Snow Crash. The Metaverse is a collaborative immersive digital space where users interact as Avatars or Holograms. It can be described as a virtual environment that one can go inside instead of just looking at it from a screen on the outside. It is a world of interconnected virtual communities where people can meet, work and play using headsets and augmented reality glasses. Once seen in science fiction movies like Matrix, today, the concept of the Metaverse is slowly becoming a reality. On October 28, 2021, at the Facebook Connect 2021 event, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and Founder of Facebook, dropped a piece of sensational news concerning the social media landscape. Facebook has rebranded its name to ‘Meta’ to reflect its renewed focus on building the Metaverse. Zuckerberg shared his commitment to invest in the advent of a 3D virtual world called the Metaverse. The firm intends to invest 10 billion dollars in 2022 in collective 3D virtual worlds. Recruitment of 10,000 people in Europe over the next five years was also announced to have a focused workforce for creating the Metaverse. Over the next decade, the Metaverse is likely to materialize fully, according to Zuckerberg. What Can I Do in Metaverse? The Metaverse is likely to contribute significantly to the work-from-home corporate landscape amid the Coronavirus Pandemic. It could be possible to go to a restaurant with one’s favorite celebrity or interact with a boss from the living room while being in a virtual meeting room. A virtual office could soon replace a video-call grid. “A lot of the metaverse experience will be around being able to teleport from one experience to another,” Zuckerberg stated. The Metaverse is not ‘just another Facebook project.’ Companies will be able to build virtual worlds in the Metaverse, much the same way they have been able to in the World Wide Web. Companies like Coca-Cola and Clinique have sold digital tokens as a first step towards building the Metaverse. Epic Games, a leading video game company, has raised $1 billion from investors to help with its plans for building the Metaverse. Roblox is another player in the same league, outlining its vision to create a space where “people can come together within millions of 3D experiences to learn, work, play, create and socialize.” Concerns surrounding Metaverse The commitment to Metaverse is in some ways contradictory to one of the central tenets of its enthusiasts. They envision the Metaverse as the liberation from tech platforms like Facebook that assumed ownership of people’s private information and traded off whatever they gleaned from the data. “Ads are going to continue being an important part of the strategy across the social media parts of what we do, and it will probably be a meaningful part of the metaverse, too,” Zuckerberg shared in a recent company earnings call. Victoria Petrock, a leading technology analyst, said she’s concerned about Facebook trying to enter the virtual world that could require even more personal data and pose a more significant threat for abuse and misinformation when it hasn’t rectified these obstacles in its current platforms. Considering that Zuckerberg is already drawing flak for this significant flaw across all Facebook platforms, it is likely that the Metaverse will encounter its share of doubts from users and technology experts the world over. Impact of Metaverse on Influencer Marketing The advent of Metaverse will give a new range of opportunities for the future of the business models and marketing possibilities of marketers worldwide. Digital creator marketing is likely to be the most lucrative and potential field of the upcoming Metaverse. Metaverse will offer influencers a new space to interact with peers and followers alike. The question to ask now is not whether Metaverse is coming or not. Instead, the question is to know when and whether digital users are prepared to be a part of this unchartered territory leading its way into a whole new internet era.
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