Microsoft seems to think it could involve virtual meeting rooms to train new hires or chat with your remote coworkers.

Meta thinks it will include fake houses you can invite all your friends to hang out in. And we know which companies are investing in the idea, but there's nothing approaching agreement on what it is. We have a vague sense of what things currently exist that we could kind of call the metaverse if we massage the definition of words the right way. It's at this point that most discussions of what the metaverse entails start to stall. Coca-Cola launched a “ flavor born in the metaverse” alongside a Fortnite tie-in mini-game. That is in part because such a world requires companies to cooperate in a way that simply isn't profitable or desirable- Fortnite doesn't have much motivation to give players a portal to jump straight over to World of Warcraft, even if it were easy to do so, for example-and partially because the raw computing power needed for such a concept could be much further away than we think. There are tangible and exciting developments in the realm of building digital worlds.ĭespite this, the idea of a Ready Player One-like single unified place called “ the metaverse' is still largely impossible. And while Unreal may be a video game platform, it's also being used in the film industry and could make it easier for anyone to create virtual experiences.

Many other large companies, including Nvidia, Unity, Roblox, and even Snap-as well as a variety of smaller companies and startups-are building the infrastructure to create better virtual worlds that more closely mimic our physical life.įor example, Epic has acquired a number of companies that help create or distribute digital assets, in part to bolster its powerful Unreal Engine 5 platform. Tech giants like Microsoft and Meta are working on building tech related to interacting with virtual worlds, but they're not the only ones. Saying that Fortnite is “the metaverse” would be a bit like saying Google is “the internet.” Even if you spend large chunks of time in Fortnite, socializing, buying things, learning, and playing games, that doesn't necessarily mean it encompasses the entire scope of what people and companies mean when they say 'the metaverse.' Just as Google, which builds parts of the internet-from physical data centers to security layers-isn't the entire internet.

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