The Metaverse report from the venerable global consulting firm McKinsey reveals that more than $120 billion has been invested in Metaverse since 2022; 79 percent of active users spend money on Metaverse; and 25% of executives expect Metaverse to account for more than 15% of their company’s revenue over the next five years. By 2030, it may be valued $5 trillion and provide the highest potential for new growth across a range of industries, including consumer products, retail, financial services, technology, manufacturing, and healthcare. The paper also tries to clarify the importance of Metaverse, the breadth of adoption, potential hotspots, and the steps businesses may take right away to realise value.
What is the Metaverse’s Best Investment?
The five daily activities in Metaverse will be games, social networking, fitness, business, and distance learning, according to the McKinsey report. “It is widely assumed that developing connections may be their primary goal in Metaverse,” said Lareina Yee, a senior partner at McKinsey.
Seventy-nine percent of respondents claimed to have already purchased goods in the Metaverse world as it currently exists, while 47 percent claimed to have done so through video games, 37 percent claimed to have done so through virtual cosmetics, and 33 percent claimed to have done so through virtual platforms for real-world goods. According to the McKinsey researchers, big brands’ current experiments with their products in the virtual world have demonstrated how marketing and advertising for Metaverse users may change in the future. The industry requires quite distinct marketing talents, both in formats more akin to video games, movies, TV series, etc., said Eric Hazan, a senior partner at McKinsey.
The Metaverse is not just about games
According to the research, the Metaverse will be the next development in the Internet, effortlessly merging our physical and digital lives. Beyond that, it tackles topics like the enormous sums of money spent on gaming, the rise of non-gaming use cases for companies and consumers, and the ongoing development of the Metaverse.
Games are essential to the creation of the Metaverse, yet they are not only for playing. Games are the most popular activity across all generations, but Gen Z is the generation most likely to be interested in them (87%). For generation Y and later, the situation is different. While the majority of baby boomers enjoy shopping, millennials place more of an emphasis on fitness, learning, and shopping.
Metaverse and Web3.0
The support for Web3 introduces numerous new chances, even though Metaverse continues to offer significant opportunities for users and creators.
Users may own, profit from, and use Web3’s new decentralised ecosystem to their advantage, while producers can earn money from their work in a variety of ways. There are three main strategies in this situation.
- Technologies for general, open, and permanent blockchain
- The blockchain publishes digital assets that are portable and permanent.
- Smart contracts help users by encouraging self-executing software.
Participate in the Metaverse
Hou Yang, chairman and CEO of Microsoft Greater China, commented on the introduction of Metaverse and remarked that manufacturing offers the most suitable environment for it. A digital twin is an online “replica” of the physical world. According to a claim made by Hou Yang, the physical world and the digital world can be connected through the use of digital twin technology. Microsoft can therefore offer production process simulation operations, predictive maintenance, intelligent analysis, and business insights into service decisions by developing digital twin models and machine learning simulation production. With the help of Microsoft’s HoloLens holograms, data and scenarios can be superimposed in mixed reality, enabling businesses to create “cloud factories” to better understand production conditions, anticipate risks, streamline processes, determine costs, and direct technical operations of employees more precisely.
Along with Microsoft, the world’s largest chipmaker Nvidia focuses on the actual application of digital twins in the industrial sector. The Nvidia Omniverse platform uses digital twin technology to create a replica “digital world.” Manufacturers might try to create digital smart factories to simulate the manufacturing process in this “digital world.” The Omniverse digital twin from Nvidia has been applied to a variety of tasks, including training for self-driving cars, simulating 5G signals, and architectural design. For instance, the BMW Group and Nvidia’s Omniverse digital twin have collaborated to develop manufacturing lines in virtual environments, foresee and resolve potential issues, and enhance production procedures. In the future, AI digital people will present a significant opportunity for Metaverse, according to Zhan He, CEO of Nvidia Omniverse China.
The rapid advancement of science and technology and the explosion of human imagination are driving the brewing of the “Metaverse” concept, its spread, iteration, and upgrading of the industry powered by capital. Businesses should actively embrace this new development, clarify their layout and positioning within the Metaverse vision, speed up digital transformation and upgrading, lock the subdivision track to match their resources and capabilities, continuously strengthen the development of their core capabilities, and better adapt to the development of the digital ecology and invest in it.
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