Fincredible MacroTalk August 25 : The Metaverse
Comments on the metaverse from earnings calls of FB, NVDA, U, RBLX, TME, MARK, SLGG.
If you started hearing about the metaverse recently, you’re not alone. If we look at Google Trends data, it’s clear that interest in this topic has grown significantly during the current year.
Companies like Facebook, NVDIA, and Roblox have talked extensively about the topic in their recent earnings calls. In this post we’ve highlighted some of the best quotes from recent company earnings calls regarding the metaverse.
What is the Metaverse?
Mark Zuckerberg explained his vision for the metaverse in the most recent Facebook earnings call.
“So what is the metaverse? It's a virtual environment. We can be present with people in digital spaces. And you can kind of think about this as an embodied Internet that you're inside of rather than just looking at. And we believe that this is going to be the successor to the mobile Internet.
You're going to be able to access the metaverse from all different devices and different levels of fidelity from apps on phones and PCs to immersive virtual and augmented reality devices. Within the metaverse, you're going to be able to hang out, play games with friends, work, create and more. You're basically going to be able to do everything that you can on the Internet today as well as some things that don't make sense on the Internet today, like dancing.
The defining quality of the metaverse is presence, which is this feeling that you're really there with another person or in another place. Creation, avatars and digital objects are going to be central to how we express ourselves, and this is going to lead to entirely new experiences and economic opportunities.
I think that, overall, this is one of the most exciting projects that we're going to get to work on in our lifetime. But it's going to take a lot of work. And no one company is going to be able to build this all by themselves.
Part of what I've learned over the last 5 years is that we can't just focus on building great experiences, we also need to make sure that we're helping to build ecosystems so millions of other people can participate in the upside and opportunity of what we're all creating. There are -- going to need to be new protocols and standards, new devices, new chips, new software from rendering engines to payment systems and everything in between. And in order for the metaverse to fill its potential, we believe that it should be built in a way that is open for everyone to participate.
I expect that this is going to create a lot of value for many companies up and down the stack, but it's also going to require a very significant investment over many years. I see our focus here as a continuation of our work to build technology that brings people together.
In many ways, the metaverse is the ultimate expression of social technology. Some of the experiences that I've dreamed of building since well before I started Facebook are only starting to become possible now.
If you look at the investments that we've made over the years, you can see this vision gradually starting to come to focus. And you can see why we're so excited about it.
So in addition to being the next generation of the Internet, the metaverse is also going to be the next chapter for us as a company. And in the coming years, I expect people will transition from seeing us primarily as a social media company to seeing us as a metaverse company.”
Facebook Inc. Q2 2021 Earnings Call
NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang also described his vision for the metaverse.
“Omniverse is going to be an overlay, if you will, of virtual worlds that increasingly people call the metaverse. And you've now heard several companies talk about the metaverse. We all come from different perspectives, some of it from a social perspective, some of it from a gaming perspective, some of it, in our case, from an industrial and design and engineering perspective. But the Omniverse is essentially an overlay of the Internet and overlay of the physical world is going to fuse all these different worlds together long term.
And you'll be able to -- if you mentioned VR and AR, you'll be able to go into the Omniverse worlds using virtual reality, and so you wormhole into the virtual world using VR. You could have an AI or an object portal into our world using augmented reality so you could have a digital piece of art that you've somehow purchased and belongs to you because of NFC. And it's only enjoyed in the virtual world, and you can overlay it into your physical world with an AI. And so I'm fairly sure that at this point, that Omniverse or the metaverse is going to be a new economy that is larger than our current economy.
And we'll have -- we'll enjoy a lot of our time in the future in Omnivere and in metaverse. And we'll do a lot of our work there. And we'll have a lot of robots. They're doing a lot of the work on our behalf. And we wake at morning as they show us results. And so Omniverse to us is an extension of our AI strategy, is an extension of our high-performance computing strategy, and it makes it possible for companies and industries to be able to create digital tools that simulate their physical version before they deploy it and while they're operating.”
NVIDIA Corp Q2 2022 Earnings Call
Metaverse Use Cases
The metaverse is such a wide concept that use cases have almost not limit. Here are some of the ideas discussed, from virtual concerts and art rooms, to full fledged marketplaces.
“First, the metaverse is real. 40% of Gen Z prefer virtually hanging out to the real thing in real life. As a case in point, 12.3 million people attended Ariana Grande's concert last week and that concert was in the game Fortnite. Content creation is forever democratized. Everyone can be a studio through their social channels and even making a living doing so through creator economies. There's no better example than the fact that Roblox has turned a large number of young team game designers into millionaires. And as a result, the traditional advertising model will never be the same. The disaggregation of content, the preference for live streaming and the ubiquity of ad blocking technology has made the 32nd prime-time TV ad spot increasingly irrelevant with Gen Z millennials.”
Ann Hand, CEO
Super League Gaming Q2 2021 Earnings Call
“Everyone wants to represent themselves in the metaverse in a way they feel proud of and they feel comfortable with.
And when we look at how we work in the real world, I was very picky today on what shirt I picked out, what shoes I wore, how I cut my hair. This all applies in the digital world as well. And it goes to body, clothing, hair or makeup, accessory, glasses, everything.
