If you’ve played a video game, or ridden a virtual rollercoaster while wearing a virtual reality headset, you’ve entered the metaverse. You can play games and take a fitness class, even socialize and meet new people like I did in Facebook or Meta’s Horizons World.
“It’s really just the next generation of the internet that’s more about the immersion,” said the Consumer Technology Association’s Brian Comiskey.
He tells me it’s already part of our daily lives.
If you’ve ever created an avatar or memoji, you’re in the metaverse.
There’s virtual reality, which requires headsets for a digital-only experience, augmented reality, where digital elements are layered over things in the real world, and mixed reality, where you can see the physical world, but interact with virtual things.
Retail is the next frontier.
If you’ve used Amazon or Ikea’s shopping tools to see how a product will look in your living room, that’s the metaverse.
The company Perfect has a virtual store you can visit on a smartphone to try makeup, clothing, and different hairstyles, and even do a skin analysis from the comfort of your home through your smartphone camera.
Perfect’s Adam Gam says retailers already have some of this technology. And little by little the metaverse will become where people shop, socialize, and live at least part of the time.
“It’s a process and evolution of all these technologies coming together for engagement to have hyper-engaged experiences,” Gam said.
So even if you think you won’t have anything to do with this thing called the metaverse, if you shop, exercise, drive, and all of the things we do in real life, one day, you’ll also be doing it with the help of the metaverse.