The technological world is having a new buzzword that is taking the whole industry by storm – “METAVERSE”. As the name suggests, it is expected to be the “next generation of the internet” which will interlink the physical and digital world.

Despite the hype around the Metaverse, consumers and even technologists are not fully aware of Metaverse. Most of the “meta-aware” people also have no opinion or are concerned about what the metaverse might evolve into. Metaverse has become a subject that everyone is curious about. The word Metaverse raises so many questions such as ‘What is it exactly?’, What’s its significance, potential scenarios, Security challenges, etc. In this blog, I’ll be answering these pertinent questions.

What Is Metaverse?

Metaverse is an independent, physically persistent, Virtual platform that provides enhanced immersive experiences by converging virtually enhanced physical and Digital reality. It is physically persistent and provides enhanced immersive experiences. Think about metaverse as the next generation of the internet built on the core principles of immersion, augmentation, automation, decentralization, mobilization, autonomization, and real-time activity.

Metaverse is not just avatar versions of real people roaming around in virtual space. In the Metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine.

Metaverse stands for a connective innovation that functions using multiple technologies and trends such as augmented reality (AR), Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, flexible work styles, head-mounted displays (HMDs), an AR cloud, Artificial intelligence (AI), NLP, NFT, and spatial technologies.

Activities that take place in isolated environments (buying digital assets like art, land, virtual shopping, constructing virtual office/homes spaces, participating in a virtual social experience or immersive gaming, etc.) will eventually take place in the Metaverse. Metaverse will allow people to replicate or enhance their physical activities with higher productivity and knowledge assimilation.

While the Metaverse might feel like the latest game-changer pushed by Big Tech, amazingly the concept and term were coined three decades ago. If you’re into reading science fiction and prefer the niche genre of cyberpunk, you might have picked up Neal Stephenson’s book, “Snow Crash” (a personal favourite) back in 1992.My Simple Definition:

The Metaverse, in its pure form, is the convergence of virtual and augmented worlds, assets, and experiences that are tied in unique ways to physical activities, efficiencies, and value creation. Metaverse is about the convergence of

1. Digital representation of Physical World
2. Physical depiction of Digital World
3. Defining and persisting flow of value from the convergence of Digital and Physical world, including its feeling of presence

Metaverse, is a fully-realized digital world that exists beyond the real world in which we exist. It is a collection of shared online worlds in which physical, augmented, and virtual spaces converge. You can imagine it as massive communal cyberspace where people can hang out with friends, work, visit places, buy goods and services, and attend events. The eventual metaverse will allow users to move between virtual spaces turning disparate online worlds into a single, seamless entity.

1.Meta + verse (Meta=Beyond, Verse=Universe), a world beyond the universe.

2. Eventually, Metaverse would be a digital twin of the universe. We have many individual metaverses existing already today and at some point of then they would co-operate, compete, share, and challenge each other …and could be our door opener to Multiverse!

3. I believe it would broader our horizon beyond what we can conceptualize today. In Indian mythology, we believe in Multiverse. I guess Metaverse is a beginning for science to understand the complexities of the Multiverse.

For any single vendor to build a single metaverse they would need to build it themselves or work with ecosystem partners.  This sounds like any other Technology powered marketplace to me.  How many markets work well with a set of partners?  In the world of online massively multiplayer life (or “verse”), the dreaded word of interoperability, digital ethics, and regulatory compliances to protect the human race will raise its head. Either all partners will have to confirm the owner’s rules for participation, or a community-led effort to develop standards that are open for all will need to emerge.

Microsoft has got a much more realistic vision when we compare Meta and Microsoft’s approaches to the metaverse. Even though Meta currently leads in delivering virtual reality (VR) devices, Microsoft is adapting technologies that are more extensively used now. The efforts made by Microsoft today are expected to be fruitful in making them be one of the metaverse’s future leaders.

Market potential

More than one-third of consumers (35%) have never heard of the metaverse, according to Gartner, Inc. A Gartner survey of 324 consumers during January 2022 identified where the everyday American is on the metaverse awareness spectrum. The survey finds that 58% of respondents have either heard of the metaverse but do not know what it means, or think they understand the metaverse but would struggle to explain it to someone else. Only 6% of people identify as being comfortable enough in their understanding of the metaverse to explain it to others.

