- Facebook, now Meta
is a little bit like the Death Star,
huge, sometimes scary, and built on a dangerous
miscalculation that may lead to its own end.
When Facebook decided to become Meta, it put all on red,
betting that the Metaverse was likely the next big thing.
And they're probably right about that.
Only there's a good chance that it won't be their
Metaverse that comes out the winner in this battle.
But who will?
I think it might be someone that you
haven't thought of or maybe even heard of.
The Metaverse is a term that's
been thrown around a lot lately.
But along with Blockchain, Cheugy, and Periodt,
it's one that a lot of people don't really understand.
See, the idea for the Metaverse isn't new, even though
the crypto community has discussed it a lot lately.
The original idea came from the 1992 novel
'Snow Crash', written by a guy named Neal Stephenson
a guy who's a Simpsons-level psychic.
In the early 90s, he predicted Google Earth,
wireless Internet, mobile computing, virtual reality, GPS enabled
electric cars, the gig economy, and AR headsets.
So when he talks about the
Metaverse, we should probably listen.
A key element of virtual reality and the Metaverse as
he described it, is that it would be decentralized.
This means the economy of this alternate system of
reality wouldn't be controlled by any one country or
company, and certainly not the massive Zucc Empire universe.
Experiences like Sandbox, Decentraland and
Superworld have already made this work.
However, it's not perfect.
These game-like worlds are
still walled off experiences.
Your weird cousin isn't using Roblox to go
on hot dates in Decentraland just yet.
At least as far as we know.
Even though they're still rougher on the edges, current
virtual worlds show us how Metaverse economies can be
built and how value can be exchanged within them.
They're a proof of concept for something that's
going to be much, much bigger eventually.
Meta, on the other hand, seems to be
stuck in its own pipe dream of having
Facebook users conduct all their work meetings and
birthday parties in their sterile, corporate, 3D environment.
Facebook isn't exactly known as an innovation company.
When it comes to building virtual economies,
they don't have the greatest track record.
Most of their popular assets are
things they bought rather than created.
And much of what they've done in the Metaverse
has been through their acquisition of Oculus.
In fact, ad industry brands aren't sure that
Facebook has the right take on the Metaverse.
See, there are a lot of people out there
trying to get a piece of the action.
The former Nintendo America president thinks
that the digital future will be
driven by smaller, more innovative companies.
Roblox is an example of the Metaverse,
wide range of different types of experiences, all tied
together with one currency that's happening today.
But we've got our eye on one company
in particular that may have it right.
But before I tell you about that, I
wanted to give Meta's Metaverse one last chance.
Because when I was writing this video, I realized
I've never actually accomplished anything in the Metaverse.
Yeah, I spent a day in VR chat.
I've smacked my hand against
the wall playing laser tag.
I crashed a helicopter.
But I've never actually won anything in the Metaverse.
- Can you see my avatar?
- That is quite the avatar.
- All right. Ready, set, Go.
- I just ditched that guy. What's up?
- We already ordered.
- You good?
- Actually, we'll order again.
Could we get another chicken nuggets?
You can have extra chicken nuggets okay?
- Oh, sorry our ice cream machine's broken.
- Do or do not. There is no try.
- Hey, could you help me with something?
Behind you, over here.
- Yeah. What's up?
- So, I'm trying to win a game here in VR.
Are you any good at anything?
Any games?
- Oh, Am I good? I am so good at ping pong.
- Actually? You're not BSing me?
- Actually, I can teach you.
And there's a tournament, a couple of
hours, if you're trying to win something.
Oh, my God.
Hey, we don't need trouble.
- No trouble. All right.
Let's go play some ping pong.
What might the Metaverse that wins look like?
If it's going to be the next big thing,
chances are it's something created by a
lot of people, not just one company.
I mean, that's why VHS beat out
Sony's Betamax as the standard for videotapes.
Confirm with your grandpa on that one.
The Internet that we take for granted today would have
never evolved if it was controlled by just one company.
Instead, it had to be something everyone could
work on and be a part of.
So, here are the key challenges to
taking the Metaverse to the next level.
First, universal standards.
Until HTML came along, the Internet really
wasn't the Internet that we use today.
It was this forest of error
codes and hard to use sites.
HTML is a big reason why everyone's pages
get along with one another.
In the Metaverse, we need to create more
for file types and practices.
Second, encouraging creator freedom.
Imagine if all web pages were created by one company
and they had to approve every piece of content.
There'd be no spice. There'd be no variety.
You'd be boring.
Instead of one company trying to think of all
the things people will want in the Metaverse, it's
important for the world's creative people to just be
able to do their own thing.
We need to encourage creativity, not restrict it.
And finally, user adoption.
Until everyone agrees on which things we're
doing, it's going to be small potatoes.
We need to drive more people
to check out the Metaverse.
We need better, cheaper headsets and devices,
and we need lots of them.
So it has to be a company that either
has huge hardware capability or empowers people who do.
The Metaverse can't be a niche, like
the Internet of the early 90s.
It's got to be something that everyone's
into, like the Internet of today.
So how do we drive user adoption?
There are a lot of players who have
the power to take those three challenges on.
Maybe a huge consumer electronic company that
has the power to get their gear
into everyone's hands and set programming standards.
Someone who's done something like that before.
Or maybe another social media giant, but one
who has a better track record of innovation.
Or maybe someone who has a serious background in ecommerce
and can drive the financial side of the Metaverse.
There are a number of players
who fit some of those bills.
