There’s a lot of speculation about what will happen with the metaverse, what it will look like, how we will interact with it, and what it means for brands and industries. Two of Globant’s top experts on the subject, José Plano, Technical Director of Globant’s Gaming Studio, and Fabien Rossini, from Metaverse and Gaming at Globant, share five key things that grant some insight into one of today’s big question marks.
- Should the metaverse be part of a company’s digital transformation strategy?
José: We are currently in a discovery phase with Decentraland, Sandbox, and Minecraft building proto-metaverses as a pioneer in the metaverse world. You can build your experience using these platforms and start to dig into what the metaverse means for your brand and how it aligns with your strategy. Does it make sense for your company to be present in the metaverse? If so, let’s jump to the next level of shaping your experience with these platforms. Globant can help to create the experience that you want and more.
Fabien: The metaverse is a huge opportunity to redefine the user experience and the internet at large from a 2D experience to mostly a 3D experience. We’re moving from The Internet of Things, to The Internet of Places.
- Will we see one or a range of metaverses?
José: It is happening in the industry and has happened several times. We will have a ton of proto metaverses or things that we can call metaverse, and we will end up in a couple of metaverses that will be the leading ones. It’s happened with social networks- when Facebook was becoming a big thing, everyone was building a social network, and we had a ton of social networks working around, and right now, you can count them on the one hand.
Fabien: A lot of the advantages are yet to be defined but what I’m inspired by is the idea of moving from a multimedia user experience mainly built around other media: TV, radio, online, and print media and moving to a multi-dimensional user experience and including streaming videos, avatars, social media, and reels. Technology like augmented reality and VR…engineering multiplying the touch points… but also digital twins and what does that mean for many companies. It is very relevant for many industries; it’s about changing the user experience, retail, the phygital experiences that Nike and Adidas are bringing to life, hospitality using augmented reality to enhance the booking experience, car industry to experience new products. BMW has done experiments in building digital twins in their factories, and according to them, this has improved their production processes also productivity.
- How can gaming help us build a metaverse experience?
Fabien: We’re moving into a new era of computing, and one of the biggest challenges is to find the talent and face the complexity. I like to call this the da Vinci era because Leonardo da Vinci was both an artist and a scientist. You need to have both the technical side to understand software architecture or even languages and programming, and also you need to have the creative side or the design side to deliver the most engaging and immersive experiences.
That’s why the gaming industry has been at the forefront of all this new evolution because, in essence, the gaming industry is at a crossword of two worlds: the engineering world, and people coding because a game is a line of code that is very complex, it includes AI, lighting management, physics and so on and it’s been doing this for years. And the other element is artists, 3D artists, concept artists, authors writing scripts, and actors actually, and to deliver a very emotional artistic experience which is a game at the end of the day, so the gaming industry has been doing it for years. Still, the challenge for many other industries to discover in that world is actually to merge, you know, this left and the right brain. The future of society will be people who have to be da Vinci to evolve and build the metaverse of tomorrow.
José: One challenge that’s in front of us is the frictionless experience. Companies who have people that don’t know anything about gaming or how to control a game, if we put them in a chair with a VR helmet, they won’t be able to be trained because they will have friction with this experience, they need to learn first how to interact with this new world. We need to consider this for the near future because we will push a lot of technology and an experience for people they will need to learn how to interact with. We need to take care of this when we design the metaverse because if we don’t have this connection, people won’t be able to interact with the experience. We need the human part, how humans can interact with that new world, and if we lose the human part, we cannot interact with anyone.
It’s essential, the education from governments to the people and from inside companies. Everyone should have some level of engineering and artistry in their daily job. It’s something that we need to push and request to the government to push education in that way and to make sure that we have this kind of people or train them to move that way because the job of the future means that we need to be more like [Leonardo] da Vinci, a mix of the engineering part with the art. It’s not enough to be an engineer or an artist; you need to be both and be very good at both to provide the solution. This is the message that we can spread, that we need to focus on this kind of da Vinci era.
- What do we know about interoperability?
José: Interoperability depends on a lot of things; how you can interact or how you can interchange your data between the metaverse is an intense discussion because it involves the decentralization of the metaverse, we are participating, or we are moving to a much more decentralized world using maybe a structure like the DAOS decentralized autonomous organizations or we are moving to a more centralized world that is what happened right now you know we have five companies running everything regarding technology. The other thing that is quite different it’s the art. You can change, or you can get your data, your art, which you have on some metaverse like Minecraft to Sandbox, and you need not just get the data or your graphics; you need to adapt the graphic to the new world.
- How important is digital health education for the metaverse?
Fabien: We need to educate people. I still have friends that have their password on a note because they want to remember it. We must educate people on how to behave with their data and security, inside social networks, from our children to elders. Digital health education, because if we are waiting on regulation and standards, that is coming after several years.
For more information on what opportunities, challenges, and possibilities the metaverse will bring, visit Globant’s Metaverse Studio
