After the extraordinary hype experienced between 2021 and 2022, the metaverse is going through a moment of deep depression, to the point that the main tech players are even distancing themselves from it, both in terms of investments and communication approaches. But can we really talk about a metaverse crisis?
It really seems like a lifetime ago from October 27, 2021, the day Mark Zuckerberg announced the rebrand of Facebook in Meta, announcing how the company’s future would look in the metaverse one’s privileged path towards the post-web era. It seemed like a sort of handover, which outlined the scenario that should happen to the social networks that currently dominate the web 2.0 scene.
That day, the metaverse suddenly became the subject of incredible speculationcapable of making promises, especially in the short term, that no one was evidently able to keep, above all by virtue of the low maturity of its enabling technologies and of those applications which, however immature, were called upon to solve problems which in fact still they didn’t exist.
After suffering billionaire losses on the markets in the most recent fiscal periods, Zuckerberg himself was “forced” to distance himself from the metaverse, stating how the holding company he created, while not completely abandoning the development of social media set in immersive virtual worlds , now it will focus its attention on another emerging technology, artificial intelligencefocusing efforts on the Meta AI division.
In the wake of the Meta, more recently, Microsoft and Disney also announced major cuts in previously planned investments to develop the technologies and applications of the metaverse. According to some rumors published by the Wall Street Journal, the holding Disney intends to go out of business of the division specifically created for research and development of the metaverse.
Microsoft, in addition to slowing down the race to develop immersive technologies, will definitively close AltSpace VR, a virtual reality social platform acquired in 2017, integrating the most relevant assets into other applications, more focused on artificial intelligence, regardless of their actual substance .
These aspects, certainly not encouraging, are added to the news of the cutting of hundreds of thousands of jobs, announced at the turn of the year by almost all the main players in the tech scene, to meet the need to drastically contain costs after the contraction in demand that followed the boom of the period marked by the Covid-19 pandemic.
In this sense, the escape from the metaverse we are witnessing confirms a negative situation that globally involves various aspects of the tech market, forcing big techs to rationalize their investments. The most recurring choices see first of all those activities that are not able to guarantee an immediate return to be sacrificedconstituting, in terms of research and development, a significant burden in the nature of the budgets.
But what is actually happening to the metaverse? Are we facing a bubble on the verge of definitively bursting or what is defined as a technology winter?
Takeaway
Those who punctually follow the tech market certainly cannot be surprised by the escape from the metaverse that currently involves the most important names in the tech field. In some respects, Apple also includes one of these, which continues to postpone the commercial debut of its first augmented reality viewer.
To explain in a simple way the concepts that characterize the road to success and the mainstream affirmation of emerging technologies, Gartner publishes a dedicated study every year: the hype cycle of emerging technologies.
The cycle is described by means of a curve which relates the expectations of an emerging technology as a function of time. After the initial phase, which foresees a real escalation, a sharp contraction follows created by a general feeling of disillusionment, usually accompanied by a drop in investor confidence.
Currently, the metaverse, introduced by Gartner in the hype cycle of 2022, is starting to face this period of sudden descent, distancing itself from the purely speculative component that accompanied that media fortune that turned out to be completely ephemeral.
In the meantime, however, the development of what, as we will see, is the true metaverse to which we need to refer today, is proceeding, made up of concrete applications in sectors that have been investing in it non-stop for years, with the slow rhythms that characterize the solid implementation in the processes industrial.
With hindsight, Gartner’s choice to include the metaverse in the category of emerging technologies appears even more logical only in 2022, when the signs of a crisis were already perceived which then turned into the profound disillusionment we are witnessing in the first half of 2023.
On July 27, 2022, Mark Zuckerberg had in fact officially communicated to the investors of his holding company his intention to slow down the race for the metaverse, halving the hiring cycle. A choice soon shared by Apple and Google. This news was followed by a collapse in confidence that led to the massive layoff campaigns announced between December and January.
In the illustrative report of the hype cycle of emerging technologies 2022, Melissa Davis, VP Analyst at Gartner, had in fact hit the mark, noting how all the enabling technologies of the metaverse:
«They are in their initial state, some in the embryonic stage, and there is great uncertainty about their possible evolution. Embryonic technologies present the greatest risks in terms of development but potentially also the greatest benefits for early adopters».
The metaverse envisaged by Gartner represents, in business terms, a starting point with respect to its long-standing, albeit immature, technological tradition. In other words, Gartner has chosen one of the many possible definitions of metaverse, the one that sees it in fact as a synonym of the already well-known AR cloud, to direct it to the attention of investors with a technological connotation capable of going beyond the ephemeral buzzword with which has been proposed in the mainstream context.
The current crisis therefore describes a path of heavy recession, which has not however arrested the development of the metaverse, while prudently resizing its ambitions, as well as removing the purely speculative component. The current market demand is not commensurate with the outlay that the big techs had planned. The inability to attract new investors and the significant drop in confidence of those who had chosen to focus on the big tech metaverse forced the latter to abruptly reverse course, first of all turning off the spotlight on the scene.
In the media imaginary, the metaverse has gone from being the umbrella term of a series of disruptive technologies to a buzzword from which many stakeholders are somehow distancing themselves, returning to refer to single application typologies, as happened before the appearance of Half.
However, 3D virtual worlds and immersive technologies have certainly not ceased to existindeed, their development proceeds incessantly, finding feedback and applications in many business sectors.
The most tangible demonstration comes from the manufacturing context, which has seen the implementation of the digital twin to monitor and simulate aspects related to the factory plan. The automotive industry is proceeding relentlessly in the development of new smart factories, with an increasingly digital-first nature. The demonstration recently came from BMWwho chose to implement a integral digital twin for the new plant in Debrecen (Hungary), intended for the production of electric vehicles, which is expected to open by 2025.
The model chosen by the German brand is a true example of what can be expected from the metaverse, a 3D virtual dimension interconnected with the real counterpart, capable of enabling real-time simulations on aspects related to factory layout, logistics, robotic and automated systems, already many years before a plant enters actually in production.
This perspective is enabled by the ability to acquire and process factory data with increasingly high-performance analytical models, which make it possible to make the information they need available to all business lines, in real time. The unified database of a digital twin allows all stakeholders to operate with their respective tools in a single shared virtual space, which coincides with the spatial manifestation of the metaverse. This vision offers the possibility to collaborate beyond the traditional boundaries of time and space.
The industrial metaverse, as BMW’s digital twin demonstrates, therefore constitutes a concrete example of the investments that will lead this technological dimension to increasingly establish itself in the future, hand in hand with the maturation and mainstream adoption of the enabling technologies of the Industry 4.0 paradigm (artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, internet of things, robotics, cybersecurity, etc.).
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