Metaverse Use Cases - what experiences will you have there?

Metaverse Use Cases: Alright, welcome back.

Jon Radoff: In my previous videos, I was talking about what is the metaverse and then we talked a lot about those mega trends that are powering the metaverse. In this video, I really want to get into the experiences of the metaverse. What are the use cases for it? I mean, that's the easiest way to understand both what people are doing with the metaverse and also where do we go from here? What are the next generation of applications and experiences that you can expect to have? So in my previous videos, I provided this structure of the industry and at the very top were the experiences and what I said you'd be doing there is having activities which is a little bit different than the internet, the World Wide Web which has been fueled by transactions and information access. This is more going to be about being present in a space, being yourself there, being a character in space, engaging in activities and it's going to be powered by this exponential rise in the number of creators who are making stuff just like for the World Wide Web, it was fueled by an enormous number of content publishers. There are going to be creators in the metaverse as well. So what is that first set of use cases? Well, we have to talk about games. Games is what we have now. That's mostly what people are doing in the metaverse. Now games are important for another reason though which is this word gamification which I've spoken about a little bit in the past. It's not a word I actually like because when gamification became popular about it, it was a decade ago. People were talking about point systems and badges and adding that to all these non-game things as if simply adding points to something instantly makes it fun. People discover that it doesn't make it fun by doing that.

Metaverse Use Cases: The metaverse is really going to be real gamification.

Jon Radoff: What I mean by that is learning from all the stuff that we've been doing in game development for many years. Not just adding points, but adding immersiveness, emotion, aspiration, progression, socialization, all of these things that make you really feel connected to an experience. That's what a lot of these metaverse applications are going to be. Now where are games themselves going from here? Well first of all, they're going to become increasingly extensible through creator economies and this is something that games have been doing a lot with for years. We've had modding communities for games. In fact, some of the biggest games that exist today started out as mods. You've got things like Minecraft and Roblox which have very active communities where it's not just playing games there, but it's the whole continuum between players, communities and creativity. We're also going to see far more game creators in the world, right? Now there's about 5 million people who've worked on games in Unity. We've had a couple million people create experiences in Roblox. That's just the beginning. There's going to be a huge increase in the number of people that are building games, building metaverse content. That's just a combination of the changes coming socially. The fact that people are more comfortable growing up and being creators in this. I look at my kids. I have twins who are 10 years old today. They've grown up with this. Their creator is already, this is going to become part of our society, both in stuff like Roblox and Minecraft where they're doing it, but also these platforms like Unity which have made it so much easier to create a content of games or even my own company, Bemable, which is trying to build a Shopify for games that you can turn it into a business. Games, game experiences, they're going to get more social, they're going to get more creative, they're going to become more updated with regular events and activities that you can do and there's going to be more of them and more people making them. The rest of the things that I'm going to talk about here are all these other experiences of the metaverse that are going to be so informed by games, game experiences and game tech. The next big use case for the metaverse is just social experiences and we have this already. If you go to Recruin right now for example, a lot of what you do there is games but a lot of it is simply engaging in social experiences. If you go to Roblox, you're already seeing the same thing, VRChat. There's a lot of applications for just connecting people socially through the metaverse. It's what has been called the Metaverse equivalent of the third place. A guy named Ray Oldenburg coined this term years ago called the third place. It's the idea that we have homes, we have workplaces but then there's this third place for creative expression in community which includes things like bars and clubs and venues for creating experiences or playing sports and whatnot. Well the metaverse is an awesome platform for the third place and that's already happening. Games is one example of course, games are a kind of a third place but in the future it's also going to be purely social activities where you're going to connect with your friends in the metaverse. The next use case is immersive commerce. So, just as you'll play games and have social experiences in real life, the experience of going to a store with your friends or a family member, it's much different than the experience of shopping on an e-commerce website today or where it's just purely transactional. Well in the future we're going to see more of the in store experience come alive in the metaverse. Companies like Shopify already see this happening. They're showing how you can use augmented reality and virtual reality to experience products before you bought them and potentially even to turn that into a social experience where it's going to seem a little bit more like the live shopping experience for certain kinds of things. Sometimes you're just going to want to go to a website and buy the thing that you already want but in the metaverse we're going to have new types of shopping experiences as well. Now Shopify is really interesting because in addition to the AR and VR experiences around shopping that they're already experimenting with, Shopify brings us to the next use case which is collaboration. They've shown some really interesting things that they've been doing with VR so that even within their own company they can collaborate with each other on things like product design. Well in the metaverse we already have examples like Gather Town and Spatial who are trying to bring some of that physicality of the office space into the online world. I think they're trying to recapture a bit of what people felt was missing from the remote work environments that so many of us have experienced during the pandemic. Well in the future metaverses may truly make physical office space obsolete. Alright well when we talk about virtual office space we're kind of talking about a form of real estate. Real estate is another use case for the metaverse. You can already take 3D tours of physical real estate. There's a company called Matterport which is mapping the inside realm augmenting it with more information about what's going on in that space, things like electrical systems, HVAC, etc. But those applications aren't just limited to touring and prescreening real estate for what you might want to buy or rent. There's applications for insurance, for bringing design consultants in. There's a huge number of other use cases. So bringing real estate, the real world into the metaverse is another huge use case for all of this technology and social change that we're talking about which leads directly to another case that I want to talk about which is travel. Travel is a really interesting use case. Now I love travel. I love going to places. But I can't travel to all the places I would ever want in my lifetime and the metaverse is going to make it more possible for us to do that. So Matterport where it's just talking about, they're already making it possible to explore spaces you might have traveled to in the past. They are taking Egyptian heritage sites and you can now visit them virtually. In the future, imagine all the other things that we'll be able to do with this when you converge it with AI and drones and real-time telepresence. You'll go and explore a travel destination with your friends all from the comfort of your own homes and make it an actual social experience that you're doing in real-time in those spaces. Earlier I mentioned collaboration. Well a real locus of collaboration for the metaverse is going to be architecture, engineering