The metaverse will provide enormous economic opportunities using new and e-imaged digital business assets, programmable economic models, value exchange, or sharing models. Business and Technology leaders should augment their digital transformation strategy by exploring virtual world product development, brand placement, customer engagement & experiences, financial flows, and future digital, resilient & sustainable chains.

According to Gartner, 25% of people in the world will be using Metaverse for one hour a day on average by 2026 for work, purchases, learning, social media, and or leisure.

Total VR/AR spending worldwide is estimated to grow from $12 billion in 2020 to $72.8 billion by 2024, a CAGR of 57%.

The adoption of Metaverse technologies is still at an early stage. Enterprise Architects, Business Thought Leaders, and Technology Innovation leaders must explore and understand emerging Metaverse technology to facilitate adoption and implementation.

To imagine the new Metaverse business opportunities, leaders would need to gain a clear understanding of how:

1. New Markets and associated circular ecosystems are created in the new programmable economies
2. Business and financial models are executed, traceable and transparent
3. Digital Business Assets created and used as part of customer engagement
4. Interoperability and Portability in Metaverse would work to Map value flows through different ecosystems to assess
5. Different personas of same Customers interact and consume the Digital Business Assets
6. To protect the trust and interests of the customer in the Metaverse
7. To build competency in AI, blockchain, customer, user, and especially 3D experience, avatar creation and behavior 

The adoption of Metaverse technologies is still nascent and fragmented but some of the emerging scenarios across the industry are:

Industry	Scenarios – 12-18 months horizon
Retail and Consumer Good	●       Merchandise for the metaverse / Branded apparel and other items To represent themselves in the metaverse
Education	●       Immersive Learning and Simulated Environments ●       Remote Laboratory and Practical ●       Virtual Class
Manufacturing	●       Customer Care ●       Digital Twin + Preventive Maintenance ●       Training ●       Remote assisted Assembly and Diagnostics
Cross-Industry scenarios	●       Employee Onboarding ●       Planning Meetings ●       Team Collaboration ●       Virtual Teams Events and Happy Hours ●       Training ●       3D geospatial data for dynamic and precision targeting ●       Digital Twins of non FMCG Products
Automobile	●       Assisted Driving ●       Enhanced Autonomous Vehicles ●       In-vehicle experiences beyond connected ecosystem e.g., how all Passengers in the car interact with and get value from a multisensory system.
Healthcare	●       Metaverse assisted Surgery (Robotic Surgery, Hybrid mode) ●       Remote Patient Care ●       Telepresence and Telemedicine ●       Virtual Hospitals / Clinics
Media, Entertainment & Sports	●       In the metaverse, media, entertainment, and spots will look very similar. To enter the virtual world, all you must do is put on your AR-VR headsets. You can attend virtual concerts, visit virtual theme parks, place bets on sports, and so on—just as you do in the real world. ●       AR-VR Games ●       AR/VR enabled interaction and experiences in Sports ●       AR-VR Media (Movies, Virtual Concerts)
Advertisement	●       The metaverse offers a whole new landscape of advertising opportunities. You can purchase virtual real estate and charge to display third-party ads or use the space to promote your own real-world business. You can tap into virtual reality billboards or use product placements in virtual reality (VR) games.
Fashion and Luxury Brands	●       Luxury Fashion and Accessories for Digital Avatars ●       Augmented reality-powered Clothing Trials ●       MR/XR powered customization and custom stitching ●       NFT for Luxury / Limited Edition Archives ●       Virtual Couture Houses

We are witnessing a paradigm shift and digital disruption and Metaverse will take this art of possible to the next level (I guess, everything is up for Re-imagination and Re-Invent).

Because no single vendor will own the metaverse, Gartner expects it to have a virtual economy enabled by digital currencies and nonfungible tokens (NFTs). The metaverse will impact every business that consumers interact with every day.

