Metaverse

It is the topic of the hour; shortly after Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his company from Facebook to Meta, businesses around the world were scrambling to find out - What is the Metaverse and how can we position ourselves in it? Emerging from that was an inflation of Metaverse definitions, and after a few short months, more companies are placing themselves in the spheres of the emerging Metaverse than those who do not. But how can something so caught up in the throes of overhype be underestimated? To answer this question, we must go back in time…

Authors: Karl Doose & Fritzi Ehlert

These virtual worlds, though, started to emerge in our physical reality as well; an example of such was Second Life in 2003. At the time of its release a huge hype developed around the 3D simulation that envisioned a virtual world similar to our real world – to the extent that a multitude of actual companies owned spaces in Second Life. Despite the initial euphoria, eventually, the hype died down. Was it still too early for such a project to come to pass?

In 2008, then, there was Roblox, a company that enabled users to take an active role in creating their own virtual worlds and interconnect them through their provided platform – it didn’t however experience a lot of user engagement for almost a decade.
But during the course of the past 5 years - and especially during COVID - it picked up an enormous amount of pace. As of today, Roblox has over 40 million daily active users to show, is valued at over 25bn$ at the stock exchange, and most parents of kids and teenagers will be familiar with the name – because Roblox is immensely popular with their children’s generation. Some only spend time in these virtual worlds, while others even purchase items with actual money.

One - more recent - case that many might be aware of is Decentraland, founded in 2015. What is special about this example compared to the others is that it’s not only building a virtual world, where creators can own virtual land through making an investment in the “MANA” currency, but also that this is done via the blockchain and, therefore, a decentralization of ownership, as hinted in its name – it is rooted in crypto.

Through the push of the entertainment industry into virtual worlds, a number of Metaverse thought leaders have emerged. Such thought leaders are Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist from San Francisco and initiator of the biggest Metaverse ETF, or Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games – the company behind Fortnite and the Software Development Tool Unreal Engine. If we take a closer look at these pioneers' definitions of what the Metaverse truly is and identify some commonalities, a clearer picture of what we are dealing with will emerge.

• It is a network of immersive, 3D experiences like the ones created in Roblox, Minecraft or Fortnite, for example. This network reaches far beyond gaming applications and includes ideas like virtual concerts or fashion shows.
  
• Social in nature, meaning that everyone has some shape or form of Digital Identity - including an inventory of digitally owned items and a virtual representation of one’s self, an individually owned Digital Avatar. This will enable users to build and experience meaningful relationships with other people in the Metaverse through shared experiences and interactions with an unlimited number of users in the same space.
  
• The metaverse is persistent in state, meaning that it’s not like an app on our phone to be opened and closed again. 3D experiences in the Metaverse are always ‘open’ and available; meaning that if somebody visits another’s space and changes something, they will see those changes the next time they take a look. In the future people might own virtual houses – and whilst they are at work, a friend might visit their virtual location and leave a digital piece of art on their doorstep which the house owner can collect once they re-enter the metaverse.
  
• Lastly, the metaverse will be highly interoperable - which will fuel a creator economy in which people can create content that can be re-used in all corners of the Metaverse. Imagine an artist designing a rock for Disney’s show “The Mandalorian” that now can also be re-used in the latest suitable game.

There is not THE one Metaverse technology. Many different technologies will need to work with each other to create the Metaverse. Also, the concept of Metaverse does not describe technologies as such. It rather puts attributes in place which are required to be realized. Even decentralization is not a mandatory technological concept for the Metaverse. However, today it is one of most promising ones to realize some of the core attributes of the Metaverse. Another big technological pillar for the Metaverse is immersive computing / immersive technologies. This bucket itself consists of various digital technologies, like Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality. A deep dive also brings technologies to the surface, such as Eye Tracking and Eye Control, that are crucial to realize the concept. All those technologies form the concept of the Metaverse. Cryptocurrency and blockchain are also topics that often come up when talking about the Metaverse. So do Non-Fungible-Tokens.

Let's talk about Metaverse Technologies:

You can find a detailed article about the related technologies here: Technologies that form the Metaverse

If you have questions about the technologies and want to discuss the use of it for businesses, feel free to reach out via: innovation.rocks.mee@sap.com.