Metaverse Use Cases: and design.

Jon Radoff: This is a specific form of collaboration because you're actually manipulating and creating spaces that people will be in. You need to bring in different kinds of skills that historically have used very different technology platforms, visualization systems and whatnot to work with each other. This is exactly what Nvidia is doing with a platform called Omniverse. They're letting these different designers work together to shape a physical space and then they actually can tap into things like AI inputs for things like fluid dynamics, air flow, traffic patterns and use all of that information to simulate the way these spaces will work as these different designers and engineers work together to craft an experience that will then translate to the real world. Similarly there's a ton of really interesting applications in the automotive sector or vehicles more broadly. So it starts with collaboration. Think of all the different types of designers who are involved in designing vehicles. Creative collaboration in virtual space is a great use case. It doesn't stop there for automotive though. For example, you got to simulate autonomous vehicles and the metaverse is a great application for that. You can set up a virtual environment. You can have AI to inform how different things will work there and it lets you actually simulate the way an autonomous vehicle is going to work. And then for the consumer, we may even do our first test drive in the future in a virtual

Metaverse Use Cases: showroom.

Jon Radoff: We really struggle to replace traditional education with Zoom and Google Hangouts during the pandemic. And that is a simple, early version of the metaverse. But I think we saw a lot of the ways that broke down and we also saw a lot of opportunities. Education and training can really be enhanced by the metaverse. Education and skill based training were augmented reality will show you how to do things like fixing the machine or playing a sport. Imagine how educational programs like science, social studies and other fields of knowledge could be enhanced by allowing you to see simulations or interact in a more hands-on way through virtual immersion. In addition to that, think about how the metaverse really dematerializes space. Well, what does that mean? It means that we can bring the best scholars and educators and trainers from all over the world and make them more accessible to learners in the metaverse. It'll no longer be about training and learning in a location. You'll be able to get access to simulations and the best knowledge that exists anywhere

Metaverse Use Cases: in the world.

