This week, we feature a guest post coauthored by Sergio Pareja (Senior Manager, Innovation Practice and Metaverse Continuum Business Group), and Sean Burke (Principal Director, Nonprofit Practice), both of Accenture, an enterprise participant in the AgeTech Collaborative™. This is Part 1 of a series focusing on the metaverse and what it means for AgeTech.
this day and age, technology has never played a more impactfulrole in our lives and has never undergone more change in such a short time. This unprecedented of change offers both opportunity and the commensurate responsibility that goes with it. To capitalize in ways that are both responsible and mindful of consequences, society as a whole and, more specifically, industry leaders mustall understand the tech as well as its implications.
In the past year or so, the metaverse has been a topic of great debate, mainly centered on the notion that it will be a technology that underpins our daily lives. Nevertheless, for many people, the metaverse continues to be an opaque source of confusion. Considering this, let’s dive deeper and answer a fundamental question: What is the metaverse?
When thinking of what the metaverse is, it’s helpful to start by sharing what it is not, and to refute some common misconceptions:
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• The metaverse is not just about gaming. Although gaming is the most tangible onramp to the metaverse, there are many other virtual experiences provided beyond just play.
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• The metaverse is not just Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR). These are only some of the many ways to access and interact with metaverse experiences.
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• The metaverse is not fully formed or developed. .
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• The metaverse is not one place. It’s many places — just like the internet, which has many sites. In this context, the metaverse is essentially a new channel ripe for evolution.
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• The metaverse is not only for multiple users. It can also be for single-user environments (i.e., training, learning, etc.).
How the metaverse is defined has been the subject of debate. Accenture sees the metaverse as an evolution of the internet that enables users to move beyond “browsing” to “participating/inhabiting” in a persistent, shared experience spanning the spectrum from our real world to the fully virtual world — and everything in between. s an evolution of the internet, the metaverse is an unfolding and expanding continuum where our digital lives are becoming more deeply integrated with our everyday realities.
From a technology perspective, the metaverse will be everywhere we are, from our computers to our phones. It will be just as integrated into our lives as email, text messages, and social media. It will build on existing technologies such as the cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT), and it will converge with technologies like blockchain, generative AI, edge , and extended reality — to name just a few.
This is relevant today, right now. We believe this space will evolve rapidly as technologies and the metaverse mature over the next decade and beyond. As a result, our take is not necessarily that companies dive headfirst into it, but rather think about how metaverse technology can disrupt their core businesses and their industry, and how they can start building a test-and-learn framework to guide their bets as we wait for broader scale to take hold.
The metaverse is not going to fade away; in fact, according to our research, it is expected to grow from $180B in revenue in 2021, to over $1T by 2025 globally. This impressivefigure is derived from a survey conducted by Accenture that resulted in industry stating that they expect the metaverse to account for 4.2% of their revenues, a significant portion of the pie.
Clearly, business leaders think the metaverse will be a game-changer for their organizations, and this is supported by our “Accenture CxO Survey” that we sponsored in 2022, which found that 71% of executives believe it will impact their organizations. The point is that we think now is the time for organizations to start building the muscle to leverage this responsibly for good, and to play proactive roles in driving breakthroughs in how the metaverse can be utilized.
The next part of our series around the metaverse dives deeper into how the metaverse should consider design principals to maximize user adoption and reach. Read Part 2 here.
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