In the metaverse world, I believe it should not be just about the technical possibility. Enterprises should look at 3 different lenses:

• Desirability: While imagining what you want to build in Metaverse consider:
• What will be the Metaverse “killer apps” that will provide users with a better or new alternative to how things are done today?
• Identify use-cases for which a Metaverse solution will be the better alternative. Focus Specifically, which functionalities, optimizations, or experiences would draw in the crowds
• Feasibility
  • Penetration of AR/VR/X devices
  • Affordability of AR/VR/XR devices
  • Interoperability and Portability AR/VR/XR devices
  • Availability of 5G, 6G
• To this end, from a feasibility perspective, we have a big way to cover the last mile reach before the Metaverse is a reality. It is not to say we cannot build “Metaverse type” solutions today – solutions that do not include the full functionality of the Metaverse.
• Viability
  • Support ecosystem
  • Monetization model: It’s easy to fix technology and build a killer app but how will you monetize it? How much potential customer segment willing to pay?
  • Awareness and Digital Fluency maturity of potential customers
  • Will end-user data keep its high value in a world of avatars and alternative realities? Capturing data descriptive of user behaviour is at the basis of many of the digital business models. What new business models need to come into play without such data? Are the current business models transferable to Metaverse, or would you need to build new models (most likely YES ) to the essence and DNA of the Metaverse?
  • Religious and Regional cultures
• Ability to Protect Trust
  • Supporting Local Laws

My perspective on key Metaverse Use Cases

1.    Converging Physical, Digital, and Digital Twin world

Developers and organizations all around the world will find enormous opportunities as Cloud and edge computing are coming together. Digital twins, mixed reality, and autonomous systems are at the core of a massive wave of innovation. It’s not always apparent how this technology links up or the benefits that can be employed by bringing these capabilities together.

The metaverse will profoundly change how businesses and consumers interact with products, services, and each other.

For enterprises, it would be important to:

1. Enrich customer experience
2. Build shared virtual experiences that convene stakeholders for collaborative work, recreation, or enablement through AR/VR or mixed reality
3. Exploring Digital Business Assets, Value Flow in virtual world economies where transactions in digital currencies and assets will power an explosion of virtual services, experiences, and goods.
4. Support metaverse payments and finance instrument (to support Digital Business Asset and Metaverse Customer experience & engagements)
5. Enabling virtual world strategies for the genuine human impact that maximize positive impact on the planet, advancing client’s sustainability, social and corporate governance initiatives
6. Create hyper-realistic, physically accurate digital twins that simulate natural environments, physical structures, industrial operations, transportation networks & protocols, associated digital ethics contracts (to protect trust, transparency, traceability, integrity, and confidentiality) including the composite AI (humans, robots, and AI agents working together) inside them, to accelerate design and planning cycles for future business paradigms.

2. Easy Testing of Products

Metaverse will allow the consumers to experience products at the outlet without leaving their homes with the assistance of augmented reality glasses. This experience will enable users to induce first-hand experiences about the texture of the products and the way they’ll bring value into their life.

3. Informative Insights on Patients

With the assistance of metaverse, medical professionals are going to be ready to collect an enormous amount of knowledge for their research on new solutions. Modern medical equipment powered by VR will get advanced after the combination of Metaverse technology. Doctors will detect and diagnose health problems much earlier because of the expanded visibility within the process.

4. Makes Gaming More Real

Gaming has progressed at an incredible rate over the last decade, and the metaverse is taking gaming to a whole new level, making the virtual world feel incredibly real to users.

Both VR and AR can help gamers remove the borderline between the real world and the virtual world. Metaverse has played a vital role in the tremendous popularity of eSports with VR sports training, competition, and more. For players, the metaverse is a social space where they can compete while also socializing with their friends.

Metaverse is creating “a global living room for millions of gamers”.

5. Virtual Tourism and Tours

People have started visiting places all around the world using VR headsets. Today, people value visiting places more highly using Metaverse technology first before investing in costly air and hotel packages. Furthermore, some people don’t seem to be allowed to travel thanks to health reasons.

With the metaverse, hospitality industry customers will be able to take 3D virtual tours of their preferred hotels to enable them to decide whether they would like to stay in the hotel. Metaverse provides users with an enticing experience of visiting the places that they can’t in real life.

6. Virtual Stores and Augmented Reality Shopping

Just as eCommerce platforms refined local and international trades, the metaverse will have a similar impact. Ecommerce stores will be able to set up virtual shops where buyers can take a 3D virtual tour of their stores before making a buying decision. Generally, the purchasing process in the metaverse will be like what is currently obtainable in supermarkets, except that it will take place in the virtual world. Additionally, with the metaverse, there would be no trade barriers, borders in this world, and strict regulations.

