What is the metaverse? It's an interconnected system of digital places which can be in VR, AR or 2D. Important aspects are the immersion, it feels like one shares the same space with other people. This feeling will probably be more pronounced in a VR or AR environment. Also, we want to be able to own digital assets and to bring those with us to other platforms.Big Tech is investing heavily. - Meta announced it would invest 10 billion dollars a year to develop the metaverse. It manages an enormous social graph, develops VR and AR hardware, owns studios and builds Horizon Worlds, a platform where external developers can build digital spaces. - Microsoft buys the game maker Activision Blizzard for about 69 billion dollars. CEO Satya Nadella said gaming will be key in the development of metaverse platforms. His company will own studios, distribution (Xbox), headsets, cloud, app stores and runs an ecosystem for developers which is pretty hardware agnostic. The Mesh-platform enables VR as well as MR-experiences and is open for headsets from other manufacturers.
- Apple likes to have a very distinctive narrative and they are in perpetual conflict with Meta. Don't expect them to embrace 'the metaverse' even though they too have many building blocks. They are also preparing a superior headset for AR and VR but it seems they will promote the narrative that they don't want people to retire from the physical world. Their experiences will involve the physical world such as in AR or they will suggest short VR-experiences.
- Google is more tight-lipped about its plans, but an AR-headset is in the making. Project Iris would deliver the headset in 2024.
- Nvidia became big as a maker of graphics cards. These days their chips are being used for gaming, crypto mining, artificial intelligence, data centers. They also developed their very own metaverse-like platform, the Omniverse, a scalable, multi-GPU real-time reference development platform for 3D simulation and design collaboration, and based on Pixar's Universal Scene Description and NVIDIA RTX technology.
- Sony is another big company owning content, studios, distribution (Playstation) and headsets but investors are afraid Microsoft will now become an even more formidable competitor.
- Tencent, the Chinese internet giant, says they have a lot of the building blocks for the metaverse ready. They will even start developing and producing headsets, which was one of the missing elements until recently.
While this are Big Tech companies with centralized company and group structures, there are also many web3 projects, using the blockchain to create virtual worlds, payment systems and ways to claim and transfer ownership of digital assets.