Mark Zuckerberg, who is Meta Chief, said in an interview this week that he thinks “about a billion people” will soon be part of the metaverse.
Even though the epidemic has caused more people to be interested in video conferencing services like Zoom and other technologies that create virtual environments, not everyone is as excited about metaverse advancements.
But Meta will keep improving in this area, and if Facebook and other social media are any indication, it won’t be long before we spend as much time in digital environments as we do in real ones.
How Mark Zuckerberg will do online in the future
Zuckerberg, who is the 15th richest person in the world, told CNBC on Tuesday that the metaverse could be a “significant” source of income for the company in the second half of this decade.
The company says, “We expect there to be about a billion people in the metaverse, and each of them will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on digital products, digital content, and other ways to express themselves.” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg says he wants people to spend money on “clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or things to decorate their virtual conference room” or even “utilities to be able to be more productive in virtual and augmented reality, and across the metaverse as a whole.”
Mark and Meta’s Big Plan, with Rules
This move away from Web 2.0 relics and social networking sites has been a long time coming. For example, Zuckerberg’s first social networking site, Facebook, is going down in popularity for the first time in its history.
For example, in 2014, Meta (which was then called Facebook) spent $2 billion on Oculus VR, but it didn’t work out as planned.
But in 2018, Oculus CEO Jason Rubin sent a 50-page memo to the company’s board of directors saying that the metaverse was “ours to lose” in the next ten years. Since then, a lot of time and money have been put into making the idea come true.
Other companies are also taking it seriously. Microsoft, Epic Games, Meta, and 33 others have created a metaverse organization that will support common standards through “action-based initiatives.”
Will people use the Metaverse? Anyone can guess.
There is a lot of talk about whether or not there will be close to a billion people in the metaverse in the near future, and there is evidence for both sides.
On the one hand, the fact that real estate investors, celebrities, and regular people have all bought virtual property shows that digital environments may have value in ways that no one could have imagined a decade ago.
Also, many of us already spend a lot of time in “digital places” that let us interact with each other. We play video games, look at social media, and talk to each other through video calls. They aren’t nearly as immersive as the metaverse, but is it really that far away?
Some people don’t believe all the fuss. Elon Musk said last year, “I’m not sure if I really believe in this Metaverse thing, but a lot of people talk to me about it.” He also said that he doesn’t see a future where people want to stay in virtual reality.
Will there ever be a 9–5 job in the Metaverse?
In recent studies of people who work in virtual reality settings, test subjects dropped out because they felt sick and nervous. Participants said they had dry eyes, dizziness, tiredness, stiff necks, swollen faces, and skin problems. However, this was mostly blamed on the heavy equipment, which still makes it hard for more people to take part.
But video conferencing services like Zoom and Microsoft Teams have started to add more immersive rooms that are similar to the metaverse. As Microsoft puts it, Microsoft Mesh for Teams lets you “connect and communicate with a sense of presence through personalized avatars and immersive locations.”
Will everyone get a VR headset in the mail one day, turning our whole society into a digital one? It’s not likely at all. Will there be more programs, software, games, and everyday life experiences with “immersive” parts that take us into the “metaverse” for a while? It looks like that. Who knows where we’ll be in 2030 if this is how things are right now.
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