Hey all, Robin here—I hope you enjoyed my last Substack on Niantic. Today, we’re going to be delving a bit more into Meta and their quest to build up the Metaverse. Meta doesn’t want to build every little bit of the metaverse, they’re letting other firms do that and they’re just starting to invest in these key firms.
These first few firms will likely be “category defining firms”.
For example, when a new mega-trend like the Metaverse begins, there are often firms that need to be set up in order to support the trend; think of payment processors for online commerce.
Meta is just starting to invest in these kinds of firms.
$10 billion and much more on the way
Armed to the teeth with $10 billion in 2021 at Meta’s disposal, Meta is (to my knowledge) the largest direct investor in Metaverse technologies such as augmented and virtual reality. This number is only expected to increase:
And this will provide investors with additional visibility into the investments that we're making in augmented and virtual reality. In 2021, we expect these investments to reduce our overall operating profit by approximately $10 billion. And I expect this investment to grow even further for each of the next several years.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg
However, Meta is not only investing internally, they are also investing externally in smaller firms.
A virtual West World?
On November 8th, 2021 Meta, Kleiner Perkins, and CRV led a Seed funding round for a small firm known as Inworld AI.
InWorld AI is creating a developer platform to create AI-powered virtual humans for the metaverse, AR/VR games, and any virtual world. Now I know what you’re thinking, “that sounds a lot like West World”. And you’re dead right.
These AI are supposed to be “native and engaging inhabitants” with “unique behaviors and awareness of their contexts and environment”, so yeah, it’s basically West World.
The Metaverse must be engaging above all else to absorb people into these virtual worlds; if there’s nothing to do, no one to talk to, and no games to play then who will fork $400 on a headset for a shot at it? These companies need inhabitants, but can’t get everyone interested immediately.
InWorld believes that these “inhabitants” are critical to the Metaverse due to its nascency. I’ll call them NPCs from now on. As tech grows, there needs to be other users on the platform to convince people to join, and since the Metaverse is going to occupy virtual space, it’s going to be like visiting a virtual city square. If your city square looks like in 1875 (desolate and isolated), then no one is going to want to come and use their Metaverse.
However, when you populate the Metaverse with virtual users that people can interact with and play games with then suddenly everyone wants to join. I’m predicting that if InWorld plays their cards right then some people will join the Metaverse just to interact with the incredible AIs. It could be a cultural phenomenon.
InWorld AI is led by experienced former developers at Google’s Dialogflow (a no-code product for creating conversational experiences for smart speakers, chatbots, call centers).
They seek to expand on what has been done in Roblox for a while; the ability to create virtual avatars that you can speak to. It’s pretty primitive, but they were great quest givers for an 11 year old Robin.
However, InWorld is making these chatbots extremely more complex in the sense that they can: advise, guide, support, and entertain users in the Metaverse. As stated earlier, they’re essentially virtual humans that can do any function a regular human could do in the Metaverse.
The applications of this technology are practically limitless—we could have real NPCs that can function almost as well as humans. These NPCs could serve as virtual companions, brand ambassadors, training dummies, or any function that can be imagined. I’m very interested on the enterprise possibilities of something like this; you could automate a lot of corporate, diversity, and retail training this way.
It’s worth mentioning that InWorld is an extremely early stage firm with a product that has yet to be released. However, the team behind them is incredibly remarkable and has built one of the staples behind our current internet; easily accessible chatbots for support. It’s unproven, it’s risky, and it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on them.
The Next Open Sea and the Marketplace Wars
As Meta prepares for the Metaverse and cryptocurrency with Novi (more on them soon), they are now dabbling into NFTs.
On November 30, 2021, Meta, a host of crypto VCs and angels closed the deal on Metamundo’s Seed round of funding.
Metamundo is an 3D NFT marketplace built on Polygon L2 sidechain. According to the website, Metamundo is not only working on a new marketplace but also 3D conversion tools to bring any 3D model into any Metaverse. For example, you could bring a 3D model of a couch into Horizons and Decentraland if you so pleased with Metamundo.
It’s a key hurdle for the Metaverse right now—if we’re all going to be living in interoperable virtual worlds, how can we do that if we can’t even export 3D content correctly?
It’s no wonder why Meta has thrown a bone their way—they want to encourage the development of 3D content creators.
Furthermore, it’s clear to most people that Open Sea is mainly for art and is a pretty garbage way of buying game assets—you have to click through too many tabs just to do that. As Play to Earn games and Metaverse titles develop, we’re going to need new NFT marketplaces to allow for the easy exchange of goods. Open Sea could lose serious control of the NFT space if Play to Earn games continue growing and use other options.
Metamundo is likely to face competition from both OpenSea and Justin Kan’s Fractal as they release their product into 2022.
Looking to the Future
As Facebook continues to solidify their position in the Metaverse, it is becoming increasingly clear that they are not repeating the errors of history; they are not trying to do everything in a new niche. Meta is spreading the love via investments and will likely continue investing in future companies.
We’re in the extreme early innings of the Metaverse right now and it is hard to predict who wins, who loses, and who adapts, but by tracking the developments of Meta you can begin to see what the future looks like. It’s a future where we can interact with NPCs in new ways and become content creators selling 3D assets.
Keep an eye on these companies as I’m sure they’ll do incredible things.
Thank you reading, do good in the world and remember to keep playing!
great read! Who is Novi? Also, I know Treasure DAO is building a decentralized NFT platform on Arbitrum, may be worth checking out/keeping an eye on it as well!