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Opinion | Metaverse must offer more than escapism before being called true innovation
- There is a great deal of interest and investment going into the metaverse’s long-term development, but its usefulness remains unclear
- If innovation is meant to improve lives, the metaverse must show it can help solve real-world problems
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Why you can trust SCMP
Mark Twain is quoted as saying, “Buy land, they’re not making it any more.” If only Twain could have lived until the Web3 era, because they are now.
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If you buy into the concept of the metaverse, there are endless supplies of “land” in the virtual world that are selling like hot cakes. For example, a parcel in Decentraland that is 16m x 16m – if one believes measurement units apply to the virtual world – could fetch up to US$5,800 at the time of writing.
In the physical world, real estate is valuable because of its scarcity. Why would virtual land have that kind of worth when availability is infinite and restricted only by the creators’ self-imposed rules, and locations do not matter when a user’s avatar can teleport from one place to another?
There is a lot we do not understand as the metaverse is being defined and moulded. In a nutshell, it offers an immersive 3D internet where users can interact with others, conduct business and perform transactions in cryptocurrency.
Matthew Ball described the metaverse in a recent Time magazine article as “a persistent and living virtual world that is not a window into our life (such as Instagram) nor a place where we communicate (such as Gmail) but one in which we also exist in 3D (hence the focus on immersive VR headsets and avatars).”
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Baidu unveils China's first metaverse platform ‘Xi Rang’
Baidu unveils China's first metaverse platform ‘Xi Rang’
The metaverse might be mostly hype, but one cannot deny the interest and investment going into its long-term development. Its market size is projected to grow from US$62 billion this year to US$427 billion in five years, according to one recent report.
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