We’ve all heard about it, but few of us can quite put our finger on what it is.
For a number of years now, the metaverse has garnered increasing media attention,
not least because it has become the strategic focal point of some of tech’s biggest companies.
By some estimates, the metaverse will give rise to a multitrillion dollar virtual economy by 2030.
In 1999, there were about﻿ a thousand headsets in existence.
In 2021, in the United States, about 15 million headsets were sold. Just in 2021.﻿
So, we’re on a trajectory here.
But between dire warnings about the virtual overriding what’s real,﻿
and the hype around the metaverse’s revolutionary potential,
it can be difficult to tell what this technology is really capable of.
In the metaverse, you can look in a virtual mirror,
and you can be older, you can have a different body shape,
you can have different skin color, you can be a different gender.
We use the metaverse for these intense experiences that solve hard problems.
Joining this episode of Experts Explain to help make sense of it all
is Stanford University’s Jeremy Bailenson.
He’s been researching the metaverse and virtual reality for decades.
He started Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab
and co-founded the VR-focused﻿ tech company Strivr.
The metaverse is a term a lot of us are hearing. But we can boil it down to a simple definition, which is
So there’s a digital world, and in that world there need to be people.
If I’m going to enter the world, I need to have an avatar.
So, there’s a lot of technology and a lot of communities that are building avatars
so people can come together in an online world.
The next thing is places. There’s a virtual world where you have to go and
Consistent means if you go there
and there’s a grid and I bought a plot of land
and it’s next to another person, it’s got to stay that way.
The next thing it’s got to be is persistent.
Even if I leave, the world’s got to still be there.
The final part of the metaverse is things.
You have to have 3D objects or 2D objects, just digital assets.
So, when we think of things in the metaverse, we often think of
These are 3D models or pictures that are digital that we can verify
Right now, that market is being driven mostly by collectors.
People that just want to have the sword that killed the dragon in a particular video game,
or have the first tweet from Jack Dorsey.
And so currently, there is a genre of people that are doing collecting there, and this is nothing new.
There are plots of land that sold in Second Life 15 years ago for $1,000,000.
So, it’s not a new thing, but it’s a very niche thing.﻿
So how will the metaverse evolve from this “very niche thing” to a huge virtual economy?
A big part of the answer is virtual reality, or VR.
Combined with the economic framework that allows people
to interact with places and things in the metaverse,
VR is already drawing in millions of consumers.
People always say: Jeremy why hasn't VR taken off?
And I say: When I started﻿ doing this work in 1999, there were about a thousand﻿ headsets in existence.
In 2021,
The goggles that now cost $300,
ten years ago, I was paying $40,000 for them, and they were nowhere near as good.﻿
So, the hardware, in my opinion, is amazing. A headset is only one third the price of a smartphone.﻿
Headsets leverage sight, sound and touch. So you get to turn your head and look around.
You get to have spatialized sound.
So if you’re underwater and there are corals that are bubbling﻿,
you get to hear them in your left ear and it gets louder when you move towards them.﻿
And we have haptic feedback.
In our headsets no﻿w at Stanford, we’ve got scent generators,
and one of our demos﻿ on climate change is that, if you’re using non-recycled paper,﻿
you have to cut down a tree with your own hands.
And you get haptic feedback as that chainsaw cuts the tree.
And then,﻿ you get this gasoline smell as the chainsaw emits.
It’s multi-sensory. We’re now doing four senses: sight, sound, touch and smell.
You can put on the goggles and you can look in a virtual mirror and you can be older,
you can have a different body shape, you can have different skin color,
you can be a different gender. And what you then do is,
and you get to walk a mile in that person’s shoes.
And we’ve worked with governments and companies and schools all around the world,
where we are building VR simulations to increase empathy and to do diversity training.
Even without a fully realized metaverse,
on the job training for things like empathy is one of the most widespread
and promising applications of VR.
The reason we have VR is because of training. People learn by doing.
The moment where VR goes mainstream in the United States is actually with Walmart.
Over a million associates have now put on headsets,
entered the metaverse and trained to get better at their job.
And we’ve got incredible data on return on investment,
and of course they enjoy the training because they’re in virtual reality.
The whole model of VR training is we do things that, if you did them in the real world, it would be hard to do.﻿
One example that’s going to stand out is if I’ve got to give you a bad performance review,
that’s going to affect you and if I can deliver that in a way that’s more skillful,
you’re going to respond better.
You put the goggles on and you’re sitting across from a person, and you get a prompt﻿.
You’re working at a company and you find out that this person has had some problems recently.
They’ve been showing up late and you get some information
about things they’ve been doing wrong and you talk to them in the simulation.
That person then replies back to you and says: Well﻿, you know, there’s a reason I was late.
And you get that news and then you iterate.
That goes on for about 10 minutes, where there is a really good conversation, and then you swap.﻿
So, we’ve recorded all of your utterances, your audio and your nonverbal behaviour.
So then you sit where the employee was sitting
and you then get to watch yourself delivering that news
and you relive the conversation from the employee’s point of view. Then,
Great learning has you try something, make some mistakes, and then you do it again.
With VR, it’s on demand.
And employees can just go﻿ and get a 10-minute﻿ training dose whenever they want.
Beyond just training, the metaverse and virtual reality
also let people work remotely in ways that weren’t previously possible.
Where the metaverse earns its keep is when you’re doing
Where, if it’s a small group and it’s important that when I look to the left and I point to someone,
everyone else sees where I’m pointing
and, if I walk up to you,﻿ you get a sense of my personal space.
or, if we’re working on a shared object together, that the﻿ spatial aspect matters.
And, oftentimes, when﻿ we think about being spatial, we think about vision.﻿
Is a person here? Is a person to the right and looking at them?﻿
However, spatialized﻿ sound offers an incredible amount of value in terms of social interaction.
Naturally, in the real world﻿, if somebody whispers, their voice is lower.
And, if somebody shouts, their voice is louder.﻿
And when you’re on a video conference, that doesn't necessarily happen.
The same cues we use in the real world to understand people,
we get to use them in the metaverse as well.
So, given﻿ the enormous potential of this virtual world,
how much time will we actually end up spending in the metaverse?
I’ve been studying the metaverse for 20 years.
The metaverse is not going to change your life tomorrow.
There was a moment where we thought all of us were going to be in the metaverse,
meaning the media was promoting this as an everyday thing,
and we’re not going to have that for some years.
It doesn’t mean that the medium isn’t being used.
What we’ve learned about the metaverse is we’re going to see slow and steady growth.
It’s going to be driven by use cases that make sense.
The medium is great for these intense experiences that solve hard problems,
however, for other things, a shared document will suffice.
So, a lot of things﻿ you don’t need the metaverse for.
The metaverse will creep in when it earns its keep, when there’s something incredible to do there.
Short of that, we should stay in the real world.