The metaverse has been deemed important enough for the parent of a social network with 3bn users to recast itself as Meta and there are plenty of other big numbers being connected to the internet’s new frontier.
A report by the McKinsey consultancy last week predicted the metaverse could be worth $5tn by 2030. Ecommerce could comprise $2.6tn, virtual learning, $270bn, advertising, $206bn, and gaming, $125bn, it said. Already this year, companies, venture capital, and private equity firms have invested more than $120bn in the metaverse — more than double the $57bn invested in all of last year.
More than 3bn gamers have access to different versions of the metaverse today, but is it going to be something like Epic’s Fortnite where capture the flag battles mix with virtual concerts taking place, or will it be just a 3D version of the web?
We also don’t know what kind of hardware will dominate or whether consumers will take to headsets and, for all that it promises to be an advance on the world wide web, its successful adoption and pervasiveness depends on it having the same open standards as Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention.
So, the announcement today of the Metaverse Standards Forum has to be welcomed — it brings together most of the major players in an effort to try to ensure there is interoperability between metaverses and even a common vision.
The list of founding members is impressive. They include Adobe, Alibaba Epic, Huawei, Ikea, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Sony, Unity and the world wide web Consortium. Notable absentees at the moment include Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Roblox and Samsung.
It’s important to note that this is a forum rather than a standards-setting body. It says it will focus on “pragmatic, action-based projects such as implementation prototyping, hackathons, plugfests, and open-source tooling to accelerate the testing and adoption of metaverse standards, while also developing consistent terminology and deployment guidelines”.
From July, it will be looking at areas such as “3D assets and rendering, human interface and interaction paradigms such as AR and VR, user-created content, avatars, identity management, privacy, and financial transactions”.
Encouragingly, this all sounds more co-operative and concrete than the current hype and competing visions around the metaverse. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out to be just a talking shop for 3D avatars.
The Internet of (Five) Things
1. Bankman-Fried bails out BlockFi
Sam Bankman-Fried has bolstered the stumbling $900bn crypto industry with his second bailout of a struggling digital assets firm in as many weeks. The 30-year-old chief executive of crypto trading platform FTX announced on Tuesday he had extended a $250mn loan to crypto lender BlockFi. Last week, he helped the broker Voyager Digital to pull back from the brink with a loan that totalled around $485mn in cash and bitcoins.
2. Terraform staff flight ban
South Korean prosecutors have banned Terraform Labs employees from leaving the country as an investigation into the company and its co-founders deepens, after the $40bn implosion of its terraUSD stablecoin and token luna in May.
3. Musk’s other interests worry China
Elon Musk is under increasing pressure from Beijing’s national security and data hawks, in a threat to Tesla’s access to the world’s biggest consumer market. His supply of Starlink satellite kits to Ukraine has caused China to view his SpaceX and Starlink companies as critical parts of the “US space military-industrial complex”.
4. Nubank set to be fintech consolidator
Latin America’s biggest digital lender Nubank is planning to take advantage of an impending shakeout in the region’s booming fintech sector by scooping up acquisitions at bargain prices, its chief executive and founder David Vélez told the Financial Times.
5. Paramount preps Plus for UK
Paramount Global wants to score its own international hit à la Netflix’s Squid Game, as the company prepares to expand its flagship streaming service to the UK, South Korea, Germany and other territories in the coming months. Paramount Plus, which offers hits such as the TV shows SpongeBob SquarePants and Yellowjackets and the Top Gun films, is launching in the UK on Wednesday for £7 a month.
Tech tools — TAG Heuer’s Bored smartwatch
While Vertu yesterday said it would offer its latest luxury smartphone as an NFT or an actual phone, or both, TAG Heuer’s take on non-fungible tokens is to allow Connected Calibre E4 owners to display their NFT artworks by connecting their crypto wallet to the smartwatch. Users can transfer multiple NFTs to the new Lens watch face via a paired smartphone. The feature is available as a free update to all owners of Calibre E4 watches through Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.
