Whether you like it or not, the metaverse is coming. Hollywood had better get ready. That’s one of the many takeaways from investor and author Matthew Ball’s new book, The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything , which attempts to provide a road map for the metaverse and explain what it means for the future of the internet. There’s been a lot of talk about the metaverse and how it will affect entertainment, even though there’s still a lot of confusion about what it actually is. For the record, the easiest way to think about it is as a future version of the internet where users can move seamlessly through virtual worlds in 3D. For the layperson, Ball’s book may be just as helpful in the way it explains what the metaverse is not and disentangles some of the futuristic jargon. Is the metaverse the same thing as Web3? No, though the two concepts are often conflated. Are NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and cryptocurrencies going to be involved somehow? Are blockchains, or decentralised digital ledgers, required to build a metaverse? Maybe; it’s complicated. Does everyone need one of those virtual reality headsets to participate? Not necessarily. Entertainment companies are making preparations and coming up with game plans. Walt Disney ’s chief executive, Bob Chapek, has spoken about the metaverse as part of the “canvas” for creatives. Burbank Entertainment, a private consortium of producers, directors and other creatives, has already hired people to work towards this idea of “next-generation storytelling”, where audiences might see, for example, ways for their Disney theme park experiences to connect with what they’re doing on streaming service Disney+. Ball has been writing about the metaverse for years, starting well before Mark Zuckerberg decided to rename social media giant Facebook as Meta and pivot the company to focus on the next generation of the internet. In The Metaverse , he traces the origins of the metaverse concept, which gets its name from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash but actually has roots far wider. Its depictions in pop culture spanned William Gibson’s conception of cyberspace in Neuromancer , the Wachowskis’ Matrix films and the novel and movie Ready Player One . Ball says he started writing about the metaverse based on his experiences playing the video game Fortnite and building on Roblox, a platform for games, in 2018. With these games, which are like prototypes for the metaverse, players got used to the idea of experiencing virtual worlds and buying virtual goods. The metaverse [is] another medium for expression, exploration, creation and storytelling. Matthew Ball To explain how a full-blown metaverse will differ from these gaming systems, Ball says it’s a bit like comparing Yahoo or AOL in the 1990s to the internet today. “Those were primarily consumer experiences designed to catalogue the internet as we knew it, but it was not very representative of the internet of 2022. “And especially not the extent to which it tapped deep into our economy in enterprise and industrial applications.” While we can think of some use cases for the metaverse in extended-reality surgery, the applications of 3D simulation and virtual presence in education, and in how we use it to operate a building or design to the infrastructure, he adds, we often can’t precisely predict how it changes society or consumer experiences. “How TikTok would impact the Billboard charts. That a college hot-or-not would become the world’s largest identity system in Facebook. That Snapchat, born of ephemeral sexting, would become another one of the world’s largest communication platforms. “And so I think that’s the challenge, and for some it’s a disappointing answer. Many want to hear, ‘What exactly is life in 2032 in the metaverse?’ – We can think of some of the enabling differences with 3D simulation, for example, potentially some applications in healthcare, architecture and education. But we’ve also learned that most of it is actually not that predictable.” On what the role of entertainment companies is in the creation or application of the metaverse, the author singles out Disney and says the content giant was not only the first studio to embrace virtual production with virtual-reality headsets in The Lion King at scale, but also to shift to pure virtual production for films or series like The Mandalorian . “But more broadly, when we think about the virtual plane of existence where the impossible is possible, it’s likely that many of us are going to want to use that to enrich our connection to the stories and characters we love most,” says Ball, adding that the most successful seasons of Fortnite are the Star Wars and Marvel seasons. “And as more technologies have [become] available that support more interaction, higher volumes, greater intimacy, we’ve seen the strongest and most beloved franchises become stronger and more beloved. “The metaverse, as another medium for expression, exploration, creation and storytelling, will strengthen companies like Disney, even if it also enables new stories and intellectual property that thrive.” Ball also cites Epic Games – the developers of Fortnite – as a “compelling company” because it aggregates hundreds of millions of users, operating services and the underlying game engines as well as the content experiences – serving as a platform for brands while enabling many other content companies to produce new interactive experiences of their own. “I think one of the most challenging aspects here, however, is every time we shift into a new computing era, it’s essentially impossible to imagine anyone but the current players thriving,” he says. “They have thousands of engineers, tens of billions of dollars of cash and operating platforms. The idea that they would be displaced by a company that is overlooked, small or may not even exist yet is hard to imagine, partly because there’s no specific thing to imagine. And yet time shows that often it’s the new leaders that win.” He says that the leaders in the arcade era – such as Atari and Bandai Namco – did not lead in console, and the leaders in console platforms and publishing weren’t the leaders in PC gaming. “Neither were leaders in mobile, and none of those players built the Robloxes and Minecrafts that are now the most popular games on Earth,” Ball says. “So as we look at this new medium, there will be many that endure and some that partially adapt. But time tells us that often it’s a brand-new entertainment company, at least in gaming.” Hong Kong gets its first metaverse churches with avatars and virtual preachers The metaverse sometimes gets lumped in with NFTs and cryptocurrency – all stuff that’s been both interesting and overhyped. Why, then, should we believe in the future of the metaverse? Ball says that, first and foremost, many of the longest advocates and leading executives in the space don’t believe in blockchains and have often overtly criticised them. Epic Games chief executive Tim Sweeney, for example, has been building towards the metaverse, and has said that the whole field is full of an intractable mix of scams. “He does not seem to believe it’s necessary. And so to claim that not believing in one means that you can’t believe in the other is disagreeing with those who are actively building and investing in it,” Ball says. Also, it’s important to recognise that NFTs might have been primarily speculative, they might have limited utility and they might have been argued to do what they actually can’t do. “That’s separate from whether or not it reflects a growing cultural acceptance of virtual-only goods, virtual-only currency, which existed for decades,” says Ball. “ Fortnite has, for several years, generated more revenue annually than any other game in history, and almost all of that revenue was for cosmetics. That cosmetic revenue exceeded that of many of the largest fashion brands in the world, such as Prada and Gucci. “You don’t have to believe that NFTs or blockchain or cryptocurrencies matter to recognise the more than US$25 billion [HK$200 billion] that has been spent over the past five years on virtual clothes in a single game.”