What would happen to the world economy if, thanks to a viewer, we could have a meeting with people in Switzerland in the morning and a second meeting a few moments later with colleagues from the Malta office? All without even taking the plane?
Welcome to the Metaverse!
Also thanks to the fact that Facebook has changed its name to Meta, in these days there is no talk of anything else. Mark Zuckerberg revealed his ambitions in this area to the world, but concretely: what is the metaverse? How will it change our lives?
Above all: how do we invest and earn?
What is the Metaverse and what does this word mean
Something really big is beginning and this is going to revolutionize the internet as we know it. Metaverse is a word made up of "Meta", a Greek word which means "beyond" and "towards", which means "universe". The Metaverse is an online world where people can work, shop, take lessons. Basically they can do anything that can be done in real life.
Except that all these things can be done through an avatar, or a character who could have both our appearance and the appearance of a robot rather than that of an alien. According to leading experts, the birth of this new world will coincide with the beginning of an economic boom that will be worth trillions of dollars. Some say $ 800 billion as early as 2024.
From the birth of the Internet to the metaverse: how the web has changed in the last 30 years
Let's take a moment of history to better understand what it is, what is also called web 3.0. In the 1990s the internet was passive, with users simply obtaining information from internet pages. In the 2000s, web 2.0 arrived, with the birth of social networks, people could interact with each other. The web 3.0, the Metaverse in fact, will be even immersive, we will have the touch and thanks to the viewers everything will be extremely real. A new generation of internet which, as happened with previous versions, will revolutionize social relations and the economy.
So far everything simple, but where is the real revolution?
The Metaverse will bring many revolutions. If like me you are over 30, maybe you find it hard to understand, but we all have to think that today's young people are already used to living online and are already used to participating in virtual concerts in Fortnite!
Fortnite has attracted 350 million players over the past few years who have spent over three billion hours in this virtual world! Also on Fortnite, for example, the largest concert in history was held, with Trevis Scott performing in front of 27 million people!
What if there was a world where everyone can be what they want and where we could be seen by others as we want? A world where we can be beautiful, rich and where we can also fly or have an aperitif on the pyramids of Giza?
The pandemic has only accelerated this. Moving is more and more difficult, smart working is more and more a reality and the interaction between people in the real world becomes more difficult every day (did you by chance try to organize a Christmas dinner with friends in times of covid and green pass ??? I'm trying and in the Whatsapp group there are 152 unread messages).
It is very likely that, soon, we will have an entire generation of people who prefer to live in the Metaverse rather than a suburb of a city or country village.
Metaverse: clashes between big names for this billion-dollar opportunity
Being a real new world, the big technological multinationals are already competing to grab the huge profits that web 3.0 will allow to obtain.
As we said at the beginning, Facebook even changed its name to Meta to show how seriously it took the matter! Mark Zuckerberg's company has a well-defined plan in mind, which aims to take out competitors like Apple.
What does Apple have to do with it? Apple makes mobile phones! This is precisely the question. Facebook relies on the Metaverse to ensure that instead of the mobile phone we will all use a viewer. A viewer that Meta has been producing for some time, thanks to the purchase of the Oculus company in 2014.
In the presentation of the Metaverse Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that the mobile phone is very limiting and that the Metaverse, in synergy with the viewer, will lead to an extremely better experience. “It will be like really being in the same place and not like seeing from a small window,” he literally said.
Facebook has missed the train of smartphones and must follow the rules of others, especially Apple. Now with the metaverse he doesn't want anyone in between his audience and the virtual reality viewer. Facebook intends to create a real ecosystem, just like Google and Apple did with their Android and iOS operating systems.
Do you want to have a meeting in a spaceship with a view of Mars? Surely you can buy this possibility on a specific shop, where the good Mark will allow you to sell anything, keeping a slice of the turnover. Does it remind you of anything? That's exactly what Apple does today, with apps within the App store.
Metaverse: what work and society will be like
Try to imagine the impact that such a technology could have on the economy and on our habits.
Take the world of work for example. Today everyone wants to work from home, because you save time on travel and you can even live in your own village where everything costs less, rather than being forced into the center of Milan, where everything costs more. Thanks to virtual reality we will be able to work from home, but literally seeing and hearing our colleagues close to us, as if we were in the same office.
Do you feel the revolution?
Think about it, even today we hardly use phones on our desks anymore, because everything is done from a headset ... How long will it take before the PC disappears too? We will have it all in the viewer!
And what will happen to the transport industry, if thanks to a viewer we can literally have a meeting with people from New York in the morning and one in the afternoon with colleagues from Singapore?
Metaverse: the 3 explosive ingredients of success
But when will all this happen? Like all new technologies, things happen when three things come together: demand, software, and hardware. Let's see them
Request
When the internet was born in 1995, there were only 14 million people online. Today there are already 2.4 billion online gamers using virtual worlds every day (How Many Gamers Are There in the World? - Cyber Athletiks) and the gaming industry is worth over $ 150 billion, an incredible figure when compared to 40 billion of the cinema industry.
The championship of the League of Legend game was seen by 44 million people ... even here an incredible number when compared to the 7 and a half million spectators of the NBA finals. So yes, the demand for the Metaverse already exists.
Software
If the internet was built with simple code, which generated all the websites and social networks present today, to build the Metaverse will need extremely powerful software, capable of creating real virtual worlds. Fortnite, Horizon (Facebook's Metaverse), rather than Call of Duty or Pokemon go, all of these virtual worlds were built with the same software.
These software that "spoilers" can be counted on the fingers of one hand, will be the engines on which the foundations of this new internet will be laid. It is as if the Metaverse were a house: Facebook may decide to build a building, Microsoft may decide to build terraced houses… but both will have to use bricks and concrete! There is no escape. These softwares are the bricks and the concrete.
Hardware
Oculus Quest 2 by Meta is already a reality (you can see it in the attached video). The most expensive version costs $ 500, a third of the latest iPhone. And it's not the only one out there: Microsoft has its own HoloLens viewer and play station has its own viewer too.
If you try it, it will only take you a few seconds to understand that this is a real revolution. I have also made several of my friends and my grandson try it: I have no doubt that there will be people who will no longer want to leave the Metaverse.
Metaverse: who will be the losers and who the winners
Computers, telephones, will be the equivalent of typewriters and fax machines in a few years: do you realize how society could change? Already today I met my best friends online… I have no doubt that our children will have friends who will only hang out online!
Just imagine how the world birth rate could drop if this prediction comes true! Exactly as happened for the covid, this revolution will wipe out many businesses, which will slowly but surely become obsolete.
At the same time, however, there will be companies that will grow a lot and make profits that are unthinkable today! Some of these companies, today, are already giants, while other companies are boogers, which if bought today would allow us to multiply our investment hundreds of times, a bit like what happened to those who invested in Amazon twenty years ago? What are these companies?
Metaverse: which stocks and companies to invest in
Having said that we are in a historical moment in which we are witnessing the birth of a revolution, where to invest? It's like when you went from horses to trains and cars: try to imagine how many opportunities arose with the transition to fast means of transport and how much the economy has grown since that time. In fact, we will have machines at our disposal that reset the travel time.
And since it would be simplistic to talk about it in a single article, which is why I organized an appointment divided into two episodes with invest.biz, where we will discuss every single point of the Metaverse revolution and see which companies have what it takes to be the Amazon of the Metaverse.
If you want to sign up for this webinar, you can click HERE.