7. Next-Generation Social Interaction

The basic exercise of human interaction has taken a new narrative since the concept of the metaverse. Human interactions are no more limited to one-on-one interaction or interactions over voice or video or interactions on social media platforms, but it has shifted to virtual presence. With the metaverse, you can freely socialize in a virtual world where you can collaborate, connect, and communicate with your coworkers, clients, friends, and family members even if they are not physically present or in the same location where you are. The metaverse will bridge the communication gap and make it impossible to experience physical separation

8. Remote Work / Virtual Office

There are many upsides to virtual office space for employers and employees alike, and the move isn’t as disruptive as one would have imagined pre-pandemic. Metaverse powered Virtual Office is the next step, offering remote workers the opportunity to work in custom immersive environments or a 3D space that can’t be found or replicated in the real world.

For employers, the greatest benefit may be saving on real-estate and travel costs (with the closure of some or all physical offices), and theoretical infiniteness (or even providing productivity enhanced and more inclusive environments) of virtual real estate. Solo work in VR will likely take off before entire virtual offices and could also help companies attract the next-gen workforce.

With Metaverse, I believe Empathy from experiences will be more attainable than what we’re able to achieve via 2D video (Obviously, nothing replaces the feeling of being together, but volumetric/3d video bridges the gap enough to shave down that sense of being remote). Moreover, this will also reduce the excessive amount of work travel to be “in the room” with others. Less travel means less fuel and a reduction in our global carbon footprint (more sustainable and better well-being and work-life balance).

Today with Metaverse powered by XR, we can teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parent’s living room to catch up. This will open more opportunities no matter where you live. You’ll be able to spend more time on what matters to you, cut downtime in traffic, and reduce your carbon footprint.

9. Leaning and Development

AR/VR/MR (XR) is being used today to teach workers everything from operating heavy machinery to handling difficult customer interaction to mandatory training or even soft skills training.

Metaverse also solves many of the logistical challenges that make training in manufacturing, energy, utilities, and other industries expensive and disruptive: Training can be delivered anywhere at scale, transporting trainees from all over the globe to a digital replica of the workplace (even complex environments like plant floor, research lab or operation theatres) instead of flying them to a physical factory and causing unnecessary downtime. In a virtual environment, users can safely learn to manage, operate in complex environments without having to requisition expensive assets or shadow another employee.

An important aspect of training in the metaverse is that training can be designed for uncommon or edge use cases that are unsafe, impossible, or not ideal to simulate in real life (e.g., variation and repetition, even a degree of randomness). It’s this aspect of immersive training that will improve as metaverse technologies advance and virtual reality gets more realistic.

10. Customer Experience

Metaverse promises to profoundly change how we interact with brands. Already, NFTs and virtual worlds with their digital economies are changing how people view material goods and ownership. With Metaverse, Consumers will be benefiting from “user experience by proxy” and it will result in the new experience economy. Immersive experiences can be seen as a new category or dimension to this economy that values experiences over products.

1. We’re entering a whole new dimension of human experience and interaction, with the ability to interact as digital avatars engaged in role-playing games, financial transactions, shopping, and more, well, illicit activities.
2. The metaverse will transform how consumers consume and hopefully make our material culture more sustainable. 

In the digital world and the metaverse, I believe design is the primary tool for creating value. To succeed in the experience economy, enterprises must move beyond sales transactions and put the customers’ interests, needs, and experience at the forefront. If an enterprise wants to succeed in the metaverse it’s not enough to use advanced technology. It is necessary to provide advanced value and they must go beyond basic functionality and offer their customers a better experience. By constantly creating advanced customer value, positive customer experiences, and turning designs into a system (or ecosystem of correlated systems), enterprises can win the competition and build a future sustainable business.

For example, some of the leading brands are already running pilots for consumers to use augmented reality to try on virtual products and envision virtual objects like luxury clothing, furniture in a real or virtual car test drive or custom configuration of products (i.e., buyers can put on a VR headset to customize goods and view more product options than the store can physically showcase).

11. Content Creation

12. Analytics and Simulation

In the Metaverse world, even Metaverse platforms would have to re-imagine Customer Loyalty. In the Metaverse world customers (and businesses) will be able to take their identities, currencies, experiences, and assets anywhere they wish. Moreover, unlike today’s web experiences, much of this digital world will persist even when no one is in it.

Security Challenges in Metaverse

We are at a point in time where we can course-correct the destructive trajectory of the digital economy. As we prepare for the transition from the current world of the Internet to the Metaverse, we run the risk of bringing the same destructive species along with us, stowing away in the products and services we will consume.

