What are some promising use cases for the metaverse?

A client asked me how to sell in the metaverse and I said, "Don't look at it as a channel, look at it like foot traffic. The eye candy will lure your customer in, but the value delivery is what will keep them inside your metaverse." The use case that I see is pandemic-driven. It is not socially-driven, but it's the infrastructure behind it.

I look at old technologies and back when ROADM was a thing, its adoption grew and then leveled out before it disappeared off the face of the earth. But that was the compression technology that enabled us to do things like Zoom. We need to reinvigorate that kind of technology, otherwise we'll never be able to build a metaverse. 

So far, the metaverse use cases remind me of the use cases for HoloLenses: it sounds awesome but it doesn't apply to me. NASA was taking HoloLenses up to the space station so that astronauts could augment what they were doing back down to Earth. We had a use case in New Zealand at our main spinal injury hospital in Christchurch. Before they sent patients home in a wheelchair, they were able to map the patient’s house, bring that into an environment and put that patient into a wheelchair with a HoloLens so that they could practice driving it around their own house. It was a cool use case and it’s hard to say that that's a waste of technology because it's not. It's just not applicable to everyone.

We haven't seen that catalyzing moment where the metaverse becomes applicable to everyone. Video conferencing is huge now because through the pandemic it enabled grandparents to see their grandkids, and gave people a way to gather outside of work to socialize. It helped us build human connection that way.

There will be various use cases; for example, if you are purchasing goods from a remote location, it could allow you to feel as if you are touching them. It’s a three-dimensional virtual world as opposed to just being a two-dimensional experience on a flat screen.