Metaversed

Chapter 13Building the Metaverse

Life doesn't happen to be something that just happens to us.

—Guy (played by Ryan Reynolds), Free Guy

We shared with you our vision of a fully grown metaverse: a hybrid universe with a physical world filled with gateways to a persistent digital dimension where users can use, own, trade, search, and co-build new kinds of objects, relationships, and spaces. Digital humans will populate these worlds and will be our primary access points to goods and services. Our identity cards, avatars, data, currency, and property will increasingly become persistent elements in our phygital experience. A regulatory, legal, and governmental framework needs to come into place to establish the trustful environment we all need to do business and work safely.

This vision is being enabled by the technology building blocks being developed as you are reading this. The distribution and advancement of these underlying technologies is happening every day. Technical acronyms abound while this happens, much like the early days of the Internet, when the infrastructure and tools were being built, and most people didn't have a clear understanding of how to use a browser. Remember when the word “google” didn't exist as a generic replacement for online searching?

In March 1998, Harvard Business Review warned readers of the coming shift in business practices with the rise of that weird platform called “the Internet”:

Established businesses that over decades have carefully built ...