By Michael Carroll
Nokia calls on creatives to unlock the metaverse
Leslie Shannon, Head of Trend and Innovation Scouting with Nokia, compared current moves around the metaverse to the early days of the internet, explaining the true potential of the emerging sector will only be realised once the underlying infrastructure is in place.
The executive told Mobile World Daily the metaverse is currently at the same stage the internet was around 1993, with plenty of theories on where the concept will head but very little in the way of hard facts.
As a result, she believes the best way to encourage the metaverse is to build the infrastructure, “stand back and watch what the creatives of the world do with it”.
Shannon noted the same approach in the early days of the internet ultimately paved the way for companies including Google, Amazon, Uber and Airbnb, “all several years after the basic infrastructure started being put into place”.
With work to provide metaverse infrastructure already underway, Shannon expects the first creative outcomes for consumer services to emerge in the second-half of the current decade.
She predicted these could include applications to make mundane tasks more interesting, or which enhance peoples’ interaction with their homes and local environment rather than the gaming-focused hype already surrounding the metaverse: “it’s not going to only be the fully immersive, VR world that seems to be the default setting of conversation around what the metaverse is”.
The issue lies with the immersion part. Shannon noted in the real world, people have real things to do, which can’t be achieved wearing a VR headset. “In my view the true metaverse, the useful metaverse, is the metaverse of presence, not immersion.”