In metaverse interfaces, our brain becomes a part of the attack surface as it connects to our senses.

Although Metaverse is still a developing technology, I do foresee some security issues. We already have examples of fraud methods such as phishing as a threat in the virtual universe. Threat actors see the Metaverse as an opportunity. As metaverse promises a future in multiple dimensions, many security concerns arise before its implementation. The cyber threats in today’s world will probably continue to exist in the age of the Metaverse. But we are sure that new threats will arise.

• With the increasing use of virtual reality wearables, new possibilities will arise for data breaches and malware.
• An increase in blockchain-related scams and threats to financialinstitutions and broader economic and geopolitical scenarios
• NFTs will be at the heart of the Metaverse economy. This raises the likelihood of an increase in NFT fraud.
• The 3D environment of the Metaverse will facilitate the more effective use of engineering methods.
• Data security will be a more sensitive point, and vulnerabilities probably will increase.

As the platform has a significant increase in the attack surface, we can’t be certain about its security implications but can expect vast security challenges and solutions. Listed below are the 9 specific security concerns:

1. Identity of Individual

Identity proving mechanism in Metaverse would be way more critical than the current Digital Identity. One important change that is expected in the ownership and security of metaverse is that it will replace usernames or login IDs with ‘Enhanced Digital Avatars’ including new perspectives like your personality, your branding, your current mood, emotions in the virtual world. Avatars will represent real people in the virtual spaces.

A metaverse user profile will contain much more personal information than your current Microsoft, Google, or Facebook account. It will encapsulate your entire digital life, your personality — not only with your unique online (and offline) identity but also with your financial and other sensitive data. Protecting it against theft will be a critical factor for the entire Metaverse ecosystem’s success. Equally important will be to ensure that metaverse users cannot fake their identities.

Cybersecurity plays a crucial role in keeping participants safe, as in any other digital scenario that depends on authentication. The security of the technology depends on the role of authenticators assumed by companies involved with the metaverse. This significant change will pose concerns over legal and security implications over user information. Moreover, prevention of spoofing on most Metaverse platforms is still not fully clear, and there are genuine questions arising on the Digital Avatar identity protection on metaverse.

2. Laws and Regulations

Metaverse is yet to gain a clear idea about the management of cybercrimes or dealing with legal and regulatory aspects of the platform. The metaverse will also bring multiple new legal implications, especially in the absence of existing standards and precedence. Some of the challenges for which local, global, and industry-specific laws and regulations are required are

• Definition of Metaverse Crime
  • How do you “police” the metaverse?
  • Can digital identities be erased or isolated with their network removed? What is appropriate, and who decides?
• Data and Asset Ownership
  • Who owns what part of Digital Business Asset?
  • Who owns the information in Metaverse? How do you track who can access it, what’s the intent of data collection etc.?
  • Are all virtual items you own portable to other worlds? If this is the ideal, then will companies comply with this or frustrate this in practice?
• Intent, Conduct, and Behavior: The metaverse has an element of fantasy, and new degrees of freedom also open opportunities for misconduct and crime. The risk of physical trauma may be limited, but users could be subject to mental trauma. The lack of an established legal framework or consequences may even enhance the probability of criminal or abusive actions.
• Qualified Digital Avatar Lawyers: As the metaverse becomes mainstream, we would need a new professional community for Digital Avatar Lawyers in these digital realms to provide services like company incorporation, virtual legal firms, and arbitrating digital land disputes. The experience, skills, and knowledge of these personas must be established and rights to practice will need to be agreed upon in the Metaverse. An AI-driven Digital lawyer / Robo Lawyer could be vastly different from the digital twin of a human lawyer, with different case types and outcomes based on specific factors.

With the increased sophistication of Cybercrimes, we are facing a huge number of hackings, tampering, cheating, and theft attempts there is collective anguish that the cybercrime rates will rise due to the interconnection of the metaverse and offline economy.

1. With every paradigm, shift change comes great responsibility. In the Metaverse, we would have to define and agree on “Who is the gatekeeper of the legal and security implications that will come with it and how do you ensure your information is kept safe?
2. Without new cyber laws, regulations, global standards (and a few ground principles that every player in the Metaverse would need to abide by), there is no reason to expect architects and administrators to behave any differently than they have to date.

