Is The Metaverse Dead?
Welcome to this week’s episode of the All About The Metaverse podcast, presented by your co-hosts Chris Bruno and Alexis Nicosia.
In this episode, we talk about:
RIP The Metaverse – An article by PR Exec Ed Zitron which has had a huge amount of coverage over this past week. But is the Metaverse dead?
Education in VR/the Metaverse – What could happen if training & lessons were taken into VR worlds, minimizing the costs and logistical requirements for training?
Why is no one creating up-to-date reports around the Metaverse? Currently seeing news articles referencing the “latest figures” but in reality, most of the reports being quoted are from 2022.
Here are some of the interesting links to find out more information:
RIP The Metaverse – The awful op-ed that has been pushed as if it’s news.
Immerse.io – a training company using VR
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Episode Full Transcript
Alexis 0:01
the metaverse as we know it today, my soap balls. But the metaverse is is going to go within a decade. Oh man, this is going to be just stunning.
Chris Bruno 0:12
Welcome to all about the metaverse podcast, the show that keeps you up to date with the latest technology, trends and news about our future digital world. I’m joined by Alexis, as always now not invited.
Alexis 0:25
Fantastic. Ciao, Chris. Hello, everybody. Nice to be back forever. Again, I guess we have another session filled up with quite a fair bit of things. It’s good that you send me a couple of articles during the week where, you know, we can scramble a little bit, bunch of information that comes up. And a lot of the stuff that came up, it’s usually not quite positive. So it begs the question like, why are we still doing this? Why would keep doing that? But you know what, it will be good that we clear this shit out a little bit as well. Yeah, yeah. 100%.
Chris Bruno 0:58
And I think that’s it. We’ve kind of been referring it right? When we talk about these things internally. We’ve talked about it a lot about just this meta bashing, right? Or the metaverse bashing. And we’ve said on every episode, I don’t care how small the attendances for an online event or how small the attendance is for an online virtual world, etc. If people are still doing things, then it’s a positive step in the right direction. And this week, just gone by we had the insider article written by a PR specialist, apparently, and very simple title. He went with rip met of us. Thanks. Yeah.
Alexis 1:37
Well, you know, the thing is, again, he’s a PR guy, so you know, if we’re talking about him, so he’s making he’s doing a buzz, right? He’s doing a buzz, even if you bad publicity is good publicity. But again, I think it’s a bit it’s a bit easy, you know, to pick on, you know, the, the unwanted kid at recess, or stuff like that. As you said, Chris, a lot of stuff is being built. Here. Again, I’m in Bangkok, Thailand. And this is to be considered as Metaverse hub. And I’m telling you in all the meetups, I’m going to a lot of stuff happening, a lot of people are working, even though the largest company keep firing, you know, like, ref, right? Left centre here, people are hiring as a matter of fact, yes, it’s still a very local crowd, but they’re building stuff. Okay, so it’s not our, our IP quite yet, I’d say, especially that from one of the stuff that you said, and something that we, you know, continuously talk about. And one of the things where I believe it’s going to be one of the driving force, and that’s not being born. One of the driving force of of the metaverse would be education. Okay. And those companies that I talked to here in Thailand, you know, the building the building solutions for, you know, refineries, hospitals, you know, stuff that you use in on a daily on a daily basis for the for the workers, they, you know, they they just teach them how you would know, deliver a child or how you will, you know, use that particular machinery, right? And I think the metaverse definitely comes into the fold, you know, to save on costs on training people at the location on sites, right. So we definitely should not rip quite yet.
Chris Bruno 3:18
I think that this is the thing that annoyed me about the article, right. And again, everyone’s entitled to their opinion, I respect that. But in the article, and I’ve taken a couple of notes as well, because it talks about, you know, the meta is dead, it’s buried, it’s gone. It’s gone the way of and I think he referenced Google Glass. Now Google Glass, like people, some people write, I wrote it, rip Google Glass. But let’s bear in mind as well, like if we do rip for the technology, like rip, CD, players, rip, DVD players, rip, all of these things are going into a particular direction. But the Google Glass was released, not developed, released in 2030. That’s a decade ago, like in the last year and a half, we have changed. Again, a massive jump with personal computing that you can now buy an Apple MacBook with an M one chip for $900. And it’s better than anything you’ve ever owned in terms of a portable computing device, right? Things are, it’s mind boggling the jump we’ve made just in the last year and a half. And what that’s caused the technology to do. We’ve got Apple rumoured to be releasing a headset, an AR VR headset, where you could say very clearly, if Google had never done the glass, does Apple ever create the their own headset?
