Pros & Cons of the Metaverse 🏙

Last week’s post sparked a lot of offline conversations around the metaverse and people’s feelings towards this alternate reality. I put a poll on my Instagram story and asked how people felt about the metaverse and let’s just say… reviews were mixed, with a large percentage of people in my community still feeling a little iffy about it. 🙃

The pro-metaverse crew was extremely passionate about it, while the pro-IRL crew just thinks it’s the most inhumane thing lol. Below are just a few comments I received:

First, let me reiterate that it is VERY important to do your own research and form your own opinion on this new technology and all of its implications. As someone who sits in the middle, I can see both sides—and that’s what we’ll spend this post discussing. This week, we’re building off of last week’s post and will dive into:

• Current and Future Use Cases for the Metaverse

• The Upsides and Downsides of the Metaverse

• How to Get Involved in the Metaverse

Current and Future Use Cases for the Metaverse

LeewayHertz has a great article that breaks down some of the use cases for the metaverse. Check out a recap below:

Advanced blockchain use cases

“In the Metaverse, companies can design more exciting and realistic NFT marketplaces where users can interact with other users, look at desired NFTs, and thus make a better buying decision. Since Metaverse offers a shared realm of virtual space, it has been promoting new NFT or blockchain games in which players can acquire in-game collectibles and further trade them to other participants. Simply put, blockchain uses Metaverse to develop these next-gen online games.”

Honestly, we’ve already seen the demand for this in the video gaming industry. It’s proof that there’s a market for people to exchange goods and interact in a digital world—whether we currently accept it or not.

Virtual work and learning spaces

“The covid-19 pandemic has compelled worldwide businesses to adopt digital ways of communication. Due to this, video conferencing platforms have also become much popular for remote work, online classes, or other work-from-home arrangements. That being said, these platforms fail to provide a compelling, engaging experience as interaction is limited to real-time audio and video.

Metaverse provides users with a more engaging experience to address this limitation through its graphically rich-virtual environment and 3D avatars and immersive meetings. Instead of seeing the participants on a computer screen and communicating through microphones, Metaverse allows us to navigate through a virtual environment with life-like participants’ avatars.”

A start-up that I’m personally invested in, called Immersed, is a prime example of leveraging virtual reality to increase productivity and learning opportunities among a group of collaborators / teammates. This is cool to me because I could be working on an island somewhere in the tropics while my avatar (a black girl with braids and hoops 💁🏽‍♀️) is present in this virtual conference room. Love that for future me!

Virtual businesses and markets

“Technology creates new opportunities for businesses, helping them promote their services and offerings effectively. With the increasing implementation of the Metaverse, enterprises are coming out the two-dimensional surface of e-commerce and adopting life-like virtualized spaces for a profound experience.

Like, e-commerce business owners can interact with merchants in a virtual space and perform trading formalities such as products inspection, finalizing a deal, negotiation, etc. Plus, they can better impact customers using interactive and realistic marketing content rather than relying on digital marketing tactics.

With many new business concepts, Metaverse technology also complements the creation, ownership, and trading of digital assets and tokenized versions of real-world assets to empower cryptos and NFTs.”

Expansion of social media platforms

“Mark Zuckerberg and the minds behind Meta platforms understand that technology can do much more apart from connecting people through social media. Their idea of embracing Metaverse is to introduce a three-dimensional space that is not limited to watching people on computers or mobile screens and listening to their voices.

A platform based on Metaverse provides a more immersive experience for social media users by enticing a feeling of presence among them. Combining virtual reality and augmented reality enables a more realistic digital experience beyond the present social media universe’s abilities.

Of course, we have seen the expansion of social media from simple text-based chats to sharing memories on stories, and now we are entering the virtual world of the Metaverse. Content in the Metaverse is graphic-intensive, and the users become content creators themselves as they live virtually inside this universe.”

On one hand I understand the argument for desiring IRL connections, but what really interests me about the metaverse is the ability for people to connect and interact regardless of physical location. Imagine how much more culturally aware future generations may be if they have the opportunity to make friends across the world. And who’s to say interacting in a virtual world will be all that different than in real life? Won’t there still be some sort of norms that will be adopted? I guess only time will tell…

The Upsides and Downsides of the Metaverse

The previous section touches on some of the key benefits of the metaverse and ways it can improve our world for the better. This graphic does a great job synthesizing the upsides:

My friend, Maya, also shared a perspective around the metaverse being a medium for self-expression that I thought was so interesting! Maybe one day I want to wear a passion twists and the next I want to pull up in a platinum blonde wig—who’s gonna stop me in the metaverse?! No one 🤪

On the flip side, let’s talk about two of the expected major downsides…

1. Environmental concerns: “Some analysts are concerned that widespread adoption of the metaverse may lead to a major increase in emissions. Metaverse’s reliance on virtual reality (VR) technology and data centers will have a detrimental impact on the environment, even as it decreases carbon emissions by reducing travel. Data centers utilize artificial intelligence to detect eye and hand movements, but virtual reality relies on cloud services. Operating such facilities necessitates a tremendous amount of energy, which comes at a significant environmental cost.” - Dataquest

2. Increased pressure and social comparison: “It's not uncommon for people to feel like they're not good enough after using social media. Researchers have found links between using social media and the pressures of social comparison. The filtered, curated nature of social media feeds increases pressure to look a certain way and to post certain achievements or milestones. The metaverse could worsen this problem. Roughly speaking, a direct consequence of having the freedom and the ability to portray yourself through an avatar may increase dissatisfaction with your real-world self.” - MUO

In addition to these two, people may also become addicted, be completely removed from the physical world, and/or lose sense of time. (yikes!)

This week’s recommended action: Look into play-to-earn games in the Metaverse!

Play-to-earn games are games where the player can receive rewards with real-world value.

According to Coindesk, “Leveraging the immutability of blockchain technology, game designers can create in-game items and rewards that are provably unique and transferable. Rewards can range from earning native digital currencies to collecting NFTs or be earned from staking. In turn, coins can be exported to crypto wallets to be converted to fiat currency like U.S. dollars, while NFTs can be sold to other players via in-house trading platforms or secondary marketplaces.”

I haven’t personally gotten into play-to-earn games, but I think they’ll become pretty popular and more mainstream over the next 5 years!

As always, hope this was interesting and at least helps you form an opinion and perspective on the metaverse.

See y’all next week!

Kendall