Jon Radoff: Another form of learning and education is fitness. Now I've been doing Zoom with my personal trainer during the whole pandemic. I've also been on my pellet and those are kind of the alpha version of what we can expect fitness to be in the future of the metaverse. You can imagine all the ways that it'll be enhanced with augmented reality in the future in the same way that I've described it in other applications and also gamifying. Use that dirty word again. Gamifying the fitness experience. One of my favorite examples of this is supernatural VR. It is a highly gamified fitness application where it kind of takes on the ideas from a game called Beat Saber, but it adds in more body movement. It lets you train anywhere from volcanoes to deserts to the surface of Mars. It has interesting trainers in it. It's got leaderboards and events to make it socially engaging and competitive. That's the future of fitness where we'll be able to tap into more knowledge, more experiences, more things to keep us engaged and make it just a super fun to experience. Now online right now we've got live streaming. Very popular with our video games of course and various other experiences, but in the future this will expand to be volumetric live streaming which means we'll be able to take our 3D representation of ourselves and put it out there into the metaverse. Imagine the live streaming that happens in 2D right now on a platform like Twitch and make it possible to really do all kinds of new applications. You can start to think of fitness applications which I was just referring to as being a really interesting application of this. But it doesn't stop there. Think about music. Music is one of the really cool applications of this idea. Fortnight and Roblox have already hosted huge concerts that have reached tens of millions of people and then there's companies like WaveXR and AltSpace which are creating music events for the metaverse. You can see how volumetric live stream isn't going to play into that. But also it's actually transformative for the whole experience of music concerts. It goes back to this idea I was just talking about which is the dematerialization of space. In the real world there's only so many people that can be in the front row seat of a concert. So in the metaverse everyone can have a virtual equivalent of a front row seat. The experiences can be augmented in amazing ways that isn't even possible in physical space. So I'm very excited about how I'm going to be experiencing music in the future through the metaverse not only by myself but with my friends and family. Alright, we've talked about music, volumetric live streaming. Let's talk about immersive theater. Now first I want to talk about one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had in theater which is a production called Sleep No More. Sleep No More is like massively multiplayer online role playing games. MMORPGs meets theater. If you ever have an opportunity to do this in New York City I highly recommend it. It's an amazing experience. It's basically a film noir version of Mick Beth unfolding around you as you travel from room to room and experience it. It's something that has to be experienced more than described. Just try it out. But there is a problem traveling to New York City. Now this is a really interesting application of the metaverse just as I was talking about with immersive music in the metaverse, volumetric live streaming, events, travel. It can all be brought together through immersive theater experiences that you'll actually be able to have from the comfort of your own home. People are actually already doing this. In Rec Room there are virtual theater production companies who are performing for live audiences right now. We're going to see more and more of this as we make it increasingly easy for creators to make content in virtual spaces, in AR and VR and every other form of interface to the metaverse. And I think we're going to have entirely new experiences that go beyond film, beyond theater, and allow us to interact in these spaces in ways that are currently undrumped of.

Metaverse Use Cases: All right.

Jon Radoff: So I spoke about music and immersive theater. I want to come full circle back to games and that's this emerging category of esports. Esports is basically taking video games and trying to turn it into a spectator sport. Now if you have ever had the chance to go to a live esports event in a stadium, these are electric. They're very exciting. They're energizing.

Metaverse Use Cases: They're just as entertaining and engaging as any real world sports activity.

Jon Radoff: Esports is going to be informed not only by continuing investments in spectator based games, the whole experience of esports is going to evolve based on the work that's happening in volumetric live streaming and live music and immersive theater. All these incredible exciting experiences that I've been talking about. So esports is also going to be something that we do more and more in the metaverse and the whole shape of the experience of esports is going to import that energy, that excitement of the live stadium based events into something you'll be able to experience from anywhere. So that's it for now. These are just a few of the use cases that I'm particularly excited about. The metaverse is going to impact almost every industry that exists. It's going to provide virtual spaces where you play games, where we socialize with people, where we collaborate, where we enjoy a whole variety of activities informed by games. What I've covered here today is just a sampling of the things that have been imagined thus far. But of course, there's far more that we haven't imagined yet. And that's why it's going to be important to think about the creator economy. We're going to have a lot more creators and they're going to be dreaming up the things that I had no idea about as I spoke about this today. I'm going to cover that in my next video on the creator economy for the metaverse. So if you've enjoyed this conversation, do click that subscribe button in the notification bell. Follow me on Twitter. This is where I share my news and views on the metaverse, the creator economy, all these awesome experiences in the metaverse. I'll be covering the massive social and technological change that's coming with the metaverse. I really enjoy talking about this stuff and I'm very grateful for you watching. So until we meet again in the metaverse, thank you.