In this article, let us dive into those sectors on which web3.0 and metaverse are creating a real time impact.
Looking past the hype and critique, Web3 and the metaverse are shaping a new application layer for the internet. How can leaders better understand this evolution and what it means for businesses, organizations, and society?
In an era where technology is advancing at a blistering pace, the terms ‘Metaverse’ and ‘WEB3’ have begun to permeate our collective consciousness. They are symbols of a shift towards a new digital reality, more immersive, decentralized, and user-controlled cyberspace.
These emerging technologies aren’t just another high-tech trend to follow; they represent a potential quantum leap into an exciting digital future.
By removing distance, connecting everyone and everything, and unleashing massive flows of information, the internet has been the greatest disruption since the printing press.
In a few decades, it has reshaped much of the human world, enabling great progress and historic change, and revealing the many challenges that come with such transformation.
There is now a growing need for standardization and interoperability across services and systems, more coherency around market fragmentation, more intuitive and seamless user interfaces, and governance that effectively regulates content and experiences while still supporting progress.
Smart cooperation and governance by providers and regulators may be critical to overcoming Web2-era challenges and enabling the next internet platform: the metaverse and Web3.
Moving further into a world that blends the physical and digital may require greater integration, more modern standards and protocols, and capabilities that give people more control of their digital selves—their identity and representation, what they own, and who has access to the data they create.
Just as we use standardized protocols and devices to interact with digital experiences on the internet, the promises of Web3 could help enable consistency and interoperability across metaverse experiences—uniting disparate, disconnected metaverses into a single coherent platform.
Similar to the web, there can be walled gardens and open commons and any number of creative innovations, accessed by browsers, mobile apps, AR glasses, VR headsets, and more.
The metaverse is emerging from our digital behaviors
Today, people often socialize through global networks, modifying their appearance with augmented reality filters that can see and respond to faces, wrapping themselves in avatars, buying virtual clothes, and attending concerts in massive game worlds.
Businesses hold face-to-face meetings remotely and virtually, and can don VR and AR headsets to train, visualize, and collaborate.
Generation Z ranks playing video games as their favorite form of media and entertainment.4 Even before the nonfungible token ( #NFTS ) boom, some game worlds were running out of virtual real estate to meet the demand of players.
Remarkably, one poll found that over half of people in nine markets prefer to spend their time online rather than in the real world. Several generations have become accustomed to digital interfaces, software and interactivity, and global connectivity. We immerse into the digital and increasingly draw it out across the physical world. Amidst the hype and critique, it is these behaviors and uses that are invoking Web3 and the metaverse.
Enabling seamless movement across the metaverse
One of the more common promises of the metaverse vision is the portability and interoperability of identity, data, and digital assets. For example, if a consumer buys an exclusive digital item for their avatar from one service, like a piece of virtual clothing, they can go to a second service that will recognize their ownership of the item and render it effectively.
For the enterprise, a similar use case might involve being able to invite users across a partner ecosystem into a shared immersive collaboration. This might mean reviewing the 3D assembly of a prototype vehicle or inspecting a digital twin of a factory for performance enhancements.
This capability may require new ways of organizing identity, ownership, and even storage. Digital identity is often fragmented across services, with multiple logins and passcodes.
Likewise, digital assets such as personal avatars and virtual clothing are designed to work in the service providing them, not for portability elsewhere. Currently, only the service knows you “own” the asset, and only the service can load and render that asset.
This concentration of user identity, data, and ownership within a given service is what is referred to as “centralization”.
Web3 can enable blockchain registries that bind a user’s identity to the things they own. NFTs offer this ability.
Instead of being scattered across services, identity could become a persistent element of the blockchain internet: physically decentralized across the many computers mirroring and managing the blockchain but logically centralized as a registry.
This would enable any service to read the “state” of the user and the goods they own. Identity, data, avatars, and 3D objects could become portable across services.
Shifting the balance of power: Understanding centralization and decentralization
Web2 has been marked by hyperscale platforms and two-sided marketplaces that have aggregated very large numbers of users and built their businesses using identity and user data. Web3 protocols were developed specifically to challenge this control.
Increasingly, these winners may feel burdened by managing and securing identity and data, contending with customers and adversarial third parties that have learned to exploit their services, and reckoning with regulators concerned with market dominance and consumer protection.
If business leaders are to guide the historic shift to Web3 and the metaverse, they may need to shed some of their Web2 norms and embrace more decentralization.
For the metaverse, decentralization applies to the premise that internet users should control their identity, their data, their digital goods, and more, and that these can move with them between services and experiences.
With Web3, a user’s avatar and digital goods, for example, can become more easily portable across different services. Or users can specify different properties for different services. For example, one’s personal avatar may be very different from one’s avatar for work—just as one’s dress style may be.
Users could use smart contracts that determine how third parties may or may not interact with their data. In this model, businesses can still own and control metaverse experiences, but they would negotiate for access to users.
There is much more to understand.
What changes will come with regulation, and how will use cases impact networks, semiconductors, software, and consumer devices?
How might media and entertainment evolve?
What is the role of artificial intelligence in amplifying these capabilities, and what is the future of risk and cybersecurity?
Ultimately, this big shift responds to the demands of people, business, and technology to establish the next foundation for progress. However, such tectonic changes should be approached thoughtfully, with more societal considerations beyond the goals of business and the inertia of technology.