How Will the Metaverse Grow?

In 2021, the metaverse swept across the world with its grand and beautiful vision, becoming the new holy grail for tech companies and financial capital alike. Hoping to seize new business opportunities, Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta to highlight its focus on the metaverse, Microsoft unveiled big metaverse development plans, and countless venture capital firms have been searching for unicorn metaverse start-ups. In 2022, product development, marketing, and academic research on the metaverse continued to thrive. Convinced that the metaverse will inevitably lift the internet to the next level, those in the industry are banking on accelerated integration with human society and more proliferation of the virtual in reality.

Rewritten Life

From the perspective of economic and social development, the greatest inventions of the 20th century were computers and the internet. The former revolutionized information processing with enormously enhanced efficiency, and the latter brought humanity into the information age, transforming traditional production relations and social systems. As a widely recognized form of next-generation internet, the metaverse will open a new digital world beyond the physical one that fuses virtuality and reality and accelerates the flow of people, objects, and spaces between the two worlds.

In recent years, we have experienced flexibility and convenience brought by digitalization. In the metaverse era, humans, in the form of digital avatars, are expected to further break through the boundaries of space and time to enjoy immersive virtual experiences in social realms, entertainment, and work activities. Enterprises will continue to strengthen the links between the real economy and digital bodies to refine and intelligentize production and services in the real world. Wielding tremendous possibilities, the metaverse will lead the human world into the “post-human era” in which all digital elements are integrated into life, production, and social governance.

Joint Efforts and Shared Development

In terms of technological development and business practices, the metaverse is still in its embryonic stage. Various technologies are constantly integrating to derive new applications, new business models, and new paradigms. Jon Radoff, a well-known investor and metaverse researcher, proposed a seven-layer industrial chain of the metaverse, namely, infrastructure, human-machine interaction, decentralization, spatial computing, creator economy, discovery, and experience. As the metaverse evolves, the industrial development model of the Web 2.0 era, which is dominated by platform enterprises, will be upgraded to a new model of industrial co-creation.

Faster joint construction of digital infrastructure is needed to develop the metaverse. The digital world of the metaverse poses huge challenges in terms of computing power, storage, and transmission, which demands developing digital infrastructure first. Consider the application of holographic communication: It will generate no less than 4GB of data per second, which requires a transmission rate of 1 Tbit/s and a transmission delay of 1-5ms. Scenarios of massive concurrent communication raise the requirements for digital infrastructure. With massive demand for computing power, the metaverse will require 1,000 times more computing power than is currently available. Demand for computing power varies in different scenarios, so more types of computing power and computing paradigms are expected to emerge.

Easier sharing of digital resources is also important. Metaverse technologies represented by digital twin, extended reality (XR), and braincomputer interfacing are driving human society into the era of all-real internet and fostering new technologies and business models. In the technological system of the metaverse, Web 3.0, with blockchain as the core, will accelerate construction of a fundamental digital system of trusted computing. The capabilities of digital platforms will continue to grow, data mining and graph computing technology will steadily develop, and strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content will promote the engineering and generalization of large-scale AI models. Players hope that the metaverse will facilitate immersive experiences and comprehensive interactions through increasing types of data resources and applications, accelerate integration of all digital elements, and improve capabilities in the sharing of digital resources.

Collaboration across industries is expected during development of the metaverse. Combining cutting-edge technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), 5G, AI, and digital twinning, the metaverse has created new space for deep integration of the virtual world and the real world. Engineers are blazing two new trails: the consumer metaverse and the industrial metaverse. Today, the metaverse is not only penetrating highly digitalized industries such as film and television, gaming, social networking, and livestreaming, but also manufacturing and even agriculture. The consumer metaverse empowers individuals and families to enjoy more immersive and interactive service experiences. The industrial metaverse builds a digital twin of the physical world based on realistic needs to facilitate simpler, faster, and more effective work as industries upgrade by reshaping work scenarios, processes, and models. The industrial metaverse will boost applications in more scenarios and provide stronger support to accelerate the process of new industrialization and promote the integrated development of the digital economy and the real economy. 

Telecom Drive 

Transforming their businesses to wield stronger digital capabilities, global telecom companies are working to create new applications for new scenarios with communication networks as the foundation. Based on their current efforts to build the metaverse and what it will eventually require from various fields, telecom companies are expected to play a significant role in the following areas: 

Telecom companies could be a major driving force in the construction of new digital infrastructure by enhancing computing and network integration. After extensive exploration of the realm, global telecom companies have become major players in the construction of network and computing infrastructure. In October 2022, the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), launched by Facebook in 2016, announced a new group focused on developing metaverse-ready networks. The group aims to accelerate the development of solutions and architecture to enhance networks that support the readiness of metaverse experience. China’s telecom companies have built the world’s largest commercial 5G network now boosting the digital economy and are actively developing metaverse infrastructure for 6G and computational networks to promote the digital and intelligent transformation of society. 

Integration and innovation of digital technologies will accelerate development of the industrial metaverse. Chinese telecom companies are continuously increasing investment in digital technology innovation to strengthen research and development of key metaverse technologies. For instance, telecom companies are building smart factories supported by complete 5G connections with manufacturing enterprises and creating a variety of innovative applications related to data collection, remote control, and VR inspection. Leaping from basic connectivity to smart connectivity for everything, telecom companies will become key enablers and incubators of innovative businesses in the industrial metaverse. 

Efforts should be made to innovate core technologies for security and trustworthiness and continuously improve security governance of the metaverse. Development of the metaverse demands faster integration and expansion of digital infrastructure as well as a combination of various emerging computing technologies and storage technologies. While promoting innovative applications of the industrial metaverse, telecom companies will also actively contribute to building security capabilities to realize secure and credible data transmission and harness the arithmetic power of blockchain and other technologies. 

The metaverse has emerged as a promising industry with limitless business opportunities, but it is still in an embryonic period. The essence of the metaverse is to build a new digital world to serve human society and foster better development and transform the physical world in a better way. 

The author is general manager of the technology innovation department of China Unicom.