Forum Topics Metaverse - interconnected virtual worlds (combine VR, AR, social media)
Hands
3 years ago

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. "

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Hands
3 years ago

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.


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Rapstar
3 years ago

How to play:

1) The rise of stable coins, DAOs, NFTs, etc means Ethereum will act as a critical platform for Metaverse for transactions, & smart contracts.

2) Theta - making 4k and 8k video steaming scalable via the blockchain, potentially disrupting Cloudflare and Fastly in the process. Cloudflare is a beneficiary in the near term. Avoid Fastly.

3) Render - Distributed GPU rendering via blockchain to speed up rendering processing.

4) Arweave. Arweave is a new type of storage that backs data with sustainable and perpetual endowments, allowing users and developers to truly store data forever – for the very first time. As a collectively owned hard drive that never forgets, Arweave allows us to remember and preserve valuable information, apps, and history indefinitely. By preserving history, it prevents others from rewriting it. Preserving NFTs, and metaverse data forever.

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Hands
3 years ago

@Rapstar

Many, many thanks for the pointers. I've got so much reading to do now!

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Rapstar
3 years ago

Render is up over 100% in the past week. If only I took my own tip!

14
Hands
3 years ago

@Kaboom

Agree with what you have written, and would like to extend thoughts. I think there is a lot more potential than we can possibly imagine in this space.

We all remember the beginning of Social Media trend where people were just using it to communicate. Then as the platform grew, in came the advertisers, then the e-commerce selling, then the 'real-time' events.

I believe Metaverse is guaranteed to go down that path even further with the seamless availability of digital currency, digital contracts and digital tracking. I hate Zuckerberg but I think he is onto something. I still wouldn't invest in facebook though as there may yet be another platform in that space that link communities and businesses - something like a giant shopping mall (google search engine turned 3D?). Gen Z/ Millenials prefer other platforms to facebook I think.

Selling luxury realestate and private planes via virtual 3D tours will not be in the distant future. The 3D design capabilities will allow for customisation, in turn garner more business for this space. Vection technologies COO was talking about a yacht builder client using vection technologies to do walk-throughs with designers/engineers and customers alike, to try out the fit of the physical space and make rapid design changes.

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