“People’s opportunities are usually anchored to where they are located,” he said, but new technologies will allow people to “be able to be present in places where they physically can’t be.”, — Mark Zuckerberg
The world is changing fast. Decades ago people were watching TV series like ‘Westworld’ and ‘Throne’ thinking that this fantastic plot will never become reality.
However, nowadays VR and AR are turning into reality, big corporations like Facebook and Apple are striving to turn their empires into meta empires. After Apple unveiled ARKit 2 in 2018, everyone knew they’re in the big game with their straight purpose to create the most innovative VR apps for the platform.
The list of top VR companies expands every day. The’re already 20 of them in the US only.
And just like the real world, the meta one has all the traits of a market economy.
You can enter this market and buy all you want: food, pieces of art, music, clothes embodied in the NFT form.
These cryptographic assets (NFTs) allow its buyer to say that they own the original copy of a digital file. It’s as if you own a product or a piece of physical art or anything else in the physical world. In fact, you don’t put your own stamp on it, it’s your own stamp as it is! And you have all the rights to own what you purchased in the metaworld.
And the question is… How do you prove your rights? In fact, the basis of the pure NFT ownership is the validity of its transfer. The ownership of the NFT can be bought and sold, ownership of the intellectual property rights will be approved just in case the transfer is explicitly set out in the smart contract encoded into the NFT. Such a transfer may presuppose ‘that all formalities for the transfer of IP rights are satisfied by the transfer of the NFT’.
NFTs can help to solve the long-lasting problem of approved proprietary rights in music , cinema, art, etc. Say ‘hello’ to DeviantArt, Twitch and cybersport which do really appreciate the whole NFT game as it helps a lot.
To sum up, you can put a trademark on every object, but you need to prepare the ground for the object to make it a rightful piece of any metaverse.
The metaworld market. A jack of all trades
In 2021, The Gaming Market was valued at USD 198.40 billion, experts believe that it will reach a value of USD 339.95 billion by 2027.
The perspectives are huge. The NFT mechanics will allow you to become ‘meta worldwide famous’. If earlier you owned a super-duper artifact in the ‘World of Warcraft’ and it tore you apart that you could sell it only on the tematic forums, now you’re free to sell your artifact as an NFT everywhere!
Let’s say, you are a happy owner of the Counter Strike knife or the PUBG suit. You’re free to sell it on all NFT marketplaces you can find! Moreover, you can use the artifacts you own in a cross chain way. Let your knife be useful on the Sandbox or Decentraland piece of land.
Thus, you go beyond one single game and reality and use your NFTs in the brand new meta world!
The metaworld in detail
‘I can carry nearly eight gigs of data in my head’,- Johnny Mnemonic
Just like WEB, social media made a long way from the one-dimensional reality, to the two-dimensional Facebook, Reddit, Twitter and other platforms. Now they’re almost turned into the three-dimensional metaverses thanks to the simulations of real-life environments.
You can live your alternative life: go to work, participate in exhibitions/conferences, go shopping, furnish your virtual home, play your favorite games, go out for a date, enjoy concerts with friends, — anything will be real in the metaworld.
Yep, things are going exactly the same as in the ‘Black Mirror’ TV series. And *SPOILER ALERT* Perhaps we can live forever just like in the ‘San Junipero’ episode.
World-building games
The story about metaworld wouldn’t be full without the word-building games like Sandbox, Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite “Creative Mode”.
Experts state that the Sandbox game passes 2 million registered users in 13 months.
According to Similarweb, the total number of visits of the sandbox.game are more than 3.6M.
Another gaming giant like Roblox has 32.6 million daily active users! Moreover, Roblox once clocked 5.7 million concurrent users, making that it’s all-time peak usage. The platform is just one stap away from monetization and NFT implementation, so off you go, young gamers!
How one can live in the metaworld reality. Right down the rabbit hole
In the previous article we briefly described the essence of the metaworld looking glass. Now let’s dive deeper right down the rabbit hole!
Suppose you’re a huge music fan. Let’s make it a perfect day for you!
Now imagine you wake up in the music metaverse like Virtual Humans. ‘When a first-person virtual personality is paired with well-thought-out storytelling and captivating design, the virtual influencer truly comes to life in their own right.’ That’s what actually happens when you dive into this wonderful musical world.
You wake up and look in the mirror. In the reflection you admire the view of your favorite Damien Hirst painting. It’s lucky you had both time and cash to buy it on Nifty’s once. Last time you saw Hirst painting available was so long ago that now it looks both like a piece of art and a priceless artifact. You smile and turn on the top-notch NFT song from your favorite freshman you have all the rights for and put on the T-shirt with the coolest meme you bought on OpenSea a few weeks ago.
That’s the world you chose to be in and things you dreamt to be surrounded by.
Oh, by the way, the land you own in this brand new digital world is the best one in this digital area. Once you decided to test your imagination and entered Decentraland. What a huge map of estates and galleries you observed! Then a crazy idea came to your mind. ‘Why not buy a piece of beautiful land right down the narrow street near this lake?’ You had savings from previous NFT purchases and decided to convert them into a cozy digital estate. That was the best idea you had that year. Cross-chain technology allows you to use your homeland everywhere in the digital world so now you can enjoy your best life in the best and most creative place ever.
Time to go out to the brand new meta world.
What’s next? You’re free to interact with your friends and neighbors, find new friends in the musical VR world and go to the gig of the freshman you’re crazy about. Hey just look at the mural on the road to the concert! How about taking a photo of it? Seems like someone already owns it, what a lucky guy or girl…
Concerts have already successfully become a lawful part of the meta world.
Due to pandemic, the collabs in the form of Travis Scott in April 2020 and J Balvin that October were launched. Scott’s Fortnite concert drew a staggering 28 million virtual attendees.
Ariana Grande also performed in Fortnite, and The Weeknd had a sensational TikTok Concert. The latter is one of the pioneers of the celebrity NFT movement.
His epic collaboration with Strangeloop Studios became the top hit on Nifty Gateways last year.
You already got used to such concerts but still have goosebumps each time one of your musical favs steps out onto the stage. You put on VR and get ready for the most exciting musical experience of this month.
After the gig your friends buy some digital merch on the backstage and then post a video from the gig to social media. And again make an NFT out of it!
The circle is in place!
NFT and metaworld: anyone can get a second chance
No matter how financially solvent or insolvent you are, metaworld is your second life just like in any other game. It’s your Plan B if real life can’t give you any chances or a huge booster to everything you’ve already achieved in real life.
To date, youngsters spend almost 50% of their income on virtual products. When you’re young you have a strong need for self-identification. And metaworld gives you all the opportunities in the world to do it!
Create your own identity, buy pieces of art, and ‘buy land, they’re not making it anymore’, as Mark Twain once said.
The NFT future is soon to come
“For a bunch of hairless apes, we’ve actually managed to invent some pretty incredible things.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Soon everything that can be labeled will be labeled. And it’s absolutely okay. That’s how the story goes. Digitalization spreads everywhere, and it’s our task to make the best out of it. Soon we’ll be able to label everything: from clothes to human organs. If everything’s done in the legal field, the metaworld ecosystem may become the best reality we had so far.