3. Protection from Malware

Metaverse doesn’t have a security framework to protect the platform from malware. New security standards need to be developed to protect the new technology from evolving malware threats.

4. Data Protection

There are no clear directives in existence to protect the data in the metaverse. The whole theory of metaverse will be affected if sensitive personal information is compromised to theft.

1. As huge amounts of user data must be processed by Metaverse, the stringent privacy and data process rules for social media will be a heavy burden for mid-sized companies that are willing to contribute to the metaverse.
2. The personal data on the metaverse account will be much more than on Meta or Google account with access to entire digital life, online and offline identity, bank account, and other sensitive data.

5. Intellectual Property

The IP issues from the current traditional economy will be stress-tested as the metaverse evolves and scales. The ambiguity of ownership in the metaverse will create a lot of intellectual property disputes. Intellectual Property (IP) theft protection is an important security aspect of the metaverse. Issues related to definitions of IP, ownership, protection, piracy, and patent issues are only a few of the potential challenges. As IP protection is still harder in the physical world, it can be much more challenging in the metaverse.

In a world where geographic boundaries break down and territory rights take a new meaning, the new metaverse economy will require new thinking. Avatar and AI-created IP could come under disputes, for example, challenging their validity.

Content owners will need to understand their licensing boundaries and usage rights. There has already been litigation spawned due to the use of celebrity lookalikes used in video games, and these kinds of disputes could spike exponentially in the metaverse given the fact that some avatars will also create commercial value.

6. Threat related to its Technology

Blockchain, cryptocurrencies, NFTs and other technologies associated with the metaverse pose security challenges that cannot be ignored.

7. Privacy

With user-generated and data-driven application-generated data content in the Web 2.0 world itself, we are hard-pressed on privacy beyond what we were prepared for. Metaverse and Web 3.0 will unleash new levels of machine-generated content, such as avatars and digital objects. The new formats of data, levels of sensitivity, ownership, control, and sharing will all undergo a massive change, and many real-world approaches are impractical to apply in this new economy.

Security and privacy issues in metaverse cannot be addressed with an afterthought. Governments around the world and the tech industry will need to assess the validity of regulations like the PII, GDPR as international boundaries break down in the metaverse. Developers, Testers, and CISO will need immediate guidance to create privacy-focused metaverse experiences and experiences that are age-centric.

8. Antitrust, Lack of Standards and Governance Frameworks

Managing security in metaverse can be a nightmare. There are many unanswered questions ranging from requirements for securing data, addressing deep fakes, avatar identity theft, trolling, theft, and new attack vectors coming from wallet integration and the use of digital land for unlawful activities.

The centralized metaverse is configured as an extended corporation (for example, Meta or Microsoft’s metaverse), and these platform companies could end up having some degree of collaboration, which could create the perception that large tech companies are asserting control in the virtual world based on their scale and size. This multi-tenant collaborative nature could lead to antitrust concerns, as antitrust standards are defined in the pre-metaverse economy.

The decentralized configuration of the metaverse could also masquerade as centralization and control behind the scenes, making it harder to track, monitor, report, or enforce. If the metaverse departs from the antitrust definitions of the existing economy, then we need new definitions. Given the different technical configuration of each metaverse and the current lack of standards, this is an important range of problems to tackle.

9. Metaverse Forensics Skills and Tools

Globally we are still short of blockchain and VR forensics talent. Many e-discovery professionals will need to enhance their skills to adapt to this change in basic assumptions, for we could see a shortage of skilled professionals even after standards are established.

Many existing e-discovery software has not adapted to the current trends of cloud or social. With the advent of the metaverse, there will be a need for orchestration platforms for e-discovery to adapt to the new processes from legal hold, preservation, collection, and in an automated and integrated matter that are integrated into smart contracts.

Key Technology involved in Metaverse

Suppose that you have a digital twin of any physical asset or environment. One that enables you to run simulations to find important things and comprehend the past and predict the future. This will help users to apply AI to detect the environment and automate things. To interconnect with that digital twin and all the insights it contains through a combined action in mixed reality. All of this is done on the Microsoft Cloud with forefront companies making use of features like digital twins, AI, mixed reality, IoT, and the potential of the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge.

