McKinsey&Company
“Two waves” of metaverse development
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Mouthful of meta. You can do a lot of lifelike things in the metaverse, but you can’t smell the aroma of a grilling burger or scarf down real fries. Nonetheless, chain restaurants are investing in metaverse marketing in a bid to understand the new landscape’s potential. At one virtual restaurant, players who successfully build a virtual burrito win “Burrito Bucks” that they can spend on real food. Another fast-food chain debuted a virtual restaurant where visitors can play basketball. [WSJ] |
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Virtual world, real crime. As the metaverse expands and more experiences migrate into it, security experts believe criminals will be sure to follow. Cybersecurity is of course an eternal problem, but unique risks are introduced if someone hacks into your VR headset and uses it to peer into your office or bedroom, or control what you see and hear. Industry executives and cybersecurity consultants are increasingly preparing for the metaverse’s criminal element. [CBS News] |
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Coming to fruition. The metaverse has long been theorized but in the past few years, it has edged closer to reality, with hundreds of millions of people connecting every day, says metaverse expert Matthew Ball. Wide broadband penetration and abundant graphics-processing units have helped it pass a critical threshold of visual fidelity, functionality, and online participants. The business case is also firming up: last year, $60 billion or $70 billion was spent on nonfunctional virtual goods, up from $5 billion in 2015. |
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Future dimensions. “Companies need to be investing in the metaverse long before the revenue, the products, and the disruption are here,” Ball says in an interview with McKinsey. Over the coming years, look for companies to fall into four categories typical of transformational eras: those that lead in one era and are eradicated in the next, those that succeed in both eras, those that survive but limp through a new era, and those born in the new era that become even bigger than their predecessors. |
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| — Edited by Katy McLaughlin |
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