland's vision for the metaverse is missing some key elements: high-quality video games and highly addictive content, high-quality graphics, strong communities, and activities that we can't easily replicate in real life.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, will be important to the metaverse, but not as important as it currently seems. In fact, the metaverse will give utility to NFTs, not the other way around. Once the metaverse takes hold, the economies of the metaverse will dwarf the size of the current $35 billion market for NFTs.
Today, about 30 million people own NFTs in their wallets. However, more than 250 million people play video games and 4 billion people use social media - two experiences that are at the heart of the metaverse. In terms of valuing the metaverse with NFTs, these tokens are to the metaverse as the tail is to the dog.
There's a lot of innovation that needs to happen between now and when this seamless mainstream version of the metaverse takes hold, and these are the areas we're focusing on at Everyrealm.
Improved audio quality. As we've learned from two years of video conferencing, audio quality is a critical component to online socialization. You may have noticed that your brain is more tired after a day of Zoom than it is after a day of real-life conversations. That's because when audio is transmitted over Zoom, there's what's known as "packet loss," which is when data packets don't reach their destination on the network. There are a number of reasons for this, most notably network congestion. Crosstalk and Spatial Audio, the audio styles used in Gather.town, provide a more natural, intuitive and engaging audio experience for players. We are excited to see how audio experiences can be improved, possibly to the point where music concerts are truly immersive. This is both a hardware and software problem, and solutions need to address both.Better UX. The Metaverse needs to have a pleasant user interface that allows players to join from a cell phone and seamlessly switch to a PC without hassle, and without compromising the gaming experience and user functionality.Higher number of simultaneous players. Most multiplayer games that exist today are limited by the number of users that can join simultaneously. For example, Ariana Grande's groundbreaking concert in Fortnite, which was viewed by nearly 80 million people, took place on a private Rift server. That's because current game engine solutions like Unity and Unreal Engine don't allow for massive player instances, which will solve future Metaverse projects. The Metaverse will have an instance where up to 5,000 people (and possibly more) can gather in the same area of a game without network or latency issues, creating a more immersive and engaging experience for everyone involved.NPCs or non-playing characters in the metaverse will act with emotions that seem more real and lifelike. This is achieved through more advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology designed to recognize traces of emotion in text, voice, and emoji chats.Photo-realistic graphics. The metaverse will most likely be developed in Unity or on the Unreal Engine, with high-fidelity graphics, but they will need to be balanced with hardware requirements and Wi-Fi and Internet quality limitations.Wallets. To further drive adoption of Web 3 and Metaverse, users need a smooth onboarding experience that starts with a friendly, intuitive, and game-like user interface. Onboarding wallets should feel as smooth as Web 2 signups, so users can participate as quickly as possible and without delay.Financial microtransactions on the blockchain and reduced transaction fees (gas) will enable high transaction rates and are a prerequisite for a seamless Metaverse experience. We are seeing more and more games built on Ethereum alternative blockchains such as Avalanche, Polygon, and Solana because these alternative blockchains offer higher transaction speeds and lower transaction costs. We expect further refinement in this area, and the change seems to be happening quickly.Security. Security and decentralization are paramount in blockchain-based metaverse and gaming products. Developers are actively reducing the risk of security breaches and hacks by developing and integrating with reliable, highly valid, truly decentralized and distributed blockchains.Metaverse and Blockchain Interoperability. The future is multichain! A multichain future is the goal of the blockchain community, but we are not there yet. Today, blockchains are not directly integrated and require bridges to transfer assets from each other. Bridges have been the primary cause of multiple hacks, with over $1 billion in bridge-related hacks in just over a year.DAOs. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) will govern the metaverse, and DAO tools will simplify the management and formation of these systems. Users will control the protocols of the metaverse through active governance within DAOs. While the DAO model is often seen as the future of the enterprise, there is a lack of tools to make this thesis a reality today.Hardware improvements. To experience a truly immersive metaverse product with photorealistic graphics, developers must use a platform such as Unreal Engine 5, and hardware improvements are a must. Today's Metaverse products and games have low fidelity and only run on web browsers. This is a current limitation, and the future Metaverse product offerings that users will love will likely require hardware improvements, such as mid-range graphics processors/central processing units (GPUs/CPUs).
