Are we living in the Metaverse?!
Are we living in the Metaverse?!
Product Management, UX, Startups, and more — freshly curated by Zeda.io.
Hello, all you product-loving folks! 🥰
Welcome to this week's edition of Product Café, your weekly cup of coffee for everything product management, startups, and more. ☕
Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, Blockchain technology, Web3…….etc etc etc. I’ll be honest, I don’t blame our older generation for not being very tech-savvy with the internet. Because even we can’t keep up. But since I write the weekly newsletter, I guess I don’t have a choice but to keep up 🥲 ( 1 like = 10% motivation to keep me going. So please, help a fellow human out 🙏🏻)
But as I started reading about it, and learning how it could transform the internet in the future, I realised how fascinating it was. So this week, I am going to pen down my learnings about some of these fancy internet terms.
The Metaverse 🌌
No, it’s not the name of the next Avengers movie (But that would be cool huh). Metaverse is an online 3D universe that combines multiple virtual spaces. Here, you can meet other users, work, play games and socialize. But this is still a concept for the future and it’s not completely in existence today. The closest element of Metaverse today are online video games, where there are in-game events and virtual economies.
So how does it work?
You know those virtual reality rides at amusement parks or malls? Exactly like that. Using virtual reality (VR) headsets, users enter into a virtual space and navigate around using their eye movements. These high-tech headsets completely immerse users by giving them the physical sensation of actually being there.
Popular VR games like Rec Room and Horizon Worlds have already made this a reality where players use avatars to interact with each other and manipulate their environment.
The tech is claimed to have so much scope, that companies have already started investing in being part of the Metaverse.
1. Microsoft invested a massive $68.7 billion to acquire game-developing giant Activision Blizzard.
2. Facebook’s parent company took it to the next level by rebranding itself to Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said this was done to show what the company is working on, to reposition themselves around the Metaverse.
“The next platform will be even more immersive — an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it. We call this the metaverse, and it will touch every product we build.” Zuckerberg said in a statement
3. After Google’s AR glasses failed in 2014, they have come back into the game by investing in multiple Metaverse projects. According to Google’s CEO, the company is discussing ideas about converting services like Maps and YouTube into a virtual landscape.
4. Trying on clothes virtually in the comfort of your home? I would be surprised only if Shopify did not want in on this. With virtual shopping becoming closer to being a possibility, Shopify already has eyes on the AR shopping feature.
ka-ching in the Metaverse 💰
So how do you transact here? NFTs are a big thing in the Metaverse. But before that, let’s try to understand what they actually are. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are like unique cards, which means they cannot be replaced by something else. NFTs can represent anything that’s digital such as music, digital art and more. Off lately, there has been a lot of buzz around using NFTs to sell digital art.
For instance, this piece of digital art via NFT was sold for over $11.75 million.
But where is this information stored?
Blockchain technology is a secure and accurate way to store NFTs and can trace who owns these tokens. All this without having another person or company to run it. Transactions in a blockchain network are directly between the users and remove intermediaries like banks or tech companies. This reduces cost and speeds up the time for transactions to take place.
Crypto and the Metaverse
The Metaverse and cryptocurrency rely on each other. In other words, Metaverse is the virtual world and crypto is virtual money to spend in them.
Together, they’re part of another hyped concept called “web3" – the third and latest generation of the internet. With Web1 being the world-wide-web, and web2 being social media. Using crypto, one can make friction-free transactions for virtual goods and services.
Source: https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/information-technology/metaverse-stocks/metaverse-crypto/
Here are some Metaverse projects with their own cryptocurrency:
1. The sandbox
This is a virtual world where users can buy and sell digital content using its own currency called “Sand”. It’s built upon the Ethereum blockchain network. This cryptocurrency can be bought and sold on a number of cryptocurrency exchanges.
Source: https://venturebeat.com/2022/03/03/the-sandbox-metaverse-hits-2m-users-and-launches-alpha-season-2/
2. Decentraland
Another virtual world with its currency “Mana”. Participants can use the native currency Mana to purchase virtual land and develop it for games, to purchase avatars and digital accessories.
Source: https://thred.com/tech/decentraland-is-a-crypto-metaverse-where-virtual-land-is-worth-millions/
3. Crypto Baristas
This is an NFT project that aims to connect both the virtual and physical worlds. Users get access to a Metaverse where they can meet other coffee enthusiasts. This project is being used to fund an actual café in New York City called Coffee Bros., which partners with coffee farmers around the world.
In other news…Shopify starts testing augmented reality 🛍️
Staying true to its word on wanting to invest in AR, Shopify recently did an internal experiment that allowed users to reset their room to see how new furniture would look. You can remove already existing furniture in your room and create a lifelike digital copy of your room. This way, users can swipe through different new room settings to see how they would look in reality before actually buying it.
Source: https://artlabs.ai/blog/shopify-ar-provides-an-excellent-opportunity-for-small-medium-businesses/
Meta launched some exciting updates to its Ray-Ban stories glasses! 👓
After releasing the first generation of smart glasses in September 2021, Meta has recently launched some hands-free updates to it. Users can now can make calls, listen to message readouts and send end-to-end encrypted messages with WhatsApp. Similar functionalities were added to Facebook Messenger last year. Meta also announced that they will soon release updates that will allow users to directly reply to Messenger or WhatsApp messages with voice commands.
Source: https://www.producthunt.com/products/ray-ban-stories#ray-ban-stories
What’s brewing on Zeda’s side? ☕
In light of Product day, we combined a list of products that made so much of a difference in our lives, that it became part of our everyday vocabulary.
Click on the image below to read more.
And from beginner to leadership, we researched about 100 Product Management books to curate the best ones for you to read at every stage of your career.
Click on the image below to view the post.
That’s all folks! Have something you want to share? Put them in the comments below and we’ll get back to you soon.
See you again next week! 🥂
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