So building a system where we can have a vibrant market where people can mix and match, where clothing items work on any avatar, where people can have any body they want and any face they want, is super important to us. And as well, it's really been part of Roblox since we started, and there's amazing opportunity there.”
Roblox Corp Q2 2021 Earnings Call
“WeSing would also soon be launching a virtual live streaming room to pioneer a new entertainment experience that brings live streaming into a metaverse-like environment. And in the future, in that environment, performers can choose their avatar to perform their live streaming and interact with audience in this virtual setting. And so in the future, we'll expand this metaverse-like environment to more use cases and provide richer interaction opportunities and more imaginative virtual interactive experience.”
Cheuk Tung Yip, Chief Strategy Officer
Tencent Music Entertainment Q2 2021 Earnings Call
“Looking forward into Q3 and Q4, Remark Holdings will now be taking our first step into building and bringing the metaverse to life. Inspired by the division of the global leading companies like Epic Games, who created Fortnite, Facebook, Roblox and NVIDIA, we will pivot to leverage our bikini.com brand equity and IP assets to create a beach lifestyle metaverse where we can integrate the digital and physical worlds together. With the Bikini.com metaverse, we are creating a full-fledged economy and offering an unprecedented -- I'll quote this unprecedented interoperability. Users have the ability to take their advertising goods from one place into metaverse to another, no matter who runs it. And with Bikini.com, we will capitalize on our name being recognized around the world as it means the same in every language.”
Kai-Shing Tao, CEO
Remark Holdings Q2 2021 Earnings Call
“Really, when we think about the metaverse and what Roblox is, we do think of it as a utility, where there's going to be a lot of use cases that we can't even imagine right now. The Gucci Garden's experience, really, for us, was really interesting. It's not really a concert. It's not really a game. It's almost like going to MoMA and going to an art installation.”
Roblox Corp Q2 2021 Earnings Call
Other Relevant Comments
“As I've said before, we believe in the emergence of the metaverse and that Unity will be a major player in defining and help lead its creation and operation. We believe the adoption of real-time 3D will change the way people interact with digital content and entertainment. Just as digital replaced analog, HD replaced standard definition, in the coming year, 5G will place 3G or 4G, and real-time 3D will replace linear and flat 2D digital content.
We expect more of the world's content to be 3D, real-time and interactive. We believe this cycle will create an addressable market that presents us with decades of opportunity at Unity.
Now for me, the word metaverse is plural. When I say this, I'm trying to make an important point. We don't think that one company will represent the metaverse as, say, for example, it was imagined in Ready Player One. We believe there's going to be hundreds of thousands of destinations in the metaverse. Games like Roblox; creation destinations from companies like NVIDIA, Unity and Adobe; social communication destinations from companies like Snap, Facebook and some new companies. At Unity, we believe in interoperability and in an open Internet, even as the Internet becomes more 3D, more real-time, more interactive and more like the metaverse we imagine.”
Unity Software Q2 2021 Earnings Call
“As we embark on this next chapter, ads are going to continue being an important part of the strategy across the social media parts of what we do, and it will probably be a meaningful part of the metaverse, too. I think commerce is going to be increasingly important, which is why we're -- one of the reasons why we're focused on this across our current apps and the current economy. But I think digital goods and creators are just going to be huge, right, in terms of people expressing themselves through their avatars, through digital clothing, through digital goods, the apps that they have, that they bring with them from place to place. A lot of the metaverse experience is going to be around being able to teleport from one experience to another. So being able to basically have your digital goods and your inventory and bring them from place to place, I think that's going to be a big investment that people make.
And our focus for now is really on helping to develop the community, helping to develop the number of people who -- and grow the number of people who can be in these metaverse experiences and can experience in these next computing platforms like virtual and augmented reality. And that's, I think, what you should expect us to focus on over the next period. But over the long term, I think that there's going to be a very big digital economy around this. And that's what we're primarily going to be shooting for.”
Facebook Inc. Q2 2021 Earnings Call
“At SIGGRAPH last week, we announced an expansion of NVIDIA Omniverse, our simulation and collaboration platform that provides the foundation of the metaverse. Through our new integrations with Blender, the world's leading open source 3D animation tool and Adobe, we're opening the Omniverse platform to millions of additional users. We are also collaborating with Apple and Pixar to bring advanced physics capabilities to Pixar's Universal Scene Description framework, embracing open standards to provide 3D workflows to billions of devices. Omniverse Enterprise software is in the early access stage and will be generally available later this year on a subscription basis from NVIDIA's partners, including Dell, HP, Lenovo and many others. Over 500 companies are evaluating Omniverse Enterprise, including BMW, Volvo and Lockheed Martin, and more than 50,000 individual creators have downloaded Omniverse since it entered open beta in December.”
NVIDIA Corp Q2 2022 Earnings Call
“The technology is very complex. The technology to support, ultimately, a 50,000-person concert, where we all feel like we're there. We can talk to our friends next to us. We can wave across the stadium. It feels totally realistic. The audio is awesome, and there's 50,000 people doing that. That's a huge technological challenge.
And side by -- so that technological challenge, I just want to put that out there, in that it's very exciting that there's so much work to do. And we're pretty far into this. If we look back to Second Life on their dot-com, this started a long time ago. So there's a lot of fun stuff to do.”
Roblox Corp Q2 2021 Earnings Call
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