Alexis 4:36
Oh, well, though, maybe, maybe maybe. I mean, again, I think I think technology is going to become more and more portable, right? And to the point that the you know, it becomes portable, all the way to the point it becomes like embedded into into our into our body. Again. As you know, Microchip isn’t coming smaller and smaller and smaller and therefore, you know, we will have a tendency of of wanting to have those vise is really you know, like, embedded in us. Right? So I don’t know, man. I don’t know if they inspired himself from the Google Glasses. Definitely do it the ecosystem when Google launched Google Glasses was not quite right. quite ready. Do you remember MiniDisc? Yeah, I
Chris Bruno 5:14
love the MiniDisc player.
Alexis 5:15
I love that man. I loved it. I of course, I was the hated kid because I had one. And I thought that was the future. That was awesome. And if you didn’t have one where you were complete to add, because you don’t understand technology. And I love that thing, right?
Chris Bruno 5:29
My friend put one in his car, and it obviously just went the way of like, it was dead. So then he’d have to record some stuff on his iPod onto a mini disk to be able to put them in the car.
Alexis 5:40
So this is this is what I’m thinking. You know, I hope the metaverse and I hope those Google Glass or Google glasses were a little bit like that. That mean it is but I really hope the metaverse doesn’t become that, you know, awesome technology. That becomes you know, obsolete because something a lot cooler was gonna come. Now, the metaverse as we know it today, my softballs. But the metaverse is is going to go within a decade. Oh, man, this is going to be just stunning. Imagine, but that’s
Chris Bruno 6:09
the thing, right? You can’t get to that last version unless you start with this version. And I think you know, I’m not saying that Apple copied Google Glass to create their own headset. But Google takes a plunge and says right Screw this, let’s build a headset. Nobody else is building a headset at that time. And then definitely not doing anything in AR like what what was AR No one we weren’t talking about ar 15 years ago, most of us anyway. So when I hear these things, I kind of try and put this into perspective. So I picked up a couple of things. Like, if you go back to when the Google AR came out, the iPhone five had come out. iPhone five, we’re on the iPhone 14 Currently, that jump just try and think back to your iPhone five, what that looked like and what the killer apps were that you were using, right? It’s crazy to think about that just think about what the speed of 3g was back then compared to how we’re rocking 5g And what was available at that time, that would have allowed you to actually make an AR device that was really seamless and amazing. It wouldn’t have been possible. But these are the things that I think drive tech forward. And I think again, if you go back to that 2013 time, compare it to today, and I’m reading the numbers, so I don’t make the mistake. There are three times as many apps and games on the App Store today, as they were a decade ago. Three times as many. Yeah, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem so much three times No. But it takes us to well over 2.1 million apps available to download today, or 2.1 million. But if you said to people name 10 killer apps, or to name the 10 most important apps are the biggest developments of apps, people will tell you the same ones, right? where companies have really changed the world. So Uber, Airbnb Grindr. So all of these things, I think, are a massive difference, right? But those are the key moments. I think, where, again, if you’re saying that the metaverse is dead, if you likening the metaverse as a concept to what Google Glass did a decade ago, like, really
Alexis 8:11
well, let’s see now the event. Again, we keep saying this, and I know that the podcast is called all about Metaverse, but it is clearly that it’s clear to me at least that AI is going to be you know like a central feature of building meta versus it’s going to improve at least this experience is going to improve so many things about the metaverse and the metaverse wanted to not it will happen okay, it is it will happen is happening as we speak and as a matter of fact the as I said before a lot of people are still building on it right now what’s gonna happen though it’s a lot of AI is going to you know, partake into the party. Yeah, so I man, I can’t wait. I can’t wait to see what what the future holds for for the metaverse powered up by a by by AI.
