Tech companies of all shapes and sizes, from Facebook to Microsoft and even Tinder, have over the past few weeks announced their plans towards building a metaverse, which many believe will succeed the Internet in the coming decade. But at the moment it is quite literally a meta-verse with no one still sure about what the final form will entail. There are also questions about who will finally have control over this virtual environment and who will ensure everyone is on the same page.
Sai Krishna V K, the co-founder of AR firm Scapic which is a part of Walmart Inc-owned Indian e-commerce player Flipkart, describes “Metaverse” as an “evolution to the internet, where you will have 3D spaces, virtual environments, communication, commerce, and entertainment…” The “Metaverse” is for him is a logical next step to what comes after the smartphone and the Internet as we know them now.
When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently rebranded Facebook as Meta, he also announced what he plans to do within the metaverse. That in no way means he wants to own the metaverse. He simply can’t. No one can.
“Nobody owns the metaverse like how nobody owns the internet… it is an open platform,” Sai tells indianexpress.com over a video call. Meta’s plans are more aligned to building its version of a “meta-universe,” a digital world where the real and virtual merge. For example, you could meet your cousin living in California in a cafe in a virtual environment that too in real-time via digital avatars.
“Though social media is great to connect with people, they [Meta] have the power of having this data,” says Dr. Anupama Malik, Managing Director, Vizara Technologies, an IIT-D incubated startup specialising in AR/VR technologies. “2D to 3D is the next move because of the fact you have very easy ways of now acquiring 3D data, and he [Zuckerberg] knows that 3D spaces will be the next big thing.”
Mark Zuckerberg says ‘the metaverse’ is Facebook’s future. (Image credit: Meta/Facebook)
Meta has the talent and resources to build the metaverse. In fact, the social media giant plans to hire 10,000 people in the European Union for this big task. It helps that they already own Oculus, a leader in virtual reality hardware, which will literally be a gateway to the metaverse.
Sai believes that Facebook’s earlier 2D-first digital environment does not work anymore. “If Facebook can be built around people, if you logically shift the platform from the feature-first to people-first, where groups of users hanging around in 3D spaces can choose to do whatever they want to… that’s logically how social interactions have always happened.”
If Facebook wants to build the metaverse, Microsoft wants its mesh platform to be a core link that connects many virtual environments together. At its recently held Ignite conference, Microsoft said it plans to bring Mesh to its Teams collaboration platform, which has 250 million users worldwide. The company describes Mesh for Teams as a feature that will “combine the mixed-reality capabilities of Microsoft Mesh, which allows people in different physical locations to join collaborative and shared holographic experiences, with the productivity tools of Teams, …….
