A Metaverse Landscape - The Consumer Metaverse

The penultimate article in our five part series on the metaverse landscape sees us take a look into the most famous and popular aspect of the metaverse - The Consumer Metaverse.

Consumer Metaverse use cases revolve around digital worlds and immersive spaces for shopping, gaming, socializing and entertainment. They will transform the consumer experience by creating new ways to discover and explore products, fusing physical and virtual product experiences in increasingly powerful ways.

The potential of this sector is so huge that we will not be able to cover it all in the space of a single article, so we will take a quick overview of the metaverse’s impact on retail and consumer experiences, sports, entertainment events and gaming.

With retail and consumer experiences, we do not consider that web3 and the metaverse will simply replace existing web2 features such as e-shops - as some things remain easier to navigate inside a two-dimensional, single user digital experience.

Metaverse technology and experience development approaches rather allow extraordinary new ways for consumers to discover and explore products of all kinds. Let’s look at a few examples already created.

L’Oréal’s Modiface application uses AR technology allowing virtual try-outs of makeup. By scanning their face using a smartphone camera, users see how different makeup products and shades will look on their skin, making online makeup shopping more accurate and personalized.

Also, global automotive manufacturer Hyundai established their Hyundai Mobility Adventure, to promote their advanced mobility solutions.

Metaverse experiences also lend themselves very well to travel, and Everdome is an excellent example of an extraordinary travel experience impossible without a metaverse based approach.

Here digital twins are used, much as Everdome is creating an augmented digital twin of Jezero Crater, the Martian location for Everdome City - our Mars metaverse civilization.

The Saudi Arabian government has looked into the metaverse as a retail tool for tourism and travel, creating their to-scale digital recreation of the Hegra World Heritage site, the Tomb of Lihyan.

For sports, we do not envisage the best use case for metaverse experiences being simply to recreate or watch sporting events inside the metaverse, but more as a means to bring fans closer to their sporting heroes and action.

Indeed, the metaverse will provide a platform for enhanced fan engagement, enabling creation of interactive experiences and generation of new revenue streams through digital merchandise and metaverse event ticket sales.

Everdome has already demonstrated use cases for the metaverse and sport, as our collaboration with OKX in their OKX Collective Metaverse showed the potential to bring sports fans closer to their heroes in a unique digital environment.

We have also seen some very successful explorations of metaverse based entertainment experiences in music, where Travis Scott held metaverse events creating revenue in the millions of USD, while Megan Thee Stallion recently created her own unique metaverse concert.

In film and cinema, the potential for metaverse experiences as marketing is clear. As long as eight years ago, Ridley Scott’s ‘’The Martian’’ made use of a VR experience to promote the film.

But the potential for cinema in the metaverse goes much deeper than marketing, providing an exciting new medium for filmmakers. Imagine a film in the metaverse where the user becomes part of the action, interacting with beloved characters and even influencing the story or outcome.

The metaverse can bring a new hybrid of gaming and cinema to potentially even create a totally new artistic medium.

And this brings us to the final consumer use case, and currently the most successful - gaming. The next generation of digital natives are innate gamers - as of 2022, 45% of Roblox’s 200 million are younger than 12 - it has been said that these gamers will inherit the metaverse.

Gaming technology is already being used as one of the pillars of metaverse creation. Everdome is using Unreal Engine 5 as a major tool in our metaverse world building, which was iterated from game development tech.

One of the most exciting parts of the metaverse for gaming is asset portability, where players transfer equipment or avatar upgrades from one game to another, with continual ownership governed by NFT and blockchain technology.

Our prediction is that gaming will become an intrinsic part of almost every Consumer Metaverse experience, mixing elements of social media, marketing and product discovery into game-like destinations across the metaverse.

Join us for our final article in this series, where we summarize the positioning of Everdome within this landscape, the importance of a creator economy, and discuss some of our future goals & vision as a metaverse experience pioneer.

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