can facilitate that will make these devices so sticky for users. It makes you wonder how things would have been different for There.com if Meta's Oculus Quest 2 VR headset was around back then. But that's beside the point.
Ten years from now, XR and the Metaverse will be part of most of our lives. But how do we get to the point where nearly every household owns an XR headset and is accessing the Metaverse regularly? What Metaverse apps and experiences are onboarding people into the Metaverse today that will become the pillars of the Metaverse in 2032?
To answer these questions, we'll first look at the idea of personal Metaverses or Metaverse homes.
Your Own Personalized Metaverse
Talk of the Metaverse mostly revolves around the vision of a shared universe. But the shared Metaverse is actually made up of smaller units of personal Metaverses. The idea of your very own command center or home base in the Metaverse that you can control is what's most compelling about the Metaverse—much like how the Internet has evolved into a billion different personalized experiences where algorithms curate the content and services that reflect your views, interests, and needs.
RTFKT (pronounced “artifact”) is making strides in putting personal Metaverses into people's hands with the RTFKT Pods. The brand, which was acquired by Nike at the end of 2021, emerged on the NFT scene with its Metaverse sneakers but has since begun creating environments called RTFKT Spacepods. RTFKT excels at creating culturally significant digital objects. In other words, they know how to create hype around collectibles. These Pods are going to be collectors' home base for displaying their 3D NFTs and digital assets. While RTFKT's ultimate vision for Pods is kept secret, we can safely assume that these Pods will also double as social centers—places that Pod owners can invite friends to and host events in. In the near term, I'm doubtful that these pods will expand outside of the confines of a personal digital gallery. However, they're a part of the larger trend that will accelerate Metaverse adoption. That trend is the creation of customizable, personal Metaverse environments.
The next Zaha Hadid or Frank Lloyd Wright of the world won't ever architect a single building in the real world. Their focus will be on designing houses, offices, parks, museums, and other constructions in the Metaverse. And they'll have more than enough work to keep them occupied. Look no further than Krista Kim, the contemporary artist who made headlines for designing the Mars House and selling it as an NFT for 288 Ethereum (ETH) tokens, which were equivalent to $514,558 USD at the time. The Mars House was designed without the constraints of the laws of physics. The result is a meditative environment that is meant to inspire and create a calm virtual atmosphere.
Most of us will never have the pleasure of a corner office overlooking Central Park. But with personal Metaverses, we can all design and occupy our own Mars Houses that help us lead more productive and social lives.
Personal Metaverse platforms are where the magic will happen. Think of them as your home page to the Metaverse or your Metaverse home, if you will. All of the cool VR apps, games, productivity tools, meeting rooms, and upcoming events will be present in your Metaverse home. It's a space you can curate to reflect what you care about. And platforms that provide the means for people to create personal Metaverses will be a major part of making the Metaverse practical by 2032.
The Rise of Bots and Digital Humans
A big part of XR and the Metaverse's promise is a better means of communication and connection. But it won't always be a human on the other end of our communication. Rather, interacting with bots and digital humans will be our primary means of social interaction in the Metaverse. This isn't to paint a bleak picture of a future where we don't engage with other people. On the contrary, these digital humans will act as our own digital workforce. They will be able to carry out tasks on our behalf, provide services to us, and curate our experiences with other people in the Metaverse.
We've been moving toward this bot-assisted life for some time. A lot of people were introduced to bots by way of e-commerce iterations like AIO bot, KodaiAIO, NikeShoeBot, and GaneshBot. Generally called sneakerbots due to their widespread use in the rare sneaker market, these bots allow people to scoop up high-demand products the moment they are released to the public online. Many websites have “bot code” programmed into their website for quality assurance purposes. These internal bots run frequent, automated add-to-cart tests to ensure that their site is operating correctly. Sneakerbots exploit these lines of test code, allowing users to input their own billing and shipping information, as well as which products to target. The result is a hands-off, automated shopping experience for consumers to purchase high-demand products that are known to sell out in minutes, sometimes seconds. Culturally relevant brands—notably Yeezy, Nike/Air Jordan, and Supreme—that have bustling resale markets are routinely the target of these sneakerbots, which can be bought and used by anyone online. It's a widely shared view among companies like Nike and Supreme that sneakerbots have tainted these exclusive product markets, and they are always working to prevent their use. But that's a conversation for another book. Sneakerbots are an early example of having an AI-powered, digital companion that will do tasks on one's behalf.
As society started adopting all-in-one communication platforms like Slack, Teams, Workplace, and Discord, the next wave of bots began taking shape. Workplace bots are now used to track co-worker progress, seamlessly schedule meetings, collect employee spending reimbursement, and more. Bots automate a lot of the simple communication tasks in the workplace.
Discord is one of the main communication platforms for the Web3 era. It's used by nearly every NFT community and crypto-gaming-related community. With that, a new wave of utility bots emerged. MEE6 is a bot that will moderate communication and flag users who are using hateful or offensive language. Quillbot will paraphrase, summarize, and/or translate text. Apollo is a scheduling bot for coordinating events. The Dash Radio bot makes adding ad-free music streams to Discord effortless. GiveawayBot will coordinate an entire giveaway contest. Dank Memer is a bot that suggests the right memes to share at the right time. This list could go on for pages.
Today, there is a bot for augmenting nearly any digital task you can imagine from communication to collaboration to productivity. By 2032, these bots will find a new home in the Metaverse and play a companion role in making the Metaverse professionally and personally effective. Until someone figures out a way to bring keyboards into the Metaverse, spoken language will need to be the interface. This means that bots will play a crucial role in carrying out some of our actions there.
Think of R2-D2 or C-3PO in Star Wars. While they were ultra-complex robots with personalities and critical thinking abilities, at their core they are like the bots we use today in Discord to automate tasks. Likewise, our bots will visually manifest in the Metaverse in the form of digital humans—taking them out of running in the background and bringing them into our field of view through 3D avatars.
In other words, digital humans will give our utility bots a presence in our Metaverse homes. Companies like UneeQ, Synthesia, and Soul Machines have been designing lifelike, AI-powered digital humans for years. They're an upgrade to the typical chatbots we encounter on the phone or on the Web, providing a visual interface to automated customer service calls. Notably, UneeQ designed a digital human for UBS (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS) that would deliver financial forecasts and updates to their clients at any hour of the day. Synthesia's digital humans have manifested into the first AI-led meteorology team, delivering an entirely automated weather forecast. One of Soul Machines' many use cases is the digital human named Yumi, which is a skin care consultant and ambassador for a premium Japanese beauty and cosmetic brand.
The tech that is being used to create these lifelike, AI-powered digital humans will be overlaid on the aforementioned utility bots to give them an actual presence in our Metaverse homes. They'll inhabit our spaces, only if we invite them, of course, sitting idly in the background until we need
