By Denis Sheehan, Publisher, H&C News: Screaming out for Metaverse hospitality.
The full scale of the opportunity presented by new things, and that certainly includes technology, is largely realised retrospectively, looking back and thinking ‘if only’. That is as true of London Docklands real estate in the 1970’s as it is of websites in the 1990’s.
Technology developments do seem however to follow a pattern, and continue to. On emergence they are hyped and dismissed with equal vigour, evangelists evangelise and doubters doubt.
So, what can we all make of the latest technology phenomenon, the Metaverse?
Here goes… what are the fundamentals?
Tim Berners-Lee alongside colleagues at CERN developed the first incarnation of the World Wide Web in 1990. As that decade progressed, so did the ‘Web’ and the extent of the Internet that already underpinned it.
You may now be re-reading the last paragraph and wondering aren’t they two terms for the same thing, no they are most definitely not and the difference is fundamental to understanding the opportunity of the Metaverse.
A simple explanation of what the Internet is, how it enables business to be done on the World Wide Web, how the two are different, but work inextricably together is… The Internet is a global network of interconnected computers – the World Wide Web is an application that runs on the Internet.
The Internet is the infrastructure, the motorways, the roads that enable data to travel on the World Wide Web. Think of the internet as the roads that connect towns and cities together. The world wide web contains the things you see on the roads like houses and shops.
The Metaverse is another (World Wide Web) house on the Internet, a new type of 3D house where via travelling on the Internet you can visit and engage with other people.
There are countless ways of complicating that last statement, but at this stage doing so only places barriers to grasping the opportunity.
A new place in the world where people can meet and engage with others would seem to scream out for… hospitality.