How real will the metaverse be? Exploring the spatial impact of virtual worlds

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we perform a preliminary analysis of the technologies, firms and industries that may be affected by the possible futures of the metaverse, attempting to derive some hypotheses on the spatial effects of this process. We distinguish between two possible evolutive scenarios – the ‘metaverse shaped by reality view’ and the ‘metaverse shaping reality view’ – and factors affecting them, deriving implications for public policy planning. The first scenario presents relatively traditional core policy challenges: ensuring homogeneous availability of network infrastructures as well as the skills indispensable to catch the new technological opportunities at the local level, accompanying the reallocation of factors of production associated to disruption and addressing inequalities. In the second, the main challenge is more radical: to ensure that desirable features are incorporated in the emerging virtual worlds from the start.

KEYWORDS:

• Metaverse
• market evolution
• hype
• planning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Park and Kim (2022) report 54 different definitions of the metaverse.

2 See the following article on the state of the art of the ongoing reviews of the merger https://www.polygon.com/23546288/microsoft-activision-blizzard-acquisition-deal-merger-ftc-latest-news

3 ISI Web of Science search based on the word ‘metaverse’ using topic as search criteria in all scientific fields (6 December 2022).

4 The hype in the scientific community precedes that of the public. Figure 2 shows ISI publications on scientific journals. Therefore, papers published in 2022 have likely undergone peer-review processes and were prepared in the previous years.

5 https://www.roundhillinvestments.com/etf/metv/.

6 While agreed-upon definitions are hard to provide, it is widely accepted that Internet 2.0 refers to the era of the dynamic Internet (as opposed to the static Internet 1.0), focused on reading and writing content, while Internet 3.0 will focus more on content creation and as explained in Section 5, may possibly be more distributed.

7 However, this skewed age profile can also be interpreted as being good news for the future of the metaverse concept.

8 There are devices at lower prices, some with a price lower than $100 (e.g. the Sony PlayStation VR), these are commonly used only for gaming, leaving few possibilities for those who are interested in the non-gaming metaverse(s).

9 We use this distinction for ease of exposition, but we acknowledge that the distinctions between services and manufacturing are ever more blurred by digitalization.

10 The expression DeFi refers to financial applications built and run on a blockchain, enabling smart contracts-based virtual transactions with no central authorities or intermediaries.