CHAPTER 10
Metaverse Real-World Use Cases—Separating Substance from Hype

The very best use case for the Metaverse is the Metaverse itself: a real-time immersive virtual world for entertainment, socialization, and creativity on a mass scale. Despite this, I am often asked by reporters and analysts to discuss “real-world” use cases for metaverse platforms. It is somewhat strange to look at a technology with at least half a billion engaged users and creators on platforms run by highly profitable companies, and effectively say, “But this isn't useful until it does something I'm interested in.”

Any successful real-world use case for the Metaverse will be an extension of what it already excels at: immersion, fun, and creativity in a shared social space. The best and primary audience for those use cases will be the people deeply comfortable with immersive spaces, in either metaverse platforms themselves or 3D games/virtual worlds. Several of these applications have already proven themselves well enough to believe they'll be sustainable for the next few decades—not perfectly and not universally, but well enough to grow and sustain real companies and organizations built around them.

Understanding Real Metaverse Use Cases: A Checklist

Before going further, it's important to first address some frequent misunderstandings that often confuse this conversation. To hopefully make this a helpful guide, let's arrange them in the form of an advice checklist.

Avoid the Allure of Unscalable Anecdotes I've been bruised too many times by the seductive promise of real-world applications of metaverse platforms that, while powerful as anecdotal examples, subsequently failed to scale.

In Second Life's first decade, for instance, I'd write about acclaimed, award-winning architects using the virtual world as a prototyping and demonstration tool in their practices, and would come away convinced that the profession as a whole would soon follow suit. (I said as much in a talk to a professional society of architects, and they sure seem convinced too.) Then a year or two later, I'd wonder why that handful of architects in metaverse platforms hadn't grown into thousands.

I gradually realized what was at work: By and large the people creating real-world uses for metaverse platforms are already personal enthusiasts of the technology. They were not there, in other words, because an immersive virtual world was necessarily the best solution to the practical problem they wanted to solve. They personally enjoyed the experience and brought along their professional interests into this new realm.

Eschew Use Cases Only Compelling in Isolation of Everything Else There's a recurring temptation to promote a powerful metaverse application with little regard to how it might (or might not) integrate with the rest of the economic infrastructure.

A common belief is that metaverse platforms will combat climate change. With the argument going roughly like this: The sense of social immersion in virtual worlds is so transformative that we'll find less need for air travel, since we can conduct business meetings and conferences in the Metaverse.

While I do suspect we'll see some adoption of metaverse-based meetings as a standard use case (more on that later in this chapter), I believe it's a mistake to argue that this will have any substantial impact on climate change.

The COVID-19 era gave us the most compelling counterexample to date: Under quarantine lockdown, we did indeed suspend most air travel and instead conducted business meetings via Zoom, Slack, and the occasional virtual world.

When the quarantine ended, however, air travel came roaring right back—if not for business, definitely for tourism and reconnecting with family and friends. Indeed, as I wrote much of this book during the summer of 2022, many of my interviews with various metaverse developers and experts were rearranged to accommodate their vacations in far-flung places.

Also: With the notable exception of Second Life and VRChat, many metaverse companies still place a heavy emphasis on work conducted … in their real-life offices. As I mention in Chapter 3, for example, developer Jim Purbrick left Meta in part because the company kept demanding that he make arduous work trips from London to San Francisco to work on their metaverse platform there.

If the Metaverse is such a great solution to air travel and on-site work, why do metaverse companies rarely put that into practice for themselves?

It's likely we will see some adoption of metaverse platforms for business meetings, but as far as addressing the climate crisis, it's much more plausible that we will see other applications do that, such as by prototyping and marketing electric vehicles and undertaking green urban architecture projects.

Beware Self-Refuting Evangelism The limitations of real-world applications for the Metaverse went into the very writing of this very book. Whenever possible, I conducted interviews for it within VRChat and other metaverse platforms, or at the very least, had them in Discord, which has effectively become the communication bridge for all metaverse platforms.

