Real Estate & Metaverse

The truth is that the metaverse is currently being defined both in its structure and its purpose. It’s much more than a series of three-dimensional video games, NFTs, and augmented reality glasses. To understand why companies like Nike, Gucci, or JPMorgan are investing in virtual lands and experiences in the metaverse, it’s crucial to comprehend what it is.

What is the Metaverse?
The metaverse is an immersive virtual world that we access through various devices, allowing for multisensory experiences and interactions with other humans and elements.

To explain it further, McKinsey & Company’s Metaverse study divides it into ten layers categorized in four categories, where we can appreciate some of its key actors and assets. The study affirms that the metaverse will be the next iteration of the internet because “it can seamlessly combine our physical and digital lives, offering interoperability between platforms and devices, and interaction among users far beyond just games.”

The Four Categories and Ten Layers of the Metaverse

Content and Experiences

• Content: Enriching metaverse experiences, including user-generated content.

• Applications: Expanding metaverse usage from learning to collaboration, events, etc.

• Virtual Worlds: Digital environments where users can gather, interact, and create.

Platforms

• Access and Discovery: Facilitating distribution and discovery of elements mentioned in the previous category.

• 3D Creators and Development Platforms: Tools enabling 3D experiences, game engines, AI, etc.
Infrastructure and Hardware

• Devices, Operating Systems, and Accessories forming part of the human interface.

• Cloud underlying infrastructure powering the metaverse.

Enablers

• Security, Privacy, and Data Governance.

• Identity: Platforms managing identity, avatars, and social graphs.

• Payments and Monetization: Platforms managing the metaverse economy.

The Meta-Land

To relate it to something familiar, the closest connection is video games and virtual reality (VR) goggles. The metaverse is a world where we possess our Avatar (a character representing us), similar to first-person video games. Through this avatar, we navigate an open virtual world, interacting with objects (making purchases, entering places, etc.), with other people (like a 3D social network or SecondLife, for those familiar), and modifying the environment, such as creating our own house, as Snoop Dogg did.
Unlike a video game or virtual experience, the metaverse is persistent and autonomous. This means that changes made are continuously saved, and it remains active even if no one is immersed in it.

The Meta-Economy

The metaverse is expected not to be owned by a single company or platform, similar to the internet. This is possible through Blockchain technology, which ensures public, traceable, and secure transactions. To understand how the economy works within the metaverse, we can consider Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) as a digital asset. NFTs are not just low-quality images; they are a technology that defines a unique digital asset, establishes ownership, and determines usage permissions in both the physical and virtual worlds. Blockchain and cryptocurrencies guarantee transactions in these markets.