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Now to address the elephant in the room – Facebook changed its name Meta last week. On the official announcement post on the Facebook blog, the company said its vision was to “bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities and grow businesses.” Yeah, okay.
The pandemic, for better or for worse, forced a realisation that most of the day-to-day activities that what we thought required us to be present in person can be done from any corner of the world with an internet connection. While virtual communication has largely been limited to Zoom calls, it will not stay like this. I believe that Facebook even with all its resources will likely not be the company to build the metaverse.
Think about the audience on Facebook apps and consider this – who is more likely to participate in the metaverse – someone your dad’s age or a 5-year-old playing games on his mom’s iPad?
This week, let’s look at three companies that could build the metaverse instead.
Roblox: The obvious choice
Earlier this year, David Baszucki, CEO of Roblox, in a virtual meeting with the company’s investors said “Some people refer to what we’re building as the Metaverse.” Launched in 2006, Roblox is an intersection between gaming, programming and social networking. Roblox offers a set of tools to the users to create their own video games on top of the Roblox platform. Roblox designed these tools for rookie game developers, that is, these tools are easy to use compared to the other option of using professional game engines for development. These tools are also flexible and can be customised to create games or experiences in different genres like first-person shooting, simulators, puzzles among others. The genre we need to focus on here is – role-playing. In it, developers create whole worlds complete with cities, community centres, parks etc. along with other fantasy aspects like flying cars or building-sized worms.
Gather: The start-up choice
Last week, I played an escape room from my browser with my friends in a different country. The game was hosted on a new service called Gather. Gather uses spatial audio technology where the audio of an object (or another user) fades out the further a user moves away from it. This way, a group of people standing in close proximity can see and talk to one another while someone else in the same space standing further away will not.
While my use case for the service has been mostly for social reasons, Gather’s real product is built for teams working remotely. Companies can design a virtual office, complete with workspaces, conference rooms, break rooms etc. The idea is that the employees will log in to their virtual office every day and will be able to interact through Gather for things that would otherwise require Zoom calls. Gather has tools that let you give presentations, whiteboard, take notes and collaborate on web-based documents. On their website, the company also showcases how the same feature sets can be used by schools and student clubs alike.
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