The main issue is that there are two major trending technology areas today which are heavily intersecting with the concept of the Metaverse: Distributed Ledger Technologies and Immersive Technologies.

Distributed Ledger Technologies like the blockchain – which, by the way, also form the backbone of the Web3 concept – have, for example, intersections with the Metaverse on topics like Digital Identity (the social aspect of the Metaverse), Smart Contracts and NFTs (the interoperable aspect of the Metaverse).

Immersive Technologies are referring to a visionary user experience paradigm in which human-computer interactions feel so natural and unobtrusive that they are deemed to be invisible to the user and form an indistinguishable part of everyday life. They are heavily intersecting with the Metaverse on Human-Computer-Interface topics like Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality (AR), which is the immersive aspect of the Metaverse.

Whilst both areas play a huge part in realizing the Metaverse, not all Distributed Ledger Technology or Immersive Technology Initiatives are Metaverse Initiatives. To recap, Metaverse initiatives are working towards realizing this immersive, social, persistent, and interoperable next version of the internet; only a handful of the applications calling themselves ‘Metaverse apps’ are really doing that.

In conclusion we can note: the concept of the Metaverse is far bigger and more innovative than traditionally articulated in the market today, yet excludes most of what is described as The Metaverse by bigger players. But whilst the realization of the Metaverse vision, of a new version of the internet, might still be over a decade away – it is possible to experience a brief glimpse of what awaits.

In addition to this, the complexity of all involved technologies is a challenge for itself. Even the isolated use of Digital Twins and Virtual Reality, as an example, are still far behind what many people expected and envisioned. So is the use of Blockchain.

Today, many use cases primarily use virtual reality and focus on meetings or collaboration. Especially in a business environment, and for business processes, most applications focus on visualizing data along the process steps.

Is marketing a threat for the Metaverse?

• Not truly immersive yet. They are immersive enough that people can spend hours upon hours in these worlds, but their overall look and graphics quality can be clearly differentiated from movies or photos. Mainly, we enter these experiences through mobile devices or a computer screen. Further innovation is needed to push us towards true photorealism, real-time rendered computer graphics and sustainably consumed content via VR or AR.
  
  
• Not truly social yet. They are social enough that people can meet up with their friends and experience exciting adventures together, but the limitations would be evident if one were to observe a virtual concert or play a MMORPG: sometimes, these experiences can feel empty. That is because hardware cannot handle more than a few hundred people per instance. As of today, huge concerts with thousands of people standing side by side are simply not possible technically. Apart from that, a consistent digital identity across all platforms is missing as of yet – but more on this later.
  
  
• Not truly persistent yet. Due to the afore-mentioned limitations in scale, many virtual worlds are sharding their experience; creating hundreds of versions running parallel to scale with the amount of people they host. Therefore, there is no “one” persistent version of the world, there is only a multitude of temporary instances. For this, too, further innovation in computer hardware, software, and internet infrastructure is needed.
  
  
• Not truly interoperable yet. Whilst there are some open standards out there forming, like USD by Pixar or glTF by Khronos Group, these for now are limited to describing objects within a specified scene. To truly make virtual worlds and their assets interoperable, standards must cover a wide variety of real-time rendering (like lighting, physics, and more) and therefore could even go as far as standardizing how objects like cars, clothes or food must be defined in virtual spaces. Furthermore, ways must be found for user data to be carried over more easily, paving the way for creating one decentralized digital identity. This is arguably the biggest hurdle to overcome, as for it to come to pass, the biggest enterprises around the world must come together and align on such standards.

Whilst there are still huge obstacles to overcome, we are well on our way there and can start experimenting around in these existing experiences whilst companies like Roblox, Epic Games or Meta are building towards the bigger vision of the Metaverse. But what, exactly, can we start experiment on if feasible goals are still that far out – and how can SAP help?

