That’s where they’re having these conversations. And this new generation is moving from social media to games. “I come from a media background,” she added, “and people moved from traditional media to social media. Houseparty was acquired by Fortnite publisher Epic Games in 2019 and Sistani sees the influence of gaming developers as logical in facilitating the more interactive future of online communication. “If the last generation is about sharing, the next generation of social is going to be about participating,” said Sima Sistani, co-founder of the video chat service Houseparty, in an interview with the Washington Post in September. Massively multiplayer, open-world video games like Fortnite offer the best prism through which to assess changes in online behaviour. Video games, however, provide the fullest sense to date of what a metaverse looks like in practice. The longstanding physical limitations of VR still confine it to the fringes of popular culture – including in gaming, where it has made the most progress. According to a March report in The Information, almost 10,000 Facebook employees – around a fifth of the total staff – are currently working on augmented and virtual reality devices. Facebook’s interest in VR and AR is longstanding: it bought Oculus for US$2 billion in 2014. It recently unveiled Horizon Workrooms, which uses Facebook’s own Oculus Quest 2 VR headsets to create a 3D environment for conference calling and collaborative work. Christina Wootton, Vice President, Brand Partnerships, Robloxĭespite historic consumer friction, Facebook is doubling down on virtual reality. Instead of focusing on that outcome, then, it is more productive to consider how a metaverse framing is informing the strategic outlook of major tech groups and the tangible effects that has already produced.Įvery brand will need a metaverse strategy in the future and the ones that have them now are at the forefront. The technology and economic conditions to produce something that comprehensive may well be decades off, if they prove technically possible at all. It would ‘be persistent’, never resetting or pausing ‘synchronous and live’, working in real time at the same time for everyone have no cap on concurrent users and give all users a sense of ‘presence’ be ‘a fully functioning economy’ be ‘an experience that spans the physical and digital worlds’ have ‘unprecedented interoperability of data, digital items/assets, content’ and ‘be populated by “content” and “experiences” created and operated by an incredibly wide range of contributors’. In a widely read and influential 2020 essay, ‘The Metaverse: What It Is, Where to Find it, Who Will Build It, and Fortnite’, the venture capitalist Matthew Ball set out seven criteria for the purest version of the metaverse. The term itself is borrowed from science fiction, first used by the novelist Neal Stephenson in 1992’s dystopian Snow Crash, and the basic concept is recognisable in the stories of Ready Player One and The Matrix. Meanwhile, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said in May that it was building an “enterprise metaverse”.Īlmost 10,000 Facebook staff are said to be working on AR and VR devicesĪs much as there is a shared vision of a collective future in the metaverse, there is some debate within the tech community as to the specifics.
In April, Epic Games, publisher of the smash hit video game Fortnite, announced a US$1 billion funding round from backers including Sony that would, in the words of founder and chief executive Tim Sweeney, “help accelerate our work around building connected social experiences” and “support our vision for Epic and the metaverse”.īy July, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had said that his organisation would be repositioning itself as a ‘metaverse company’ over the next few years. They are working towards the ‘metaverse’ – or at least a template of it – a ‘successor state to the internet’ with ramifications for everything people do together, including sport.
They are developing products that can be used right across an individual’s digital life. They are spending billions on more naturalistic interfaces investing heavily in technologies that offer greater telepresence, or the feeling of moving physically through a virtual space. Some of the biggest companies in technology are preparing for a new online existence.
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