TikTok parent ByteDance is well-positioned to lead the Asian expansion, Acumen said, while American companies Meta Platforms and Microsoft are leading the push in the West. In Asia, the growth will likely be driven by an increasingly tech-savvy online gaming community, while the $42.3 billion US metaverse market is expected to retain its dominant market position.
Companies Must Decide How to Use Technology
Acumen predicts that metaverse companies face several challenges in reaching this goal. These include privacy concerns and how to unify platforms into a virtual continuum.
Blockchain, the open-ledger technology behind Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, will likely provide the economic backbone of this virtual world. It will allow users to exchange cryptocurrencies and other tokenized assets without an intermediary.
Developing software, services, and hardware and understanding how to use new technology must be high on companies’ agendas, Acumen notes. Presently, different companies have focused on different elements depending on their core strength.
The move makes sense, considering Apple’s hardware design strength and its products’ ability to interact seamlessly.
Meta’s Quest 3 headset, on the other hand, targets improving the reproduction of a person’s appearance in the metaverse. The technology encodes facial expressions and sends the encoded data to another person’s Quest over the wire.
The recipient can see a lifelike rendering of the sender, making it seem like they are in the same room. This niche of the metaverse plays to Meta’s core business, which is generating revenue through social connections.
Meta headset | Source: Lex Fridman
Tokenization and Metaverse Digital Twins
William Quigley, a co-founder of Worldwide Asset eXchange, predicts that the digital twin market, the industry that develops workable digital equivalents of physical items, still faces technical hurdles.
An example of a digital twin could be a virtual musical instrument that sounds the same in the metaverse as its physical counterpart in the real world. A firm like Roblox, with its roots in physics simulation, could play a pivotal role in advancing this technology, having already created virtual worlds and marketplaces for brands like Gucci and Chipotle.
According to Acumen, the digital twin market reached $9.5 billion in 2022. The firm expects this niche to expand to $274 billion by 2032, provided the technology progresses as expected.
Quigley predicts digital twin technologies will only mature around 2030. Until then, he expects businesses to emerge that can bring physical assets onto the blockchain through tokenization.