An interesting article by Pengana Capitol on ShareCafe. No doubt the metaverse is going to bring rewards for those that pick the right companies. All of this could be another positive for those invested in PLY. The full article is worth reading.

https://www.sharecafe.com.au/2021/11/26/modelling-the-metaverse-the-fight-to-profit-from-the-next-big-thing/

"No one can say with precision how long it will take for these pieces to fall into place or how big the economic opportunity could be. “The entire global economy is roughly US$84 trillion now,” Tishin observes. “In 10 years, it will be way over US$100 trillion. What percentage of that will have moved into the Metaverse? It’s clearly not all of it, or probably even most of it, but if it’s even one-tenth, you’re talking several trillions of dollars.”

Economist (17Nov21): How to build a metaverse

"As Silicon Valley gears itself up for a new round of metaverse-building, it’s worth looking at what lessons can be learned from the highly-successful world of gaming. Although “Second Life” is probably the most well known persistent virtual world, it has been surpassed by newer virtual worlds that have sold their experiences through gaming. ...... Building a true Stephenson-type metaverse will need some mechanism to get individuals interested in spending time there in the first place, and games seem to be the way to do it. "

The next trend?? The one-up from social media where crowds can gather and attend virtual events (eg concerts, product releases, shopping sprees, realestate showings, who knows??)

Benefits from user-created content as well as company created content - hence an endless supply of content just like the internet. This is where Non-fungible tokens is crucial for branding and digital art purposes. Nike and some other large companies have already moved to grab NFT of their logo and other accompanying intangibles. Cat memes and other popular recognisable art/design/cultural media pieces are going to be used to attract members and decorate virtual worlds. NFTs are the only way digital creators can get rewards for their efforts.

My question is.... how to invest? I see Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality as the building blocks. So investing in the 'infrastructure' of the content creation world would be a start. I'm thinking the following areas:

• cloud infrastructure side - we have to host all this data somewhere, and probably mirrored across the globe so that people can stream movies/concerts in real-time.
• hardware infrastructure side - more powerful computer chips required to handle 3D graphics at increasingly greater detail (eg AMD, Nvidia)
• content creation tools - enabling anyone to build a 'shop/venue/site' from coding (eg Unity) to gaming platforms (eg roblox), to graphic/video production (Adobe), anything that might help turn the 'real world' into a virtual world (eg statellite mapping/3d mapping technologies, 3DP.ax?); 3D visuals including Matterport and Vection Technologies
• social media/gaming - already existing communities will be the first explorers and market-makers of this virtual world as they are familiar
• financial companies helping enable the trading of the new “currency” (eg Crypto contracts as well as Crypto coins; or even digital bartering between users – I’ll swap you this digital skin for the virtual admittance ticket to a show)

Facebook has already rebranded themselves... about to change their stock code on 1 Dec. Apparently 20% of their staff are working on augmented reality/virtual reality projects.