By and large, however, most of my interviews with metaverse developers about the Metaverse were conducted, instead, in Zoom or Google Meetings. Or even, radically enough, on an actual phone. It's strikingly similar to how the most avid and widely shared conversations about the Metaverse are conducted among people on Twitter and LinkedIn—or via webinars.

If we're all so enthusiastic about the Metaverse, shouldn't we be talking about it on, well, a metaverse platform?

When I bring this contradiction up with various metaverse evangelists, I'm told that existing technology is not yet ready to handle a conference-like meeting experience. This is demonstrably untrue. In 2021, for instance, I hosted a conference in Breakroom, a metaverse platform architected for enterprise use, with The Metaverse author Matthew Ball and the Washington Post's Gene Park; about 100 attended live as avatars, and many more thousands watched the recorded event on YouTube.

In my experience, many or most evangelists interested in the Metaverse as a business opportunity are not personally interested in or familiar with the experience themselves. They may protest this by saying it takes extra time to learn a new virtual world's UX or customize an avatar, but these very activities are supposed to be part of the technology's appeal.

So this suggests a good rule of thumb for judging the plausibility of any metaverse evangelist’s over-bold prediction. To frame it in the form of a question: If you really think this is the next generation of the Internet, why aren't you using it as much as you can?

Distinguish Between Metaverse-Adjacent and Metaverse-as-Such Applications When asked to describe a major metaverse use case, many technologists will describe an immersive 3D application that is actually metaverse-adjacent but not a Metaverse-as-such use case. The more valuable the use case, the more likely it will involve a platform with some metaverse qualities, but is not a metaverse application in the full sense of the definition.

Let me explain one way to distinguish a metaverse-adjacent application:

I have helped pitch metaverse technology to several major organizations and companies. The first serious question they inevitably ask is: “Can we put this behind our firewall?”

And if you are creating an application for an organization with incredibly strict standards around privacy and security, that question will keep coming up.

But a metaverse platform that's completely behind a firewall is not really the Metaverse at all.

The firewall requirement exists with most all enterprise-facing applications of virtual worlds: simulations of city infrastructure and architecture design, national defense/military training and prototyping, and so on. Applications like these already exist, but by and large they are behind a firewall, architected for security over usability. And being firewalled, they are regularly used only by a small group of people. The considerations and tooling also tend to be so different from consumer-facing, broadly used metaverse platforms, they deserve to be put into a related but decidedly different category.

At the same time, Metaverse-adjacent applications are unlikely to be widely adopted unless consumer-facing virtual worlds/metaverse platforms continue gaining users. An enterprise-facing pitch that runs, “It's a bit like Fortnite but for prototyping city streets,” will become less compelling if Fortnite is no longer popular.

Or to put it another way: The best way to grow real-world use cases for the Metaverse is to first grow the general user base for it.

Acknowledge and Address the Limitation of For-Profit Use Cases In technology we often only see solutions framed by the commercial needs of a company's product, and so we miss all the possibilities that would exist were that same technology not tied to an immediate profit motive. This is very much the case for the Metaverse.

I have seen proposals, for instance, where bedridden hospital patients, often confined and usually alone, would be able to share a virtual world space with their loved ones and other patients. In this unique situation, most of the practical impediments that help make VR a niche technology would be overridden by the patient's desire for social connection and an escape from the hospital ward. With over 35 million hospital stays per year in the United States averaging nearly five days per stay (according to pre-COVID government data), a shared virtual world for patients and care workers in the American healthcare system would be incredibly valuable.

Unfortunately, medical experts have also laid out to me how difficult all this would be to implement with existing VR and metaverse platforms, both of which have processes around personal data collection that run wildly, wildly awry of HIPAA/patient privacy laws. Further, the virtual world itself would need to be extremely easy to navigate and use (for both patients and already-busy hospital personnel), likely on simplified, easily sanitizable devices, all of which would need to be created in close participation with stakeholders across the entire healthcare industry, including government and patients themselves.

