A new world: the Metaverse

Imagine living in a world where technology is so pervasive that it’s intertwined in everyday interactions and experiences, and and it is so immersive it feels as real as the room you’re in right now. It’s not on a screen, but surrounds you.

That phenomenon has a name: it’s called the Metaverse. And I recently heard about it on a podcast. It was astonishing.

Listening to the interviewee, Matt Ball, talk felt like tuning into an evolved futuristic human sending a message back in time to tell us present-day people what his world is like. His words drew me into the future and I was awash with images of sci-fi world-like predictions and it felt like walking on the Starship Enterprise or something like that.

The Metaverse is not just virtual reality. It’s more than that. It’s various worlds and digital realities that will exist simultaneously, where people will be able to navigate and experience fluidly. It’s virtual reality (which replaces your vision with a whole different world) and augmented reality (which adds to your vision in this world, like using Google glasses and seeing signs that aren’t in real life but can be seen with the glasses) mixed with other tech that likely doesn’t exist yet.

But most of all the Metaverse is a simulation.

It’s not real but it feels like it is, but in a way it is…real.

The technology appears to be decades away. But there are people trying to pull it forward, closer to the present. Pulling tomorrow toward today.

Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, is at the forefront. His company owns and has nurtured the best simulation engine in the world called Unreal Engine. Many of the biggest games and movies run on it. Epic also owns one of the biggest games ever, Fortnite, which also runs on Unreal. And he offers it and many other services for content creators at a nominal fee, almost at cost, so that he can empower creators and the audience to improve the simulation experience and continue to innovate. Sure, that doesn’t create immediate value for his shareholders, but he’s trying to create the next big thing. And the innovation he’s nurturing, he believes, will drag the future closer to the present, actualizing the Metaverse sooner.

By the way, if you want to invest in Epic you can do it through buying Tencent stock. This company also developed Wechat, the largest messaging app in China, that also has a ton of others features like paying for your utilities, business profiles, e-commerce, etc. It’s like WhatsApp on steroids. And Tencent has a 40% share on Epic, a privately held company, which means its stock can’t be bought on something like the New York Stock Exchange. But, if you bought Tencent, you would own a chunk of Epic. You should know Tencent is a Chinese company. So there is that added risk. And I’ll disclose that I bought and am holding their stock even before listening to that podcast.

You should also know that I’m not a financial advisor and this blog post isn’t advice. Consult a professional before you start plunking money down, or, at least, do some serious research. And, besides, the market could tank at any moment, since, you know, our economy is in the crapper, and we’re in a pandemic.

And I don’t want to fool you. I don’t know if I understand all of this entirely. But it fascinates me. And I wanted to share it with you because I had never heard about this before and it felt like it would be a welcomed distraction for you. And maybe, like me, you’ll find it otherworldly interesting.

Here are a couple articles about the Metaverse that you might find illuminating.

1. From the Post.
2. From Matt Ball.

See you in the Metaverse.

Lots of love,
John