Meta: Is it all a Maya? – The Times of India Blog

According to Wikipedia A metaverse is a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection. In futurism and science fiction, it is often described as a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal virtual world that is facilitated using virtual and augmented reality headsets. Author Neal Stephenson is credited with coining the term metaverse in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, in which he envisioned lifelike avatars who meet in realistic 3D buildings and other virtual reality environments.

And Wikipedia says Maya, literally illusion or magic has multiple meanings in Indian philosophies depending on the context. In later Vedic texts, My connotes a magic show, an illusion where things appear to be present but are not what they seem the principle which shows attributeless Absolute as having attributes.

As you can see the virtual is very close to illusion and augmented reality is another word for where things appear to be present. So, the question is does metaverse provide solutions to real world problems and create opportunities for businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs or is it all a maya? The truth is you already live in the virtual world where you care more about what you look like on Instagram and Facebook than in real life.

Most people think the metaverse is a virtual place. Like in the movie Ready Player One or a virtual world, like Minecraft, Roblox. I say the metaverse is the moment in time where our digital life is worth more to us than our physical life. This is not an overnight shift but a gradual change thats been happening for the last decade or two. Every important part of our life is going digital. Work moved from factories to laptops. boardrooms to zooms. Friends moved from neighbors to followers. Where do you find like-minded people? WhatsApp. Twitter. Reddit. etc. And more kids play Fortnite than basketball and football combined.

Now shifting from personal to business, the pandemic accelerated a transition in our organizational reality that may have already been in motion a shift from single-location corporate campuses to more geographically distributed teams and organizations. As a critical mass of people work from wherever they work best, they will choose to spend more time with any technology that makes their preferred work experience possible. And, if this critical mass has the skills and knowledge the world needs, the people still working from the main office will, in turn, adapt.

Luxury brands are getting in on the action. As Vogue Business notes, Gucci was quick off the mark in May when 20 million users visited its virtual Gucci Garden on the Roblox platform. In just two weeks, hundreds of thousands of users bought multiple limited-edition avatar items from the gardens virtual store.

Guccis Dionysus bags even sold for more than the usual price of the physical equivalent. Vogue Business found that users who bought these virtual Gucci items wore them five hours longer than other accessories.

Fashion house Balenciaga teamed up with Epic Games to debut its autumn/winter 2021 collection in VR, offering a special line of in-game outfits and accessories, as well as physical merchandise sold via the game. Balenciaga also released its spring/summer 2022 collection as a video using only one model and a computer-generated image (CGI) audience.

Businesses that want to stay competitive should make plans for how they are going to engage with customers, find new advertising opportunities, and bring in sponsorships in the metaverse. The metaverse is less about becoming immersed in a fantasy world of unicorns and dragons and more about escaping physical limits to spend time in a virtual space thats a version of, or extension of, real life. Instead of only reaching your physical store to get a try or test with the first new product, your customers can join or visit the exclusive launch party no matter where they are in the world. They can have the feeling, sense, and experience they can in the virtual world.

BMW is already building a digital twin a digital representation of a physical asset, system, or process for its factory using Nvidias metaverse platform Omniverse. Microsoft says that it will build its enterprise metaverse with Mesh, a mixed-reality, cloud-based meeting app that can teleport a person digitally to a remote location for shared experiences.

While the road to the metaverse is still being mapped, technology that makes real-world, physical scenarios available virtually and enhances enterprise offerings will play a role. Metaverse may start slow as the technology remains in a nascent stage, market competition will intensify as the tech titans battle for market dominance and non-tech brands track their progress for potential revenue and operational improvements.

So, whether you acknowledge or not, this is also about taking advantage of what you know and understand and applying emerging technology to new context. For example, business should look at metaverse to:

Ultimately, beyond business adoption, metaverse consumer platforms will transform how people play, shop, access media, and interact. The metaverses future will be interesting to watch unfold. I have more questions than answers on what it will ultimately become, but we can be certain that even if seems like maya for now, meta is real as in having attributes.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Meta: Is it all a Maya? - The Times of India Blog