What is the metaverse?

Guest blog by Daniel Rowles, CEO at Target Internet

What is the metaverse? This has been the question on many marketers’ lips since 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was being rebranded as ‘Meta’, and committed the newly renamed company to developing a metaverse that would become a “successor to the mobile internet”.

In this article, we’ll tell you what a metaverse could look like, how it could change marketing, and why the metaverse concept is far bigger than Facebook’s mission alone.

What is the metaverse?

‘The metaverse’ is a concept which some influential people and powerful companies believe could be the successor to the mobile internet.

A key distinction between this metaverse concept and the internet as we know it, is that the user would be digitally present within a virtual, or ‘embodied’, space. They are not so much on the internet, as in it.

There are various opinions on what the metaverse would be like. Most commentators seem to agree that the term means an interconnected system of mostly 3D online spaces, which a person could navigate while using a device such as a VR headset or smartphone.

The users would do this in the guise of a digital persona, or avatar. While using the metaverse, a digital persona would be able to move seamlessly from one virtual world to the next, while retaining their identity and keeping hold of virtual assets such as currencies and graphics.

These spaces and digital personas would persist through time, even when nobody is using them, thus forming a ‘meta’ universe that layers over reality.

Much like the word ‘cyberspace’, ‘metaverse’ originated in sci-fi literature. Its first recorded use was in the novel Snow Crash (1992), by Neal Stephenson.

Does the metaverse exist yet?

Media commentators and tech brands often refer to a singular ‘the metaverse’, but it’s highly debatable whether such a thing currently exists as much more than a concept.

There are already virtual worlds that hint at the possibilities of a metaverse, such as Fortnite’s online community, in which players can venture outside of the game’s ‘battle royale’ action to socialise and watch online concerts together, or VR hangout applications where people can interact with friends, play games and engage in other activities within a world comprising multiple spaces.

Activities within these spaces are sometimes described as happening “in the metaverse” – but it’s often more accurate to say they’re a form of ‘virtual social’, or ‘social VR’.

We’ll only really have one true metaverse when some of the most popular virtual communities start to link up within a common infrastructure. When we reach the point where a person’s digital avatar can move seamlessly between autonomous virtual spaces and experiences – much like we navigate places on the internet using links and search – there’ll be a stronger argument to say that the metaverse has arrived.

What we do have at present, is some of the proposed building blocks of a potential future metaverse.

For the full article: https://www.targetinternet.com/resources/a-marketers-guide-to-the-metaverse/