I am hopeful such a metaverse application can be made, sooner rather than later. There's at least one proposal I'm familiar with, where a virtual world would be customized to benefit kids in hospitals across the country undergoing chemotherapy and other difficult hospital procedures. It would be a relaxing and creative social space to comfort these children through a time of unimaginable loneliness, fear, and pain. This is a metaverse application worth fighting for.

I am also frustrated that this kind of use case is rarely if ever discussed by people in the metaverse industry, who are too dazzled by the excitement of brand deals and corporate synergy to confront the Herculean challenges of bringing a product like this to market. I dearly hope my skepticism here is proven wrong.

With that checklist established, there are several real-world use cases of metaverse platforms that are showing genuine promise now. Here's an overview of three, with an assessment of their usefulness over the long term.

Use Case: Live Music/Entertainment—Pros and Cons

In early 2020, at the pandemic's peak, when most everyone was trapped at home in lockdown, the future of live music seemingly appeared in the form of a 100-foot avatar resembling rapper Travis Scott, striding the world of Fortnite like a colossus.

Performing to 28 million users over a single weekend, Scott's Fortnite performance would have been impossible to replicate in real life, full of dazzling, reality-altering visual effects painted across the canvas of Fortnite, while fans scrambled like ants beneath Scott's heavy stride.

Immersive and dreamlike, the show felt like an experience that seemed superior to a real-life concert in many ways. (And that's even before factoring in the porta-potties.) At the time, I estimated Scott's Fortnite show generated over $10 million worth of branded virtual merchandise (avatar enhancements and so on), all without the costs and logistical nightmares associated with managing a real-life concert. Surely, many people (including me) thought that this was going to be a central aspect in the future of music performances, even after the COVID lockdowns ended.

This may still be the case, but in subsequent years the number of metaverse platform music performances to meet the standards set by Travis Scott's show has been roughly zero. There have since been many virtual concerts featuring pop stars, to be sure, but the shows themselves have been far less extravagant. By and large, most of these “concerts” consist of a 2D video stream broadcast on a screen in a branded space, with little or no direct avatar-to-avatar audience engagement with the actual performer.

There are several reasons why live music events have not managed to scale into the Metaverse yet. To name just a few barriers:

At the moment, no major metaverse platform can host a mass live event attended by thousands; local concurrency limits tend to cap out at around 500 users, but often much less.

And while metaverse platforms already attract tens of millions of people, only a few hundred or a few dozen can share the same contiguous space at exactly the same time. Consequently, the Travis Scott performance—along with most others on current metaverse platforms—are not actually “live,” but prerecorded and preinstalled on an update of the software and played back on thousands of virtual world servers, or shards.

The Perils of Live Events in the Metaverse

Hosting a truly live performance in a metaverse platform is not only technically difficult to scale, the financials are also questionable. Blocked by concurrency caps from hosting an audience of more than a few hundred in a virtual venue, artists face the costly option of developing a prerecorded version of the show that can play to millions—or performing to an audience of under 500 in a virtual space the size of a small theater.

Barring a corporate sponsor for the event, the economic questions quickly get vexing: The artist can charge a high ticket price to a small number of audience members, the most passionate fans who'll pay up in the hopes that they'll get a chance to interact virtually (and in close proximity) with their beloved star. (And in a metaverse platform context, even the $10 equivalent of the platform's virtual currency is typically considered to be premium.)

And in exchange for paying a high premium, the attending fans will likely expect far more than just seeing a 3D avatar re-creation of their star—they'll expect close-up interaction, best achieved by rigging up the star to a full VR rig, so that their hand and body gestures are mapped onto their avatar and play in real time. There are very few recording artists of any renown willing to strap themselves into such an apparatus simply to perform “live” to a small audience of anonymous avatars. So far, at least, no startup or management company has to my knowledge attempted to do all this.