Chris Bruno 8:54
But this is another interesting point, right? So in this article, and I know I’m kind of really hammering I really am not happy I’m a hater of this article. I’m not gonna lie like I’ll put my hands up. I’m the hater on this article. But I just think it’s way too easy, right? So the guy says about you know this is going to death metal is dying. Metaverse is dying. Capital M Metaverse is dead. But then says like, you know generative AI is the future like that’s where everyone’s Whoo, this is exciting. And I’m sitting there going these two things are inexplicably linked regardless, right? If Facebook figures out Metaverse figures out meta, how to bring their generative AI into a virtual world things change very quickly, right?
Alexis 9:36
Remember, remember military reports mean? Minority Report. I don’t know if your auditors ever seen that scene, I invite you guys to to look at the movie. I don’t know if he’s aged very well, but at that there’s a sequence where you know, like you have Tom Cruise, you know, just like taking apps and building stuff together just with these, you know, like, tactile sort of gloves that he had and all that was powered by A Well, AR VR and AI. And this is gonna happen. Yeah.
Chris Bruno 10:06
And this is the idea, right? But if you think about like even that all of those things we talk about generative AI now like it’s a normal thing. This didn’t exist in the real world, six months ago, seven months ago. So what we’re already seeing those guys do and what that could mean for the metaverse I think is huge. And again, I don’t think this is a one or the other. I think the AI changes the game for the metaverse completely and for all virtual worlds, games, content creation. It’s huge what the difference can be. And then again, the last piece like I after this, I promise you I will stop hating on this stupid rip Metaverse article. And the guy says literally in this article, the future is you know, future tech is self driving cars. Now I just want to make this really clear to everyone. The first ever self driving car that was done was in 1995 1995. But here we are nearly 30 years later. And I still can’t order a self driving car to pick me up and take me to the pub. It doesn’t exist. So in 30 years, this isn’t this isn’t a failure, like this is this had 30 years it hasn’t worked yet, but we’re still calling it the future. So this is where I really believe there’s a lot out there, which is just meta bashing, not even Metaverse, but the metaverse gets lumped into it. And it’s all about hitting meta, and making them look bad. And somehow I don’t know why somehow just making sure you keep hitting that company. And I don’t know if it’s a financial thing.
Alexis 11:36
Okay, by the way, we’re not we’re not we’re not sponsored by MIT, to, you know, to give them to give them grace or whatsoever. No, we’re not. But if you’d like to
hear us, if you hear us, we try to we try to keep you offload. Okay.
Chris Bruno 11:50
But I don’t want them to they also bash decentraland. They’re bashing web three saying the whole of web three has died in this article, right? Hey, let’s
Alexis 11:57
do a podcast as a podcast on one of those meta verses, you know, just for the sake of putting the money where our mouth is? Yeah, there’s no hanging. Audience? Yeah, let’s ask the audience where they would like to see us doing one of those podcasts, come up with some comments, let us know where would you like us to, to have one of those podcasts. And as a matter of fact, we’ll do a podcast, maybe you you’ll be there.
Chris Bruno 12:21
Come and join us. Well, listen, stop hating on this guy. I don’t like the article. Below, you can read it for yourself. And you can make up your own mind at the lawn and ate it with me but on your own in your own space. But so we came across a company this week as well, that I hadn’t really heard about. And again, this is new for me. This isn’t financial advice, saying you guys should look into this buy stuff from them or anything else. It’s definitely not a sponsored plug either. But we found a company called immerse.io. And I absolutely love what these guys are doing, which is basically VR training. And you started to allude to this a minute ago as well. Where this is a huge I think this is another huge thing. We’ve talked a lot about education as being one of the cornerstones of what the metaverse could be. But actually, when we jumped in to see what these guys had on offer at the moment, I was blown away, right there is things from first aid training, through to how to deal with the media, and our media interview in like a studio kind of thing so that you feel like you’re in the environment that you would be in. And I thought to myself, This is gonna be a great way to train. And again, especially with things like chat, GPT now being able to ask the questions and and react to your answers. This is huge, right? I thought this was really cool. And again, another great example of how these worlds could be used.