Most people misunderstand Metaverse with computer games. They consider a completely immersive digital environment accessed by augmented reality glasses that transports users to a virtual fantasy. However, the Metaverse is more than a quiet computer game. Some of the key technology powering the Metaverse is

1. Virtual Reality (VR): A video game may be a computer-generated environment with scenes and objects that appear to be real, making the user feel they’re immersed in their surroundings. VR builds a world for us which is a merger of components like artificially constructed environment, image, sound, and more.
2. Augmented Reality (AR): Augmented Reality (AR) overlays digital information onto physical environments. It typically requires camera and screen access to look at physical surroundings and overlay additional information.
3. Mixed Reality (MR): Mixed Reality (MR) is formed when a user is {in a position | is ready} to interact directly with the Metaverse in a physical setting. Mixed Reality could be a mixture of physical and digital worlds.

It’s not just AR and VR (or XR and Spatial Computing”) that are advancing and breaking the path to worlds “beyond screens.” Include:

a. Cloud Computing

b. Blockchain

c. Web3

d. Advancement in AI on topics such as Generalized Adversarial Networks

e. Compute capability at Edge

f. 5G

Microsoft Metaverse

Earlier Microsoft has unveiled a solution to the problem of remote working and confirmed that the company will start rolling out Mesh for Microsoft Teams in 2022. Microsoft Mesh allows users to collaborate or interact with people who are at different physical locations and share holographic experiences.

Microsoft Mesh

Microsoft Mesh allows users to collaborate or interact with others with presence, it delivers a similar interaction like everyone is present in the same room. Microsoft Mesh has bought science fiction movies like experiences in real life where people can gather together as 3D avatars, or in other words, you can say the photorealistic representation of themselves in mixed reality.

Mesh for Teams

“Microsoft Mesh app is a collaboration-first experience for HoloLens 2, built on Microsoft Mesh services. The Mesh app will allow you to create spaces to work with others in your organization.  This will create a much more natural and productive experience for the employees and teams. Employees can work more efficiently with the feeling of being in the same room but from different locations. “

Mantras to be ready for Metaverse

In the next article, I will talk about the mantras to be successful in Metaverse. Watch out for the space.

a. Prepare for Hyper Speed

b. Prepare for Limitless Space

c. Metaverse Consumer Reach

d. Product Data Ecosystem

e. Digital Business Asset mindset

f. New Metaverse Commerce, Payment and Transaction Management

g. New Partner Ecosystem

h. New Service models

I. Develop Metaverse Talent

j. Digital Fluency for Metaverse

k. Cybersecurity for Metaverse

l. Metaverse CCoE & Hub

m. Responsible Metaverse / Ethical Metaverse

Summary

Metaverse is more than aspirational at this point and opens for interpretation and imagination but over the next five years, the metaverse has the potential to change the fundamental way humans interact with each other, employers, vendors, marketers, and retailers.

Metaverse will require a host of technologies and complementary innovations to create a persistent and immersive digital environment. Future Product leaders across industries must plan for the disruption of Metaverse but they should invest selectively and not overspend in the short term, as a complete metaverse will take at least 3 to 5 years to develop.

Many technology companies are chasing down the metaverse. With Metaverse, marketing, communications, and branding professionals will face both challenges and opportunities.

Many individual metaverse ecosystems are forming to enable much deeper and lifelike digital experiences. By adding an immersive 3D secured layer to the high-speed internet, digital twin, and incorporating natural tactile inputs to all the senses, metaverse will be creating much more real experiences. This virtual universe is expected to result in a myriad of new applications and business models. For Metaverse to be successful, Technology Leaders, Governments, regulatory authorities would have acted faster to define the Security standards, Cyber laws, and Digital Ethics for Metaverse governance and protect humans.

With the Metaverse, the workforce is going to be transformed. Workers will not choose between remote work or visiting the office because the office is available anywhere. It’ll enhance working remotely by helping workers to feel a part of a team. Thanks to Metaverse, employees can interact with their co-workers, attend interviews, apply for new jobs, communicate with clients, build businesses, and more.

As a side note, while we wait for Metaverse to become more real, we shouldn’t completely lose ourselves in this matrix and overlook the benefits of human-human in-person interaction. We’ll need to maintain balance as this new technology is constructed. The metaverse doesn’t necessarily have to be all-consuming; it can simply offer new, exciting opportunities for people. The metaverse is here to stay and it’s just the beginning of a re-imagined world.

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