I've not even delved into the licensing and IP challenges of live music on a metaverse platform. Is it truly a live event, requiring a public performance license, or a glorified Internet stream, requiring another kind of permission system? Little of this contractual infrastructure has been built out. Unsurprisingly, I know of several projects in recent years backed by major labels to build their own metaverse platforms, so they can fully control and monetize their IPs; also unsurprisingly, none have really gone anywhere.

Admittedly I'm somewhat jaded on the live music question. Having helped produce many live events and music performances on various metaverse platforms, I can say this with hair-pulling, scream-at-the-monitor surety: The logistics and preparation it takes to stage one is almost as time-consuming and complex as staging it in the real world—and becomes vastly more so when the featured artist and their team has limited experience with immersive virtual world events.

I think back warmly—so, so, so warmly—to my time attempting to produce a live performance on a metaverse platform that would star a platinum-selling singer. While the star himself was completely game to do it, he also refused to let it interrupt his real-life concert tour. Then his record label nixed the idea of him singing live in the virtual world—since doing so would allow audience members to record (and perhaps sell?) a bootleg recording of the concert.

After much back and forth with his management, the proposed concert would have been a sad affair: Instead of performing live, we would be allowed to stream just two to three recordings of songs from his library, while his avatar performed onstage with prerecorded gestures. And far as appearing “live” in the virtual world, it would have required me lugging my laptop to his touring bus when it was in a nearby city, so I could puppeteer his avatar while he spoke and chatted with fans. (To my relief and probably the pop star's, the whole project faded off our collective radar.)

Best Practices for Metaverse Platform Music Events

All these considerations to one side, many indie artists have carved out some success in the Metaverse. In Second Life alone, hundreds of performers put on regular shows that tend to be in smaller, coffee house–type venues for an audience of dozens, earning tips and building their fan base (including bluesman Mr. Charles Bristol, whom you meet in the Introduction). I'm heartened to see a number of live performers emerge in VRChat, amplifying their in-world shows with live streams to their YouTube/Twitch channels.

Rafael Brown, CEO and founder at Symbol Zero, produced 2020's Lil Nas X event in Roblox. With a reported 33 million in the Roblox audience, the event ranks just behind Travis Scott's Fortnite performance in terms of largest attendance. Brown worked directly with the artist, planned out the concert and choreography, and worked with Nas to motion-capture the performance that his avatar would perform.

Very little (nothing, really) of most major concert events on metaverse platforms is “live” in any way comparable to a concert in the real world, Rafael affirms to me:

“This is basically photogrammetry and mocap and music stems that are then brought to a real-time in-game cinematic and run for the players paired with scaling so it runs simultaneously on every server,” as Brown puts it. The performance is essentially a 3D music video, played on several thousand servers to small groups of online avatars.

With major label music experiences on metaverse platforms, Brown argues, the crucial factor is not that the artist performs live in-world—it's the audience's own live experience together that matters. And when it is convenient for them. (“Do you want to tell little kids’ parents who want to watch Nas X that they have to do it at 2 a.m.?”)

“Indie artists should be live, but if you're going to put Beyoncé into a thing, you don't want to be, ‘Hey Beyoncé, we're going to expect you back at 6 a.m. for the next show.’”

In any event, Brown believes a music event that makes use of real-time motion capture probably won't be feasible anytime soon without a considerable loss of quality.

“The fidelity is shit,” as he puts it. “You get jitter.” When South Korean mega group BTS performed in Roblox, Brown tells me, they built that motion capture jitter into the performance, adding visual effects to make it seem part of the performance.

In smaller venues such as Second Life and VRChat, successful indie artists build a following by creating a connection with their loyal fans—not just by performing for them but by palavering with them in between songs, calling out to their avatar names and replying to questions and requests sent via in-world text chat.

While this kind of direct engagement isn't feasible for a label artist performing on a platform like Fortnite or Roblox—“There's a limit to who she can view and understand when there's millions watching her”—Brown recommends alternatives that maintain controlled live engagement—for instance, a phase during the event when the artist speaks to the fans on livestream, answering a number of questions sent to it beforehand.

