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However, as we will also see, it is not business as usual in the metaverse. Yes, the immersive internet is another channel that you need to master as an organization, but it is a channel that requires your full attention. It will require significant up-front investments, trial and error, and strong connections with your community. After all, designing a series of nonfungible token (NFT) collectibles related to your brand or creating an immersive digital version of your headquarters for your customers to explore during the pandemic is a lot more capital- and resource-intensive than creating a social media campaign. In addition, “datafying” processes and embedding operating equipment with sensors to create digital twins (virtual representations of physical processes or assets) that will provide valuable insights to constantly monitor a remote production facility and continuously improve its output is easier said than done. Finally, moving from Zoom or Teams to a virtual reality meeting room where employees from around the world can come together, collaborate, and spend potentially even more time in the virtual world requires a significant change in employee behavior. As we know, building the technology is the “easy” part, while changing user or employee behavior is a different ballgame.
Of course, for the metaverse-natives (Generation Alpha and, to a lesser extent, Generation Z), embracing the metaverse is easy. The challenge lies with the older generations who are not accustomed to an omnipresent immersive internet and persuading them that embracing virtual and augmented reality offers new opportunities, including amazing experiences.
This book aims to help you understand the metaverse, what it is, how it will work, how you can benefit from it, and how we should build it. Of course, no book on the metaverse is complete without referencing its origin. The metaverse is a term coined by novelist Neal Stephenson in his famous 1992 novel Snow Crash (Bantam Books, 1992). The novel defines the metaverse as a place where people use virtual reality headsets to interact in a digital game-like world. The novel has enjoyed cult status, especially among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and HBO is turning the book into a series. The same applies to the book Ready Player One (Crown Publishing Group, 2011) by Ernest Cline, which was turned into a movie by Steven Spielberg in 2018, where the protagonist depicts the metaverse as a “virtual universe where people go [..] for all the things they can do, but stay for all the things they can be.”9 Both sci-fi books see the metaverse as a digital universe that we interact with using virtual reality. This falls short of the actual metaverse that is being constructed at this moment, where virtual reality is only one channel to interact with the metaverse. In addition, both authors depict the metaverse as commercially owned and as a way to help people escape the dystopian reality of the future world. While this is certainly a possibility for our own future, we do have a chance to prevent a dystopian future where a small elite controls the metaverse and our planet is distraught by climate change. It will be a long and challenging fight—those in power generally are very reluctant to relinquish it to the community—but one we cannot afford to lose. If anything, the dystopian future as described by Stephenson and Cline is not something to look forward to, so we should ensure we build an open, decentralized, and community-driven metaverse and fix the mistakes of Web 2.0.