Being Meta-Averse – The Struggle is Real! #XR

NOT META- AVERSE Why I am not concerned about the Gartner Hype Cycle; why, even though there are still SO many questions about the future of connected worlds and currencies and gamification and privacy, we need to focus on what we want to create not on slinging mud at those who are doing it… plus random stuff like Roblox 190 million users, DAU is 52 million and US Military are investing in augmented reality on top of their old virtual world stuff. This is an opinion piece, you can skip it if you want. My #metaversenews and #metaverselectures back shortly 😛 xxxx #metaversementor #ar #vr #virtualworlds #australia #usarmy #NotMetaAverse

SPONSORSHIP: Im currently putting out one-to-two educational videos on Virtual Worlds, Currencies, Gamification, Metaverse, Cross Reality (XR) etc a week, and one Metaverse News video. Each video takes research, then recording, then editing, then promoting on social media. A sponsor/benefactor/Fairy Godmother 😛 would be muchly appreciated and ease my life considerably. Please let me know xxxx

Transcript of Averse about the Metaverse – Meta Averse Video

[00:00:00.550]
Hello. My name is Laurel Papworth. I’m a metaverse mentor to corporates, businesses and also a university lecturer. I was getting ready today and doing some research to do a metaverse video and I realised that all of the news was negative. On top of that, the whole meta averse thing is confusing.

[00:00:23.060]
And I think the reason for me that it’s confusing is because I’ve been through this wave before and I’ve been through the hype cycle. If you’re not familiar with that, we look at a peak of inflated expectations early on and then we move into a trough of despair that’s equal to the trough of disillusionment, but whatever.

[00:00:46.430]
I know it’s early days, I know there’s a lot of hype and I know there’s a lot of passion involved in this area, a lot of people who are extremely opinionated because opinions lead the way and help form constructs when we don’t have data, facts or even a real idea of what’s going on. On top of the opinionated meta averse people, there’s also bad news. And the bad news is really coming today. We’re at the end of August, 2022, if you’re in the future high, the average price of virtual land in Sandbox and decentral land has dropped by about 80% and the trading volume has dropped by 90%. So that’s an issue that’s not unexpected, where we’re still trying to figure out where the people are going to move to, what they’re going to look like.

[00:01:50.370]
Can we have walled gardens? Should we have open worlds? If we don’t have open worlds, how do we create value that can transfer across the world? A lot of those questions are being worked on because we are at that beginning stage, we’re at that early stage. This is an emergent tech.

[00:02:11.780]
An emergent tech typically takes time. It doesn’t always become what we originally envisaged. Also, today cryptocurrencies have had their largest two month drop, I think forever. That was from Bloomberg. It’s around 9%.

[00:02:30.410]
So all of those who see cryptocurrencies as being not a medium of exchange within the metaverse, but actually a store of value, are upset. Now, I will point out that you can’t have a store of value without people using that currency as a medium of exchange. Now, Roblox has around 119,000,000 users, but it’s the dual time and the Mau and the DA’s, monthly active user and daily active user that’s important. And I believe that their daily active user was around 12 million users per day. So it’s right up there.

[00:03:08.210]
It’s not enough. At the moment, Roblox is probably MySpace or Friendster as we go through and look at the components of the metaverse of which worlds is one of them. And yes, there are trust issues, particularly on Horizon, but around others. And yes, there is concern about boring meetings in a virtual space versus gamified worlds full of engagement, but really just games like we’ve seen for the last few decades in virtual worlds this is an opportunity, which is what I’m leading to, for us to create the metaverse in a way that we want to create it. And people standing on the sidelines saying, it’s all crap, it’s terrible, it doesn’t exist, it never exists.

[00:04:06.090]
If it did exist, it would be awful. What about the children? What about privacy, what about data, what about this, what about that? Their concerns are justified, but not enough to stop pushing forward. Being technophobic is a critical part of being critical thinking, I guess, and absolutely we are not seeing the kind of connections in these worlds that we see in the physical world.

[00:04:33.030]
So until you see rights of passage and rituals in metaverse worlds, then we’re not going to be able to compare that to the physical world or even to be honest, Facebook. If you’re not seeing in the world things like birth deaths and marriages, that’s a rite of passage and you’re not responding as a human to that news, then it’s not going to be sustainable or fulfilling to humans. But standing on the sidelines and throwing things without offering an alternative or suggestions is minimal value at best, I think is the kindest way that I can put it. In other words, make sure that you are offering something of value rather than just saying, oh, that’s crap. Because when you say though, that’s just crap, few people listen to that, it’s great, clickbait and people are going to click on it and watch the video and then they’re going to go back to doing what they’re doing, which is thinking about envisaging, manifesting how they want the metaverse to be.

[00:05:50.790]
And I’m in that tribe, so maybe think about how you don’t like something and what it could look like. So rather than saying, oh, that’s just crap, I don’t like it, that’s not going to work. Suggest something like, well, that’s a walled garden, that’s firewalled. How are we going to transfer assets between worlds? I think that’s a fair critique, fair summary of some of these things that are going on.

[00:06:21.150]
If you don’t like Paris Hilton’s world with her NFT, don’t go there, it’s fine. We will see a lot of non nutritional content and that often happens at the beginning of a new wave, a new cycle. But there are already deeper connections being made into virtual reality and into other spaces as well. Don’t dismiss gamification, please. I know everybody says, oh, stop playing games, you need to work now.

[00:06:58.550]
But work will become gamified and the more gamified it is, the more human beings will enjoy it and the greater gains there will be from our overlords and masters as we don’t realise that our game is their work. And really that can be anything from having to read the text captures that Google uses to actually translate all documents and to the virtual world. What was it called? US army. That the players didn’t know that the US Army were actually in the world fighting players in order to get training.

[00:07:45.060]
And they were using real world maps, fallujah and et cetera.
So again, I ask you, when you see or hear meta averse concepts, investigate. Are they offering an interesting path all the way through? Are they offering interesting examples? What can we use to say this is not what we want? But then how do we articulate what it is that we do want from the future?

[00:08:23.660]
Thank you for your time today. My name is Laurel Papworth. I will be back next Saturday with Metaverse News. Thank you.

RESOURCES FOR Metaverse MetaAverse

Cryptoslate : Metaverse land prices’ collapse sparks debate on viability of virtual worlds

Wikipedia : Gartner’s Hype Cycle and criticisms.

US Army Augmented Reality thingie.

One of US Army’s games (download here) called America’s Army. My post from 2008 on the sale of There.com (monetization: whitelable franchise) to USA Army

Bloomberg Drop in Crypto (I saw a different one, but this will do)