Alexis 13:35
Yeah, well, this is where, as you said, this is where the technology is going to come, you know, to help humanity. I’ve been suffering a couple of frustration this week, because of technology. And I really hope technology is really going to come to to humanity’s aid. But this is definitely this is definitely one of the side of technology that I’m looking forward to, you know, being immersed in an environment that it’s unfamiliar, could be a little bit, you know, stressful and knowing that it’s a virtual world, where, you know, you’re allowed to do mistake where you’re not going to be judged so harshly, you know, where, where it becomes all of a sudden, a little bit more, let’s say inclusive, maybe, you know, that might definitely be the angle that we want to see. Or at least I’d like to see that right. So education is definitely a go for me. And whenever whenever people or whatever institutions are willing to implement, you know, a certain form of VR education to schools Hobby Lobby the app for that Biafra, because I remember then you can bring that education tool back home as well. Of course that does not replace standard and you know, normal education systems I’d say, but is definitely going to come to to help.
Chris Bruno 14:51
But if you imagine as well, like if you’re someone who is scared as public speaking, for example, right or is something that you know, you really don’t feel comfortable about it, but You know that you’re going to have to do something soon. These are great. I think these must be good ways. I don’t know this for a fact, right. But these must be good ways to get involved to start experiencing that to be able to stand up and be able to talk, maybe even get some feedback from some colleagues and friends or family that you trust by looking back at what you actually did and how it went. But again, this is fantastic, what a great way to start immersing yourself in these things. But I brought it up here on my computer as well, because I just wanted to have a quick look. They’ve got everything from clear communication skills, how to conduct a sales, meeting, conference presentations, construction management, construction, road safety, CPR, right how to actually do things on a CPR ended on a virtual model, customer services, dropped objects, electrical hazards, I mean, equality and anti racism training seminars that have all been virtually created, which means now, instead of having huge costs of bringing in a training company, who needs to bring you a specific trainer, who then has to come to your location so that your six men now
Alexis 16:00
during $2,000 VR set
Unknown Speaker 16:05
times 100.
Chris Bruno 16:06
I’ve never once you’ve got the VR sets, right, and this is an again, we’re not talking about really 1000s If you look at the the PICO for that came out last year, I think so that’s it, like 400, and something dollars, which again, sounds expensive. But if you actually start looking at how much a training costs, I know somebody who’s a coach who does basically very high end sales and negotiation training, it’s a four day programme, it can cost 30 grand for a team to go through his programme with them. And he works with huge multinationals, s&p 500 companies, like it’s a lot of money. And that will be for a group of eight to 10 people maximum. So that’s, you know, three grand per person, these sorts of headsets are 500 bucks or not even 1000 bucks. If it gave you access that you means that your sales team could do the sales, a library
Alexis 16:53
of tonnes of of courses. And yeah, of course,
Chris Bruno 16:57
I agree. Absolutely. And everything from this as well, like you go, depending on what job you’re training for. Some people need to go in, for example, fire safety, you need to go into a building and be able to recognise what could be an issue, what couldn’t be an issue. These are great models that you could actually start doing these trainings, virtually learn your job to figure out whether you miss things, what sort of things you should be looking for. I think it’s a great opportunity. And again, I think we both agree, right education is going to be a killer app, or maybe the killer app for education is actually VR once it gets good enough.
Alexis 17:28
Yeah, fair enough. Yes, indeed. Well, let’s see, let’s see what the market is going to be awash with what type of product because again, you know, I also believe that is the quality of the of the product that they’re going to define a little bit what’s gonna, what’s gonna be developed on them. And, and hopefully, there is not going to be some proprietary technology that you only need to, you know, build something this content in that particular format that feeds that only particular VR said, because otherwise that that will definitely kill the chicken in the egg. Right.
Chris Bruno 17:58
So yeah, and I think this probably brings us really well on to the last thing as well. So we’ve seen lots of articles recently, lots of people talking about all sorts of things, whether it be the metaverse is going to be a $5 trillion industry in the next sort of six years, 10 years, whatever it might be. But actually, I realised as they started digging in a lot of the reports that we’ve even been talking about as well, when I start digging in. It’s data that’s based on figures that were researched and surveys that were conducted back in 2022, which is probably at the time when there was the most hype, where are
Alexis 18:28
they today? Where are they? Right? Where are these guys today?