But fundamentally, says Brown, these experiences are basically stuck for the time being at the stage of prerecorded music videos that play out in 3D. “That's kind of where live music in the Metaverse has to be now.” Five to ten years from now, he believes, the technology for genuine real-time live music on a mass scale may be possible. Until then, he adds, “We need to buy them that time.”

But those technical caveats aside, when it's done well with artists like Nas X who have maximum appeal to the Metaverse's Gen Z core demographic, the major music experience is a scalable use case now.

Little Nas X's merchandise sales—branded avatar enhancements, emotes, and other items—paid for themselves within a week after his Roblox shows and continued selling long after. From March 2020 to March 2021, Brown tells me Nas X's Roblox merch generated $15 million in revenue with no further work.

Direct virtual world ticket sales, by contrast, remain unproven and difficult to scale. Were users to pay an entrance fee costing the virtual cash equivalent of $10 or more, they would probably expect special exclusive content, likely including truly live shows or VOIP interaction. This might very well be feasible for artists who genuinely enjoy metaverse experiences and are willing to make appearances multiple times (perhaps from the comfort of their home studios), but as of this writing, that possibility largely remains untested waters.

“Your biggest payback is the merch,” Rafael tells me. The event itself is free-to-play; a percent of attendees buy the merch, and the event producers cite the high attendance numbers to immediately justify its ROI: “The number that attend the concert becomes the viability of the concert, and selling merch over time pays for it.”

All that to one side, I should also add that contemporary metaverse platforms have largely failed to meet the potential suggested by early music experiences in Second Life.

In one, branded as “Musimmersion,” the world would change around folk singer Grace McDunnough as she performed, morphing to fit themes or lyrics mentioned in the song—a rainy bayou at one point, a giant birdcage in another, beneath the wings of a dragon, and so on, imagination seeming to endlessly unfurl. In another, called Parsec, created by experimental musician Robert Thomas, spheres of light and tonal melodies would be triggered whenever members of the audience spoke through voice chat.

Both of these previous examples happened well over a decade ago. With some exceptions, next-gen metaverse platforms have yet to realize the medium's full potential.

This may quickly change. In December 2022, Jenova Chen's game studio, Thatgamecompany, unveiled a full-length concert in Sky: Children of Light, featuring popstar AURORA. Over 1.5 million players attended. More important, by optimizing player avatars (minimizing detail and not displaying avatars at a distance), Thatgamecompany was able to host 4,000 of them in the same concert venue/server shard. This is impressive in itself, but Chen and team also created (with AURORA's input), an entire interactive experience only possible in the virtual world. As Chen recapped to VentureBeat's Dean Takhashi:

• [In the show's climax] everybody dies and is brought back to life. They're like butterflies. This is 3,000 butterflies, and the sun rises, which brings back Aurora, who represents Mother Nature. A lot of people were crying. You can see the emotes from the players. Then we have this giant version of AURORA. Instead of just jumping around, she reaches out and touches you and holds you, like your mother. A lot of the players, when they played this part of the concert, they were crying. It reminds them of their mothers, the love they have.

FIGURE 10.1 Popstar AURORA performing in Sky: Children of Light for 4,000 simultaneous avatars in the local audience; total audience, 1.6 million

Courtesy of Thatgamecompany

This technology, Chen tells me, will be available in his upcoming metaverse platform.

Use Case: Real-World Meetings/Conferences—Pros and Cons

As I show in Chapter 2, Second Life's fate was partly sealed in 2010 by a futile and costly attempt to make it feasible to host real-world professional meetings in the virtual world.

Since then, however, a generation raised on immersive games has moved into the workforce, and the technical capacity has nudged this use case into the realm of feasibility. Interest was accelerated by the worst possible circumstances, as the COVID lockdown pushed people into remote meetings and they yearned for anything even somewhat less aggravating than Zoom.

