By changing its name to Meta, Facebook has encouraged investors to rush to metaverses, these virtual worlds where it is possible to buy land whose value could jump thanks to speculation. But are they right to sink thousands of dollars into these immaterial worlds?
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Imagine if going to work, the gym, or a music show only required putting on a virtual reality headset. And how about owning two houses: one in real life and another in a parallel world? This is the dream that metaverses sell.
Among the new owners in these parallel worlds, we find Jonathan, a thirty-something from Saint-Eustache. It has no less than 33 lands in an emerging metaverse, TCG World, a virtual world in which it is possible to walk around and capture creatures.
Since the price of his land is valued with the cryptocurrency of this metaverse, the TCG Coin, it can be estimated that he currently has the equivalent of at least $15,000 in virtual real estate.
But why opt for virtual, and therefore uninhabitable, land rather than real-world property? It’s simple: for reasons of means.
“Many young people can no longer afford [d’acheter une propriété]“, underlines Jonathan, who sees in the metaverse an opportunity to make his money grow.
“My dreams are to sail around the world in a sailboat, to go parachuting, to have a small self-sufficient farmhouse,” says the young man, who nevertheless recognizes that his investment is risky. With luck, however, he could pocket quite a bit more than if he had put his money in a TFSA or gambled it on the stock market.
He is not the only one to be tempted: according to market analysis firms, real estate transactions in the metaverse have exceeded 500 million US dollars over the past year. An American company even bought a 19-lot lot for $5 million in TCG World, the biggest deal ever in a metaverse.
A good idea?
That’s all well and good, but will the land bought now really increase in value as the metaverse grows?
“I wouldn’t put my money on it,” says Tomás Dorta, professor of virtual reality at École Polytechnique. For the director of the design research laboratory Hybridlab, buying land in these virtual universes is as far-fetched as “buying land on the moon”.
The future of metaverse
It is that the metaverses, in their current form, are not finished. The dream parallel world in which we could work and shop risks seeing the light of day elsewhere than on the current metaverses, such as Decentraland or TCG World, predict specialists with whom the 24 hours entertained.
The main problem with current metaverses: they require a helmet to access them and are completely detached from the real world, says Tomás Dorta.
“You can use it once in a while, but if it’s your work tool that you have to wear it every day, it’s hard,” he says. Me, I do not believe that my social network will be in immersion, detached from everything.
This is why the popularity of metaverses in their current form will eventually fall and the land purchased in these virtual worlds will necessarily lose value, believes Tomás Dorta. But if this parallel real estate market is a wet firecracker, the concept of the metaverse is not doomed to failure, he insists.
For Tomás Dorta, the secret to the success of the metaverse will instead lie in augmented reality.
Augmented reality is the technology behind the popular Pokémon GO app. It consists of embedding virtual elements in the real world thanks to a mobile device, such as a telephone, an iPad, or even electronic glasses.
“I think it’s augmented reality that has benefits for social relations,” says Tomás Dorta. This technology makes it possible to “see the world, but also to add information about the world” and “it has a lot of future”, he continues.
The director of the OVA startup which specializes in the construction of future metaverses, Harold Dumur, agrees. According to him, augmented reality risks sooner or later replacing virtual worlds as we know them today.
“With solutions like Snapchat glasses, we will be able to see an augmented world that is really placed above our reality,” he explains.
Snapchat’s glasses, dubbed Shows, are electronic glasses that superimpose virtual elements in the user’s field of vision. For example, we can see virtual works appear in the streets, or even know our speed or our route at a glance when we are racing.
The majority of tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Meta have committed to building their own glasses.
It is therefore proof that a form of metaverse is indeed at our doorstep, and that it is relevant to find out about its progress. However, investing in these virtual worlds currently seems as risky as investing in a cryptocurrency or an emerging company – so make your investment decisions accordingly.