Metaverse, who’s afraid of borderless virtual reality? The (billion dollar) plans of Meta and Microsoft-Corriere.it

The most famous version, the first, is by Meta (formerly Facebook) which has invested over one hundred billion dollars in it, 15 of which last year alone. But the most advanced version is from Microsoft who made the “rollout”, the presentation, right in Davos. And, to confirm how new and unexplored everything is, the corrector of my writing software from Microsoft marks me as a mistake this word (“metaverse”) in which even Microsoft itself has just invested at least one hundred billion dollars.

How the metaverse works

How to define this new bet? The metaverse is a three-dimensional virtual world that aims to replace many of the interactions of the real world, be they work or social or otherwise related to leisure. Basically, put that helmet with a black visor on it – equipped with an unspecified number of microchips – and you will literally start having visions of a parallel world. You will feel fully immersed in it. First of all you will be assigned a hologram that represents you, a cartoon character who vaguely resembles you (but for now it has no lower limbs). In your flesh and blood hand you will be given a sort of remote control that allows your avatar – the cartoon that represents you – to move or perform actions with his hologram hands in the virtual space in which you are immersed. In essence, you have entered a colorful, metaphysical and unreal world without taking LSD.

The experience in Davos

In my twenty minutes in the Microsoft metaverse I found myself in a dreamy alpine landscape, then I was lifted into a balloon that sent me thousands of meters above the ground. I was flying over the sea and an iridescent island. So I was “teleported” (they say) to the bottom of a tropical sea, in a mangrove forest to understand the problems of the oceanic environment. Finally I witnessed from a few meters away, in the company of a dozen avatars, at the hologram concert of a famous star of American pop whose name I had never heard. After twenty minutes it was time to take off my helmet and my legs were shaking. The insiders asked the six or seven present at the “rollout” for their opinion on the new tool. I replied that, if video games and social media are a threat to the mental health of (at least) children and adolescents, the metaverse is worse. For a developing person, spending even just two hours a day in a parallel reality where the laws of physics are suspended and everything seems like a dream means becoming less capable of facing reality. More generally, relying on the metaverse means raising a generation that will potentially have severe difficulty focusing on the mundane but real. Even an adult who spends too much time in the metaverse will have a good chance of becoming a misfit, as soon as he takes off his microchipped helmet. The reaction there in the Davos congress building was interesting. As soon as I clarified my thoughts, I was surrounded by a group of smiling people from Microsoft (and from a well-known consulting firm) who seemed to find me interesting. They were actually trying to shift my opinion, gradually, gently. One asked: “If we use the internet in two dimensions, why wouldn’t we want to have it in three dimensions?” From others flowed a flood of rhetoric about “collaboration” that becomes possible in the metaverse (example: “if we hold a meeting of colleagues on ocean issues sitting on the bottom of the sea, we will be much more focused on the topic”). Then words after words on the search for “common solutions”, on “adding value together” or – as Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said, again in Davos – «on learning together across space and time».

Investments and earnings

Now, let’s put aside the extraordinary arrogance of a company that claims to design a reality in which we should live in the future: we are one step away from wanting to superimpose ourselves on nature or on a superior entity, for those who believe. And given that generating a “metaverse” costs at least a hundred billion dollars and years of work, it will always be very few and colossal oligopolists who will be able to create these parallel worlds. Microsoft also explained to me that their virtual reality it is an infinitely reproducible universe, always different, because it is designed by artificial intelligence. But because I still thought the metaverse was a threat to my mental health, they offered me a meeting with a more senior manager. My question was simple: if large groups like Facebook-Meta or Microsoft invest more than two hundred billion dollars in aggregate, how do they expect to make money? The most obvious way is through e-commerce, which threatens to crowd out the Amazon model. Consumers can stroll through a virtual store, buy a bag or a car, receive the hologram right away, and then take the real product home. The identity of the consumer and the transaction itself will be certified through the blockchain, an automatic digital register.

Business services

Microsoft claims that it also intends to offer services to businesses: a message from the CEO to all the staff spread across twenty countries around the world, a virtual meeting where one has the sensation of being present. Surely – my interlocutors admit it – Microsoft’s metaverse can create mental health problems in consumers if it relies on the same monetization model as video games or social media: the one based on capturing attention, keeping the user glued to the screen ( or helmet). I personally doubt that Microsoft or Meta can or will avoid an attention model. Primarily because it is about listed companies subjected to the tyranny of revenues and quarterly profits, so they will leave no stone unturned to maximize the latter or their managers could be ousted by shareholders. Secondly, Microsoft’s behavior is already pointing in that direction. A year ago it bought for almost 70 billion dollars in cash Activision Blizzard, the third largest video game company in the world (produces “Call of Duty”, “Candy Crush”, “Spider-Man”). This is the most expensive acquisition in the history of Silicon Valley and can only be explained in the metaverse strategy: to make games more and more immersive, to anchor customers to their parallel reality and to monetize – inevitably – by capturing their attention for as long as possible.

All of this is worrying. I was born in the last century, but I’m not an anti-modern Luddite. I don’t want to destroy the steam looms of the digital revolution. The metaverse can actually find interesting applications in education, vocational training, commerce or corporate life. It is a novelty to be accepted even for small “Made in Italy” companies” that they can sell online. But it’s dangerous if you abuse it. The European Union should regulate it before it becomes a mass phenomenon.

This article originally appeared in the Whatever It Takes newsletter, edited by Federico Fubini on Corriere.it. Click here to receive it.