Though it's unlikely that metaverse platforms will minimize long-distance geographic travel overall (for reasons I went into previously), they do have an opportunity to supplant work-related conferencing, especially when the specific destination offers little beyond the conference itself, or when the attendees are constrained by a limited travel/accommodation budget.

Learning from Breakroom

Founded in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, Breakroom is an enterprise-facing metaverse platform from UK-based Sine Wave Entertainment. I did some consulting for Breakroom, so I can share some firsthand best practices based on that.

I hosted two Breakroom-based business conferences, one with the Washington Post's Gene Park and Matthew Ball. (It's not all the time that you get to talk with the author of The Metaverse inside a metaverse platform.) As we chatted in a beachside auditorium, Breakroom staff instantiated a delightful hodgepodge of 3D objects around us on the stage (a Japanese garden, a giant blue frog, and so on). Prior to that, I hosted a chat with Philip Rosedale and an audience gathered around a roaring bonfire in the mountains under a breathtaking star-filled sky.

Of the two, I think Philip's event was more immersively successful. The primal draw of the bonfire naturally drew the audience closer, to the point where the flame glowed on our avatars’ faces, encouraging a more intimate, truth-telling kind of conference. I felt myself sinking into a warm intimacy, to the point where it really did feel like I was speaking to people around a roaring flame, as opposed to people logged in from San Francisco, London, Australia, India, and all points in between.

FIGURE 10.2 Cohosting a conference with Philip Rosedale (avatar in the black T-shirt) in Breakroom

But these meetings were about Metaverse-related topics, for participants who are Metaverse enthusiasts. Would they work just as well for standard business engagements?

The best data point to prove a virtual conference's effectiveness, Sine Wave CTO Adam Frisby tells me, is how much attendees spend in it. For Breakroom, he says, the average time hundreds of attendees spend in a Breakroom conference “has been in the five to six hour range per day.” (Webinar engagement rates tend to fall below 30 minutes.)

And while you might expect a virtual conference of game developers or other 3D-friendly industries to engage the longest, a major international banking institution had the longest session times of any Breakroom client.

Adam tells me of a Fortune 50 company planning to deploy job fairs on Breakroom, where recent college students can meet companies in a virtual world space. Up to now, a fair like this is hosted in a convention center or on a college campus—costly to set up and attend. “This lets them do it remotely,” says Adam, “but they're also able to interact socially.” Each virtual world job fair is planned to hold a maximum of 500–1,000 people at once, enabling attendees to socialize and network with each other.

These are encouraging figures, though as the pandemic's memory fades, I'm still not convinced regular metaverse-based conferencing is sustainable. For occasional meetings between people who work remotely? Quite possibly. But my strong sense is that virtual conferencing on a frequent basis will not be feasible or desirable until launching them is as at least as simple and seamless as initializing a Zoom call from within Slack.

I'm also convinced that virtual world conferences as they're currently deployed need to be better designed to scale.

Nick Yee's advice, “break reality in productive ways” to overcome prejudice in virtual worlds (see Chapter 9), also translates to this context, offering ways to make metaverse-based meetings better than what we have in the real world.

“We know that there are some people who, by virtue of their personality or their appearance or gender category, age, or whatever, tend to dominate the discussion,” as Nick puts it. So what if people's avatars virtually get bigger in a meeting room, the more disproportionately they speak? Then you can literally see someone who is disproportionately dominant in conversation.”

A similar approach could encourage attendees to identify and encourage those who don't tend to participate in meetings: “[P]eople who haven't spoken for a while, their avatars literally start fading away … the visual cues help balance a conversation.”

So far, no metaverse platform is attempting to do anything like this with real-world conferencing, instead relying on standard human avatars. But as I discuss in Chapter 9, a conferencing solution that offers only human avatar choices will inevitably encourage some level of harassment, toxicity, and other HR problems. In a work context, requiring personnel to take a meeting in a metaverse platform can cause anxiety to some, since it puts them in an unfamiliar medium they're often not comfortable with. Women in particular can sometimes consider the very request to be uncomfortable. (“I'm already judged by what I wear at work,” as one woman told me. “Now I gotta be judged as an avatar, too?”)