Chris Bruno 18:32
So where are the where are Deloitte, where KPMG? Where are those guys right now?
Alexis 18:37
Where’s the money? Where’s the money?
Chris Bruno 18:38
So the money’s gone is the money. So now they start doing the charity AI reports and things like that. But what is left is a massive gap, whereby people rely on that kind of information to make decisions, apparently, as companies as investors, or whatever it might be. And since that it’s gone, too. We don’t talk about anything, right? Like, there’s nothing new
Alexis 18:58
is there. Some is left I got for us. Great. Good. So we’re gonna have to do the research. There you go.
Chris Bruno 19:05
If you would like a report, if you would like to sponsor a report, PM, but it’s a crazy one, actually. Because when you look at this, you say, all of these people. Are they supposed to be helping industries? Or are they actually part of the cause of the problem? Like if you have these massive hype generating cycles, and then rip the metaverse, according to whatever his name was the PR guy. The reality of it is is is that actually being helped or made worse by companies like KPMG jumping in when there’s a massive boom, or when there’s this kind of big hype cycle, and then afterwards, literally, just don’t talk about it. We just don’t mention anything.
Alexis 19:46
But you know, one of the things that I am either more comfortable with is the nomenclature used to describe the metaverse. I think that’s going to be you know, we’re gonna have to revise this and just even simply calling it the metaverse right I think at Just that that name has got so much baggage now, right? So anyway, but as soon as you, you’re going to bring up the word Metaverse as much as the word NFT. People, you know, people can relate to that. Oh, no. And if God came to Oh, no. Okay. And no, it’s not it’s, it’s awesome.
Chris Bruno 20:17
And you see that a lot, though, don’t you with NF T’s have become Oh, yes. So assets, right? Like we don’t talk, you don’t really see many big brands now talking about NF Ts and Kryptos become web true. Yeah. And even then, that’s also apparently dead, according to the PR article. Even though right now,
Alexis 20:35
when women didn’t mention us, you the dimension.
Chris Bruno 20:40
After this goes out, again, there you look at this. So market cap currently for Bitcoin and Aetherium. And I look at a theory of more, but theorems at about 220 billion as a market cap. And I use Aetherium as an example, because lots of people use it to build things. But bitcoins sat at 500 billion, half a trillion dollars. And this is in a bear market, as we call it, like things are not particularly great. There is no hype cycle currently going on around this. And I think if you can look at those numbers and still say, web three is dead. I mean, I I’m struggling to understand where that comes from. How is so like, yeah, yeah. And how do you back that up? If you want to be someone who’s writing as a journalist, like, we can say, whatever we want this podcast. But if you’re writing real publication, like Yeah, how do you justify that? Show me the numbers or show me the figures or the statistics that make it so that web three is dead? And I think you’re right, the metaverse will change, the names will change, things will change. But yeah, shame. When I
Alexis 21:41
started to dig up a little bit, let’s see if those, you know, big auditing firms and research firms come up with a recent paper about a man ever has because I mean, at the end of the day, they did put quite a fair bit of ink into it. I mean, you don’t call you don’t call an industry, the next cornerstone of human evolution, where it’s going to pump like 30 trillion, gazillion, bazillion. Come on. At some point you’re gonna need to go live. Okay. We’ve made as a slight mistake, but here are the facts. Here are the facts and companies are still out there doing stuff. It’s going to look somehow decent in the next coming months or years. And, and by then we’ll still be here.
Chris Bruno 22:27
Absolutely. We’re not leaving even if it goes good or bad. We’ll keep staying and we’ll keep talking about it. Well, it’s an Alexis, I think that covers everything that we had planned for today. But if you’ve listened to this, and if you’ve enjoyed the show, please don’t hesitate, hit the subscribe button down below or follow us on your favourite podcasting app. We’d love to hear from you as well. So you can find all the links down below to get in touch with us, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever you prefer, it’s not a problem. We’d love to hear from you. And also, we’d love to know what your thoughts are on the podcast if you think we should be doing more content that’s more research based instead of KPMG. We’ll get on top of that as well. But, Alexis until next week, thank you very much me.
Alexis 23:03
Thank you for having me again. Thank you, everybody. Thank you to our listeners and see you next week.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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