You might now wonder what your role in all of this might be. Why should you care, quite frankly? Well, this is similar to the question that people might have asked themselves back in 1992, when the internet was still emerging as information superhighway. Currently, Bloomberg states that The Metaverse market may reach 783.3bn$ in 2024, with a particularly large market share in the live entertainment, gaming software sector and services & ads.

According to Gartner’s prediction, by 2026, 25% of people will spend at least one hour per day in the Metaverse managing everyday business like e.g. working, socializing and shopping. Ultimately, you could ask yourself – if in the future, people will spend most of their free time in the virtual worlds of the Metaverse like they do in the internet already today – how can you best serve them? To execute on such campaigns, you need the talent to enable such initiatives; most crucially, what is considered as ‘game’ design and ‘game’ art talent today. They know how to design a best-in-class user experience in the virtual worlds of the Metaverse. This talent, though, is some of the most desired talent in the market even today – and is usually not looking for jobs in the enterprise, but entertainment space. Starting early means attracting this talent early. But what is it you attract them with?

Some of the companies that have started experimenting early are companies with brands very close to the consumers. Take for example the fashion industry: Gucci has built its own Roblox experience, where consumers can learn about what Gucci’s brand is representing and buy Gucci clothes for their virtual avatar. Thus, Gucci not only attracts critical talent quite early, but also establishes a connection with a younger audience that will eventually grow up more natively into the Metaverse and might purchase clothing made by Gucci for their virtual avatar in the future – therefore preparing the launch of Metaverse-native products. Similarly, we can look at the automotive industry and Ferrari, launching their new car model in Fortnite with similar goals: Attracting key talent and preparing the launch of future metaverse-native products like cars that you can buy & experience in virtual worlds.

The current Metaverse landscape is quite scattered and various interpretations exist. To make it tangible and to give it a structure, we created three possible interpretations of the Metaverse:

The Metaverse as Town Square:

Here the idea is that there is a big Metaverse that is always there & reasonably persistent. Where people come together and meet to go on adventures together from there. Where you find news and parties and shared activity. What Facebook (the website) is currently for many people. VR makes it cool and immersive and up close and personal, but it takes a lot more to make it a real meeting place that brings people together and allows them to use it. [Meta Interpretation]

The Metaverse as Simulation:

The focus here is on recreating the real world as accurately as possible so that you can then experiment in it and learn from the experiments. Test drives, training, onboarding, etc., but also industrial scenarios, planning, computation, etc. [NVIDIA's interpretation]

More: The Metaverse Begins: NVIDIA Omniverse and a Future of Shared Worlds

The Metaverse as Real-World Overlay:

The idea here is to make the wealth of information we have about our surroundings visible, tangible, and usable, for example by overlaying it on top of the real world in an AR layer. And to enrich and personalize it beyond that with further purely digital information. On the one hand, this can be very professional - for example, in a maintenance scenario, very playful and creative - for example, in an AR game, or very trimmed to engagement, style and personality - as in a fashion and retail scenario. Here, ratings, skins, power tools, etc., can certainly play a role. [Siemens & Niantec & NVIDIA, & Alibaba Interpretation.]

Pokémon Go provides a nice example of how such an overlay can look like.

We as SAP also have exceptional talent working on the areas overlapping with the Metaverse – primarily Distributed Ledger Technology and Immersive Technology. SAP for example has dedicated XR teams that are building applications like the SAP Virtual Office to remotely work in Virtual Reality. And on the Distributed Ledger Technology side SAP also has talented teams like the team behind GreenToken – this started off as a project with the palm oil producers of Southeast Asia. We applied blockchain to make their supply chains more transparent and prove to potential buyers that the palm oil was harvested sustainably, that the environment wasn’t damaged in the process, and farmers paid fairly. Now this project is looking to innovate supply chain transparency for a variety of other industries. Although none of these examples are “Metaverse” examples itself, this demonstrates that we have the talent to be a strong player in this space.

The Metaverse might be overhyped – its impact, however, is truly underestimated.

Read more:

• How the role of an innovation manager can help you to accelerate your digital transformation
• What you can do with NFTs in a business environment
• How Eye-Control software helps you to optimize the way you work
• How VR can shape enterprise applications and business work

Stay tuned: more about digital innovation and technologies