Until we see the kind of innovations Yee is proposing, metaverse meetings can only offer a somewhat-more-fun alternative to Zoom, which also introduces a new set of problems.

Use Case: Marketing/Brand Extension—Pros and Cons

Second Life's hype period was driven in great part by the arrival of Coke, Reuters, Armani, and other major real-world brands, setting up official headquarters and marketing experiences in the virtual world. This hype bubble largely burst when reporters finally noticed that very few people in Second Life were actually engaging with these brands. (A 2007 Wired magazine cover story title summed it up well: “How Madison Avenue is wasting millions of dollars creating ads for an empty digital world.”)

This criticism, once valid, has largely been defeated by next-gen metaverse platforms. Major real-world brand experiences, especially deployed in Roblox and Fortnite, can and often do attract heavy user engagement.

For instance, the U.S. restaurant chain Chipotle launched a 2022 campaign in Roblox, offering free real burritos for the first 100,000 people to play Chipotle's virtual burrito builder game in the metaverse platform. According to RoMonitor Stats, a web service that tracks Roblox metrics, the Chipotle Burrito Builder attracted roughly five million visits in its first month.

This is extremely strong engagement. Traditional digital ads on the Web and mobile, even for major big budget brand campaigns, rarely bring in these kinds of numbers. Other brands appealing to the primary metaverse audience of teens and early 20s, such as Nike and Vans, have also done well.

One ROI lacuna, however, remains: Does brand engagement in a virtual world lead to actual engagement with the brand's products and, well, increased sales?

“I tend not to address it, because there's so many intertwined business models,” Nic Mitham of the consultancy Metaversed tells me. “And there's just not enough data. I'm less interested in ‘Does a virtual world campaign do something in the real world?’ I'm more interested in ‘What's the behavior of the consumer when they interact with that brand in a virtual space?’”

Mitham has worked with numerous major brands across multiple metaverse platforms. Instead of dealing with traditional ad metrics, he emphasizes direct engagement:

“[We] had fans of L'Oréal Paris, and all fans of cosmetics, almost demanding to run a competition where they could showcase their creations and then have them judged by L'Oréal Paris. That's golden for a brand that you've got someone who's inside a virtual world who's spending hours and hours trying to create [an avatar] skin underneath the umbrella of their brand.”

For instance, a recent Mitham client is a brand selling hair extensions; his firm launched a virtual world competition where users vied to create new design styles, making it “a virtual competition to give them new product development ideas for real-world products. Super smart.”

These are all positive signals for an experimental campaign, but tracking the customer's journey (as the marketing expression goes) from a fun virtual world experience to a real-world purchase remains difficult some 20 years after Second Life's first real-world marketing campaign.

“Most of them don't,” Justin Bovington tells me. “The reason for that is it's just an issue of the interoperability of that data. You can't really punch out of those worlds into the Web.”

Bovington should know: He was one of the very first people to bring major brands into Second Life, perhaps most prominently with the classic UK band Duran, which, with the help of Justin's studio, Rivers Run Red, deployed a whole fantastic island.

Now a creative marketing strategist with PVH Corp. (corporate owner of Calvin Klein, TOMMY HILFIGER, and other top fashion brands), Bovington has set up campaigns in Roblox and other metaverse platforms. As he did back in his Second Life days, he emphasizes the entire ecosystem around the virtual world activation itself—the social media reach, mainstream media coverage, word of mouth, and so on.

“Eighty percent of [the marketing campaign] is happening outside of the metaverse,” as he puts it. “Twenty percent is happening inside.”

But virtual marketing that leads to actual sales remains a thorny challenge.

“What about a simple coupon code that avatars could get in a metaverse experience for a brand,” I suggest, “to redeem at the brand's store or website?”

