At GeniusU we talk a lot about the metaverse and how it will usher in - like the first iteration of the internet - a new era and change the way the way we learn, interact, collaborate, and run our businesses.
This is the year 1995 (the year the internet was launched) all over again, but much much bigger. The metaverse is only in the first stage, but it is here. Now, its participants are wearing goggles and glasses to enter a new 3D world, but the day will come in the not-too-distant future when there will not be virtual headsets or augmented reality glasses, but chips implanted in humans that allow them to connect in real-time by simply thinking the name or business or organization or friend with whom they want to interact.
Do you want to attend the concert at Madison Square Gardens with Adele? Buy your virtual tickets here, pick your seat, and your avatar will guide you through the event and find your seat, allow you to buy merchandise afterwards, and if you are buying the special backstage passes, no problem. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Just what is the metaverse?
Let’s start with Fortnite as an example. Fortnite is an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) in which 100 players fight it out until the last man standing in a fast-paced, action packed 3D environment which was developed by Epic Games. It was recently valued at $17 billion. In 2020, 15,000,000 gamers experienced Fortnite’s Galactus event. According to Charlieintel.com, Epic has nearly 400 million registered users. The demand for 3D virtual reality games is off the charts and growing. Roblox, a gaming/educational platform, has 160 million users.
Keep in mind, the very first MMORPG, Everquest, launched in 1999, and barely a year later, Everquest creators Ken and Roberta Rucker sold their company, Sierra Online, to Cendant for $1 billion (with a B). That’s $1.6 billion in 2021 dollars, and that was just the first glimmer of the metaverse.
While the internet was built on code, today’s metaverse is built on engines that build 3D universes. Discover Unity, a game engine that can create 3D, VR, and AR experiences for any industry, including “Auto, AEC, Film, and More.” Fifty-three percent of the 1,000 top-grossing mobile games globally are powered by Unity, according to their website.
The current metaverse engine that is considered the standard is Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, first pioneered in 1998, a full year before Everquest. Today, the Unreal Engine promotes itself as “the world’s most open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool.” The next engine in line for the crown is the Reality Engine, launched in early November of 2021 by 8th Wall. According to VentureBeat, which covered the launch announcement, “the Reality Engine enables web-based augmented reality (WebAR) experiences to immediately work across a wide range of devices including iOS and Android smartphones, tablets, computers, and AR and VR headsets.”
The VentureBeat piece went on to report that the Reality Engine is a re-imagined version of 8th Wall‘s original AR engine. The idea is that developers who create a WebAR project only have to build the engine once, and then can deploy it everywhere, saving valuable development time.
EdTech is looking to the metaverse as a new and almost endless horizon. According to a 2020 study published in the Journal of Computers in Education, Immersive content and VR can improve knowledge retention to a rate of more than 75 percent. This compares favorably to class lectures, which have a learning retention of only five percent and reading retention of just 10 percent.
Teacher Raquel Ribeiro, who writes for Cambridge University Press, opined in a piece in November 2021 that “Due to the mid/post-pandemic educational context, both teachers and students have reached a new level of understanding in dealing with technology. And that also means we have learned strategies to cope with the constraints faced, especially during synchronous classes!”
Business collaboration will also get the red pill treatment, if Zuckerberg’s statements at October’s Facebook Connect conference are any indication. He believes that business collaboration will be a huge metaverse market, with room for growth in the virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) markets, which research firm IDC expects will grow to $73 billion by 2024.
All that said, let’s imagine we could go back to 1995, when the pinnacle of the digital experience was represented by AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy, just barely eclipsed message boards and Usenet forums. We had no idea what the promise of the digital world held. Today, however, the metaverse is laying out a vision that includes the 350 million players spending 80 billion hours a year playing Fortnite, 27 million people attending virtual concerts, and more. These advances have opened the doors to shopping, playing, learning, collaborating, and even traveling wherever you want, all inside the burgeoning metaverse.
The demand is already here. With 2.5 billion gamers online every day, worth $150 billion last year alone, the metaverse is already being populated by projects and people. GeniusU’s role is to bring Edtech into the Digital Decade, with a seamless experience – aided by keyboard-less hardware with no more screen time and no more mouses. With goggles and headsets, you’ll see through the eyes of a robot, and look into a future of possibilities that would make Tony Stark swoon.
