Metaverse 2035 [English Version]
The Metaverse is a term used to describe the convergence of key digital technologies in order to expand on reality. It creates a new layer of shared, immersive, and interactive digital spaces poised to have a significant impact on every aspect of society by 2035, including social interaction, collaboration, access to information, human experiences, education, commerce and physical reality.
What is the Metaverse?
This study divides the Metaverse into its two major components – frontend and backend. This framework helps not only to extrapolate the key drivers and their rapid evolution, but offers a new perspective on unique opportunities, disruptive challenges and strategic implications for business in the coming years.
Through its frontend the Metaverse has the potential to revolutionize the way we leverage technology to experience reality. It explores digital spaces beyond time and space and introduces truly immersive and human centered interfaces. It creates radically new opportunities through digital humans entering into our world and expands the current limitations of our world by automating the creation of content - manifesting in lasting and impactful systemic effects also on the physical reality.
At the same time, the Metaverse is reinventing the digital through the backend. By allowing for digital resilience in the form of a tokenized economy, it facilitates true digital ownership and true digital scarcity. It is the key to reimagining digital identity with privacy, authenticity and scalability at its core, creating both new opportunities as well as limitations for digital marketplaces. This drives societal but especially institutional adoption through the digitalization of trust.
In the next decade, the Metaverse will have a profound direct impact on society and all its industries. However, to truly leverage the rapid advancement to one’s benefit – in face of significant long-term unknowns – businesses need to also realize the indirect and secondary impacts of the Metaverse, which is something this study aims to uncover.
2b AHEAD Future Study | April 2023