More than in the book.
More than in the book.
More than in the book.


Courtesy of your smartphone.
Reality? Fiction?

Courtesy of your smartphone.
Reality?
Fiction?
Courtesy of your smartphone.
Reality? Fiction?




Chapter 3
Fascination with a real-time digital parallel world.
Digital twins of everyone and everything. Like the fashionable Ray-Ban glasses, these digital entities will not only replace smartphones but also blur the lines between reality and fiction. They will revolutionize education (imagine students conversing with Caesar), transform work (with colleagues appearing as projections), and redefine shopping (designer consultations from the comfort of home).
Fashionable like RayBan glasses, they will not only replace smartphones, but also blur reality and fiction, revolutionize education (students talk to Caesar), work (colleagues participate projected) and shopping (at home with the designer). In essence, they will create an entirely new world.
“Metaversity” describes the perception of virtual worlds as being on a par with physical worlds, making them equally attractive. This development stems from the human inclination to engage in virtual play, one limited only by imagination. While all games – both physical and digital – share the common feature of players immersing themselves in different, often self-created worlds (immersion), virtual worlds offer more content diversity and facilitates the creation of shared worlds across physical boundaries. As technology becomes more powerful, immersion will become an everyday reality. Engagement in virtual world will extend beyond games to include fitness, work, and education. This shift is made possible by the next stage of the internet – the “embodied internet” – where users not only view content but become embodied in it.
The metaverse is a global, real-time virtual reality serving as a digital counterpart to the physical world. Thanks to artificial intelligence, the metaverse offers numerous conveniences for data-processing companies through digital twins. The metaverse won’t won’t become commonplace overnight, but it will gradually develop as technological capabilities advance, progressing in parallel with AI.
Here are a few concrete developments:
After 17 years of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg decided to rebrand the social media giant as Meta in October 2021. The announcement also made mention of the Metaverse.
Sparking immense interest, the term was searched for 2.62 million times that month. Companies that were brought up in connection with this search term are: Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft, and Coinbase.
Since 2002, Second Life has offered a parallel world where users can interact through avatars and engage in economic exchanges. Although the market wasn’t mature enough at the time, new companies like Sandbox and Decentraland set about developing a new metaverse, reaching a combined market capitalization of almost 2 billion euros.
The company Nvidia has since designed a platform called Omniverse which enables collaboration in the virtual world (featuring physically accurate simulations). Starting in 2025, Jaguar Land Rover will use Omniverse to further develop their assistance systems for automated driving.
Morgan Stanley projects a 25% growth rate in the luxury goods sector by 2030, which can be attributed to the sale of digital assets. That amounts to just under 50 billion euros.
Microsoft has been keen to acquire Activision Blizzard for 69 billion euros for quite some time. This move aims to position Microsoft more broadly in cloud gaming and, by extension, the metaverse.

