MAIN FEATURE
$ 68,7 billion to build its metaverse. Occulus Quest was the number one app purchased on Apple’ s iStore over the Christmas 2021 period. Apple prefers to stay away from the buzzword metaverse and prefers to stick to the generic term‘ augmented reality’ as they position themselves quietly in this space.
Other popular metaverse platforms and games include Unity, The Sandbox, Axie Infinity, Fortnite, Unreal Engine, Decentraland using crypto & NFT’ s, Horizon Worlds, Somnium Space and Alt Space VR( Microsoft) to name a few.
How the Metaverse
fits into Marketing? What does this new shiny form of marketing entail? It is a shift from traditional towards experiential brand engagements with fully immersive experiences. It gives the opportunity to network, meet and connect on to one, to hundreds even thousands of people in a single server to extend human interactions in a virtual world using your avatar. It also allows people to work in an environment to create content, market, exhibit products and services, use as a training area or as a customer centre to shop where you can buy and sell goods, virtual land or transact with crypto, tokenised assets and NFT’ s using digital wallets.
Metaverse Pioneers A number of major companies and brands experimenting with metaverse technology include Microsoft, Google, Snapchat, Tencent and Binance and big consumer brands that have pivoted into the metaverse to prepare for the next coming tech boom include Gucci, Disney, Adidas, Nike, Samsung and Sony.
South Africa’ s metaverse and nonfungible tokens( NFT) market is expected to gain huge popularity this year, as more local companies experiment with immersive technologies to deliver operational and revenue improvements. South Africa has their own home grown commercially functional metaverse platform called Spatialweb which
20 FEB 2022 SA Real Estate Investor Magazine