Big tech sees the metaverse as the next market opportunity — Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta, and Microsoft has said it intends to build an “enterprise metaverse.” Microsoft recently stated that its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision “will provide building blocks for the metaverse.” Although the metaverse is still at a nascent stage, if realized, it could potentially reshape the internet.
This post explores some opportunities the metaverse offers in education, health, and urban development although there are promising use cases in almost every sector.
What is the metaverse?
XR is an omnibus term for augmented, virtual, and mixed reality technologies. The metaverse offers virtual spaces for engagement, connection, sharing, and collaboration. In the metaverse, people can play games, work, meet, collaborate, shop, stroll, watch movies and concerts, and do almost anything else they could do in the real world.
The combination is likely to be accompanied by a quantum jump in data capture, transmission, and storage, which in turn will require significant investments in digital infrastructure. A high-quality immersive experience could require the transmission of 8K resolution images at 60 frames per second with HDR (High dynamic range), expanding their color and contrast. These specifications would translate into high bandwidth requirements even with advanced compression techniques.
The metaverse represents a significant economic opportunity as the global market size of the metaverse in 2020 was $4.69 billion and is estimated to grow by 43.3 percent annually between 2020–27. The figure below shows the number of patents relating to “virtual worlds” published since 2000.
1. Education and Training
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According to the University of Maryland, users retain information more effectively when presented in virtual reality (VR) rather than on a computer screen. A PricewaterhouseCoopers report states that employees can be trained four times faster in soft skills using VR than traditional in-person classroom or online training.
Verizon similarly reduced training time for call center agents dealing with angry customer calls from 10 hours to 30 minutes per agent.
2. Healthcare
The United Kingdom’s National Health Service commissioned a study to determine the value of VR in educating hospital frontline staff. Ninety-two percent of VR participants trained in infection control measures were found to have an adequate understanding, compared to only 16 percent of the control group. Post-training performance increased by more than 230 percent for the VR group, compared to 16.75 percent for the control group. Additionally, users reported feeling less anxious when confronted with COVID-19 scenarios.
3. Urban development
Singapore has created a digital twin — Virtual Singapore — that lets users visualize in 3D how the city will develop and evolve in response to population growth and new construction. This virtualization has multiple uses, including transportation planning through simulations and determining optimal sites for the location of solar systems.
Seoul has announced that it will offer services in the metaverse, allowing citizens to interact with public officials, resolve civic complaints, and receive consultation services in a virtual world without visiting City Hall.
Saudi Arabia is building a $500 billion city. The city, named Neom, will have a digital twin in the metaverse allowing the citizens to experience the city even before it is functional.
What should developing countries be considering?
Teachers can be exposed to immersive training in teacher training institutions. Students can be encouraged to create educational content on gaming platforms. Similarly, healthcare professionals can be better trained using immersive technologies.
Residents could be consulted on alternative designs through immersive experiences. Commercial spaces that are part of the redesign could be sold in virtual worlds with ownership transferring to their physical twins upon execution, thus generating revenues for development.
Most importantly, The United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the European Union are pursuing policies and initiatives to promote digital twins. The metaverse opportunity can be also included into national data ecosystem development strategies which have been recommended in World Development Report 2021 “Data for Better Lives”.
Despite its current hype and attendant risks, the metaverse could potentially offer benefits in multiple sectors, including healthcare, education, and urban development, to name a few.
Join the Conversation
Reading this article made me realize that given what is happening in my country we have a long way to go before the government can use the metaverse to better our situation financially speaking. But I am not waiting on them or expecting anything from them at this point. I will be looking into investing in the metaverse and I found a free course that helped me fully understand how to do just that, If anyone is interested here it is: https://cutt.ly/NAA9gnl
Thank You.
Thank you for this comprehensive and timely blog article.
As it is noted they key thing is readiness of Web 3.0 infrastructure for Metaverse. So, in my opinion there are three key things need to be ready for developing countries to shift into Metaverse:
1) Talents and skills.
2) Capital and funding.
3) Infrastructure.
1) Talents and skills. By talents and skills, I mean from both sides: supply and demand. Country might focus on raising and attracting the best talents of developers and builders who can work on the latest emerging Metaverse technologies such as: Unity, Solidity, Rust, open-source tools and etc.
In terms of skills from demand side it is a basic and advanced digital skills from citizens and business side. For example, one of the drivers of Metaverse, gaming industry is already showing how a new trend can benefit to ordinary people in social matters. One of the examples is Axie Infinity game and so called Play-to-earn paradigm, when during the COVID-19 times people in Philippines lost their incomes, some of them survived by playing and earning for life (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo-BrASMHU4). This trend motivated people (even at very old age) to learn skills of mobile phone usage, online gaming, crypto wallets usage, online payments and etc.
2) Capital and funding. In order to attract the capital and funding developing countries might consider creating a favorable environment for local/international capital. In blog article there is a good example of selling “Digital twins” on auctions backed by physical infrastructure. This brings us to constraints of crypto industry/ tokenization/ NFTs regulation (utilities/securities issues). In order to boost “digital ownership” rights a certain regulation should be adopted in developing countries.
Governments of developing countries might take so called “hands off/enhancing” role. It means launching an attractive ecosystem for international start-ups (advanced in Metaverse related technologies) to be able to testbed emerging technologies in country. The other way could be establishing environment for venture funds/ international capital that can invest in Metaverse companies, technologies within the country.
3) Infrastructure. As it was described in article a key technologies that will shape infrastructure of Metaverse are: VR,AR, Cloud Computing, IoT, blockhain and 5G. In here a well-known recommendations for developing countries could be to urge in updating government policies, adopting required standards, boosting the competition, reducing the costs in order to improve accessibility and affordability of future 5G infrastructure.
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I'm interested in the metaverse training for urban planning and development.
Amazing Article