We've all heard of the metaverse, an immersive virtual world that's a digital twin of the real world, or akin to 'climbing into the internet,' depending on who you ask. But how many of us understand exactly how it works?

 


Despite increasingly slick headsets, hype, and bold predictions, the true potential of the metaverse is not obvious.

We speak with Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford University to better understand the technology. He's spent decades studying the metaverse and virtual reality. He founded Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab and Strivr, a VR-focused tech company.

 

Bailenson paints a compelling picture of a virtual world in which you can be any size, shape, or gender you want, interact with 3D projections of real people and non-fungible objects, experience haptic sensations, and have 'intense experiences that solve hard problems' in this episode of Experts Explain.

 

According to Bailenson, this intensity is one of the reasons why the metaverse is particularly useful in management training. "You have an experience while wearing the body of another person and get to walk a mile in their shoes. We've worked with governments, businesses, and schools all over the world to create VR simulations to increase empathy and diversity training."

 

But Bailenson isn't presenting an unbridled tech utopia. The VR expert is candid when it comes to the platform's shortcomings, and sees it as a work in progress whose development will be "driven by use cases that make sense".

 

"The metaverse will not change your life tomorrow," he claims. "There was a moment when we thought all of us were going to be in the metaverse - and the media was promoting it as an everyday thing. But we won't have that for a few years."

 

Creating a new reality: the metaverse

 


Watch this Davos 2023 panel session featuring Rwanda's ICT Minister, Paula Ingabire, Meta CPO Chris Cox, HP chief Enrique Lores, and Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash, where the term "metaverse" was coined, to learn more about how the metaverse can be made safe, accessible, and economically viable.