But instead of trying to keep all the
spoils for themselves, what if we had a
company that can help facilitate a decentralized, collaborative
and interoperable Metaverse so it can actually become
a reality, virtual reality, that is.
Enter the Omniverse.
[Music]
Many of the biggest companies in tech have
done open source projects and shared standards, but
some are more desperate for control than others.
One company in this space is especially
interested- the creator of the Omniverse.
They're focusing on the big three keys.
The company behind this, Nvidia.
Unlike our overlords at Meta, who seem to be trying
to control all humans I mean, data.
-[Singing] The humans are dead.
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Nvidia has created something different.
While Meta talks about what they'll do in
the future and show us renderings, Nvidia talks
about tools that developers can use now.
Instead of trying to create and control the
entire Omniverse themselves, they're creating a framework, a whole
suite of tools that help you and existing apps
operate, bring together several virtual worlds.
They have tools for computer graphics and
simulations, tools to create and stage scenes
and environments, tools for cinematics and animation.
So is Nvidia the next king of the Metaverse?
Well, we can't be sure, unfortunately, but it's
definitely an approach that looks more collaborative than
the Metas, Apples and Googles of the world.
And here's why that matters.
Looking back at the three keys to the Metaverse,
the big question for a while was how could
a Metaverse exist with so many different standards, different
currencies, different physics engines, different avatars?
And think of driving a car in GTA and
how it feels different from driving a car in
Fortnite, and how, depending on the physics of those
games, a crash would affect your vehicle very differently.
They're just incompatible.
- All right, so the first and most important thing
is the angle you're holding the paddle at.
So if you look at your controller the way you're
holding it, the angle you hit the ball at is
going to be the most important thing when you're playing.
Yes, that's part of the training.
Okay.
I need to make sure I can get a serve right.
- Nice.
Hit back corner.
I think you're ready.
- The Internet had a similar problem in the
era before the dot com boom, before HTML was widespread,
the incompatibility between web pages, browsers, and operating
systems made using the Internet a nightmare.
Basically, it was like a string of islands
with no boat to get between them.
But Nvidia's Omniverse fixes that problem with one silver bullet-
or USD files, this isn't a new type of file,
to be fair, but that's probably good.
It was created by Pixar in the '90s for use in their
animated films, and it let them create a pretty consistent
sense of physics throughout their body of work.
The Pixar look was as much a
product of the system as anything else.
But this file type has the potential to unite
3D objects from all the different third party apps
and engines that might come together in the Omniverse.
It's a single standard that everyone can use.
So instead of walling off their ecosystem
to plunder people's info, Nvidia wants to
make everything interoperable, which is tech guys'
speak for 'playing well together'.
How about creator freedom?
The benefit of the USD file format is that
creators can work in whatever platform they want to
and cross over into the Omniverse seamlessly to see
all the updates that they've made real time.
So even if one person is making a
virtual skyscraper in Autodesk and another person is
working in Blender, they can contribute without having
to manually move mountains of data.
Imagine how a decentralized organization with devs and
clients from around the world could use the
Omniverse from start to finish, and they'd never
have to meet in person.
- I'm not a cat,
and it's already happening.
About 500 companies are experimenting with
bringing the Omniverse into their workflows.
One high profile example is BMW, who's
been using the tech to simulate factories.
Because of the massive amounts of data that
go into 3D scenes, the Omniverse uses their
AI tech to crunch numbers quickly.
And better yet, they make it accessible.
Developers pay for what they use, not
for the whole pile of data.
And Nvidia is really good at large scale computing.
In a recent earnings call, Nvidia reported that their
GPUs power 342 of the world's top 500 supercomputers.
And that kind of power is what led
some experts to predict that Nvidia's market cap
could surpass apples in just five years.
You guys aren't going to believe this, but
I tweaked my shoulder playing VR ping pong.
Zero to eight.
- The angle you hit the ball at is going
to be the most important thing when you're playing.
It's very early in the game to know who
the big winners and losers are going to be
in the Metaverse. There are no sure things.
And if history is a guide, we've seen that the
early big players are rarely the eventual big winners.
But it seems like betting on people nurturing
the decentralized model is a smart way to go,
whether Nvidia or someone else.
The company just kicked their Omniverse
into high gear by giving out
free licenses, which normally cost $9,000.
Instead of launching full VR experiences like
Meta's Horizon Worlds, Nvidia has gone the
direction of doing what Google would do.
Now, that's not as ridiculous as it sounds.
Before Google was this data empire, they used
an open source approach to get software in
the hands of eager developers at zero cost.
This was one of the reasons why
they became such a dominant force.
Even if Meta or Apple, with their upcoming
VR headsets, create perfectly usable virtual ecosystems of
their own flavors, people still need content, and
Nvidia has beaten Meta to the punch when
figuring out how to bring creators on board.
Does all this mean that Nvidia is the only
stock worth investing in for the Metaverse future?
No, far from it.
Going into the next five or ten years, there will
be virtual worlds that may become more popular than anything
Omniverse is connected to, and there'll definitely be a series
of land grabs in each of them.
But most of these will probably leave folks holding a bunch
of stuff that no one wants a year or five later.
That's just how new technology works.
So while Mark Zuckerberg asked us to imagine a
Metaverse reality at some point in the future, Nvidia
is ready to show you the start of a
universe that they've already built and just waiting for
everyone to start using it.
And chances are that Meta's Metaverse will be just
one part of the larger Omniverse.