By Srivatsa Krishna
A good foreword to the metaverse story would be something that might astonish you. Everyone today owns an iPhone or an Android/Android fork device. However, there existed a company called Nokia, which began as a pulp mill company 150 years ago. As recently as 2000-01, it accounted for 4% of Finland’s GDP, 20% of its export, and over 70% of the Helsinki stock exchange’s market capitalisation. What most people may not recall, though, is that Nokia made the first phone with a touch-screen; it also made the first phone with a web-browser, one of the first phones with a camera, and even an application store—all these much before Apple introduced the iPhone, which, of course, changed everything! Apple invented only the multi-touch function and the iOS platform—almost everything else in the first iPhone was invented prior to it, but this single product vertical is worth $1 trillion today!
The reason this is relevant for the metaverse story is that one should never assume that just because there are leaps in technology, users will follow. Sometimes, technology also can lead to users not following it, till something else much bigger comes along and disrupts—and builds on—the previous platform. Take the case of PCs today. The total installed base of PCs is only ~1 billion, and shipments are falling each year. Twenty years ago, if you had told someone that the mobile phones installed base would be about 5 billion today, they would have probably laughed at you. But that is exactly what happened, with mobile phones overtaking PCs to become the dominant mode of consumption and exchange of content.
Thus, while stupendous advances in both the speed and breadth of 5G communications are underway along with superior computing and storage power—all of which will enable the metaverse to take wings—the key question is whether it will it go to the PC way or the mobile phones way when it comes to user acceptance. Let us not forget it took mobile phones 15 years to reach the take-off stage and hit population-level saturation.
Before all that, what is the metaverse? Metaverse is regarded by many as the next extension of the internet and will become the next big computing platform that will enable users to have a far richer and more immersive experience than they get today in a 2-D world. So, is the metaverse simply a better way to view the internet, on a new device in 3-D? It is a spectrum of digitally-enhanced worlds, organisations, and business models taking shape around us. This continuum will reshape public- and private-sector digital worlds alike, and imagination coupled with technology will open a world worth $5-12 trillion (if you believe the various consultants’ studies).
Today, much of the metaverse experience is in the world of gaming, and in some parts of manufacturing and industry. However, the total installed base of all gaming consoles in the world is only about 200 million today, far less than what is needed to saturate the population (which happens when, like electricity, it becomes invisible and ubiquitous). India is the world’s sixth-largest gaming market by revenue ($6 billion annually), but is well behind China and the US (both at $50 billion). Thus, it has considerable headroom for growth. There are some interesting applications of the metaverse, being used currently, and spreading rapidly across the world:
– The island nation of Tuvalu in the Pacific is expected to be amongst the first to sink substantially when climate change leads to an increase in sea levels. Tuvalu is now embarking on creating a metaverse of itself, which will preserve its culture and society today for posterity.
– BMW, the German automaker, has 30 factories globally, building over 100 variants of over 40 different car models and employing about 60,000 people. Imagine the complexity and variability that comes with such a vast manufacturing operation. Using the metaverse, BMW has created a digital twin of its factory, bringing together executives, planners, designers, engineers who collaborate in the metaverse. This has vastly simplified the process of manufacturing a car; it also has a tremendous impact on the bottom line of the company. It uses the NVIDIA platform to engineer the digital twin.
– At Stanford University, I witnessed the use of digital twins in teaching human anatomy. Using simple, retail-level AR (augmented reality)/VR (virtual reality) headsets, students can go inside a human body to understand how the body functions. At several US hospitals’ such as Johns Hopkins, surgeons wear a heads-up display while operating on a patient’s spine, to reach near 100% accuracy while touching parts not visible to the human eye.
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– Deloitte (and TechM) have significant metaverse labs in Hyderabad, India, and the prediction is that, by 2035, these will add about 1.3-2.4% of India’s GDP. Being the youngest nation, with one of the cheapest broadband regimes globally and a connected population, India seems ripe for the metaverse to take off.
– The US Airforce has demonstrated a metaverse from the startup Red 6, where pilots in a real aircraft can look outside the window and see both friendly and enemy assets in the metaverse. It is being tested for mid-air refueling, and combat planning with multiple live aircrafts sharing a common AR environment!
– Metaverse holds immense possibilities for how governments can deliver services to their citizens. South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Dubai, and China are already taking the lead. The government of Dubai has created a sandbox where there are digital twins of most of its government assets that are used for simulating unusual experiences. Likewise, in the US and other countries, the agriculture department is using the metaverse for simulating forest fires and strategising how best to extinguish them quickly.
– In India, outstanding startups like Avantari.ai and Rephrase.ai have used technology to have personalised, one-to-one communication but at the population level. Imagine prime minister Narendra Modi or Karnataka chief minister Basavaraj Bommai addressing you by name and sharing with you the specific benefits that have been delivered to your locality and your pin code! How cool is that! This is already happening, and the natural extension would be to meet them in the metaverse—individual avatars of citizens interacting with those of leaders, government officials, and business honchos, one-to-one!
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As far as I am concerned, I am waiting for metaverse’s next evolution, where one person’s avatar can be at many places at the same time and interact lifelike. I can then send my avatar at the same time to the chief minister’s and the chief secretary’s meetings, without being worried about missing either! That is coming soon. Right now, I make do with Nreal Air, one the world’s leading AR/VR consumer companies, which enables me to see and interact with multiple laptop screens at the same time without the hassle of carrying around a laptop!
The author is an IAS officer
Views are personal