Bovington is skeptical:

“When you're talking about back-end e-commerce systems, like using Salesforce or whoever, integration with those particular systems will probably take six months to a year to do. They don't move very fast.”

Which makes me skeptical that marketing in the metaverse is (as yet) on solid enough footing for the long term. During Second Life's 2006–2008 peak, there was enough excitement around the virtual world to subsidize a dozen or so firms creating marketing experiences in the virtual world, led by a “metaverse big three” (as I called it back then) of Rivers Run Red, Electric Sheep Company, and Millions of Us, founded by fellow Linden Lab alum Reuben Steiger.

And then the full effect of the housing crisis finally devoured the corporate world's experimental marketing budget, and without the audience numbers or the ROI, most of that went away. My fear is if metaverse marketing ROI still can't be established, this cycle will once again repeat.

Untapped Opportunity: Classic IP Extension

Adjacent to marketing, major media brands have been slow to experiment with their back catalogs of intellectual property. Fortnite has seen many promising cross-promotions of current IP, from Marvel and other Disney-owned franchises. Missing in this equation are decades of beloved back catalog IPs.

“They've got IPs in the form of movies that they own completely,” Nic Mitham points out. “And, sure, you can stream it off your smart TV, Netflix, wherever. But by and large, these are intellectual properties that are making little to zero money now that have got massive brand equity and brand recognition.”

By way of example, Nic mentions Jaws and The Shining, classic movies from the ’70s still regularly watched but with a declining long tail of revenue. “How much money does The Shining make them every year? What if you could go inside a virtual version of that hotel?” (This is actually depicted in Spielberg's adaptation of Ready Player One, but perhaps lost in the forward momentum of the plot is the opportunity for the IP owner, Warner Bros., to actually create something like this.)

It's worth noting that with the exception of the Star Wars franchise, there have been several single-player games based on classic movies like The Godfather that have, at best, garnered modest success. What's unique about putting them in a metaverse platform, however, is that the immersive version can be experienced and enjoyed socially with a group of friends. They can also exist as virtual soundstages for grassroots creators to shoot their own movies or create unofficial spinoffs of the underlying IP.

And this shouldn't just stop at re-creating classic movie backdrops, but props and practical effects, re-created and made available in multiple metaverse platforms. Deckard's gun from Blade Runner; Julia Roberts’s thigh-high boots from Pretty Woman; Oh Dae-su's hammer from Oldboy; thousands of items like these and more are cherished by millions of movie-loving metaverse users across the world and across generations.

The possibilities are exciting to consider. Brands can expand into the Metaverse, while metaverse content can seep into traditional media platforms.

Imagine an avatarized TikTok, where most video diaries are delivered not from the disheveled bedrooms of emo teens but in fantastic castles or underground fortresses, many drawn directly from classic movies and TV shows, where the latest school drama is shared, with more anonymity and therefore less drama, by voluble baby dragons and other fantastic avatars.

Picture a Metaverse portal for Netflix and Disney+, where instead of simply watching the latest hit streaming series in 2D, some can choose to be active participants, entering into select scenes that are digitized sufficiently to transform into fully immersive 3D scenes, and where some can even take on cameo roles. (“Remember that romantic scene in Andor season 5? I was the purple alien bird thing in the background.”)

Consider a future presidential campaign online—for the sake of public awareness, politicians are also brands—catapulting from what we saw with Joe Biden's Fortnite island in 2020 (see Chapter 5), where many of the volunteers organize not in fluorescent-lit calling banks but in the candidate's official HQs across multiple metaverse platforms, and instead of texting and calling prospective Gen Z voters on their phones (long ago discarded as a spam-choked cul-de-sac), engage with them person-to-person in virtual spaces across multiple platforms.

For now, most of these use cases remain conjectural, niche, or yet to be proven for the long haul. Before we can seriously engage in a conversation about practical use cases for the Metaverse (beyond enjoying the Metaverse itself), two serious challenges need to be confronted.

But that's for Chapter 11.