What is Metaverse?

The metaverse is a 3D virtual world offering users a totally immersive experience: in the form of an avatar, they will be able to evolve freely in a fictional universe. The term comes from the world of science fiction, appearing for the first time in Neal Stephenson’s novel, “The Virtual Samurai”. Made concrete in the early 2000s thanks to Second Life, the “metaverse” is today a project led by the giant Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg thus announced in July 2021 that he wanted to create a virtual universe within 5 years. If it is first of all a question of setting up a virtual social network allowing users in particular to meet without leaving their homes, the “metaverse” plans in the long term to constitute a “world” in its own right offering multiple possibilities: the avatars will be able to work, manage their money, get married, embody a personality built to measure. The deployment of 5G and virtual reality headsets should act as powerful accelerators in favor of the metaverse, just like the Covid-19 crisis which has accustomed people to living at home.

The enormous potential of targeted advertising well anticipated by Facebook (Meta)

The more an ad catches your eye and piques your interest in the metaverse, the more Meta will be able to charge for it.

Meta plans to do this by exploiting the cameras installed inside its Oculus virtual reality headsets. Cameras which, initially, are supposed to track the user’s gaze in order to optimize the computing resources of the headset by improving the quality of rendering of the areas actually looked at to the detriment of the surrounding areas. Meta is therefore ready to divert certain technologies for advertising purposes, which will not surprise anyone given the company’s habits and liabilities in this area.

The commonalities between video games and metaverse

In fact, there are many commonalities between video games on the Internet and the metaverse to come.

• Avatars, i.e. virtual characters that we embody. In an online video game, we can assume the role of a magician, a knight, a trader… The metaverse will allow such experiences of self-doubling, in our own form or in that of a character.
• Objects or elements having a particular value and that one is ready to acquire. In an online game, it can be armor or a particular horse. In a metaverse, it could be a gift like being able to fly or an NFT piece of art that you have acquired and put on display at home.
• Complete cities, whether real (we could visit New York virtually before going there for good) or imaginary, with places for recreation, competitions, etc.
• Place to stay can be decorated as you wish, in which to “receive” friends;
• Persistence. We can leave this world at any time. When we come back to it, it evolved in parallel.

Where then is the difference? The first is that a metaverse will, a priori, have no limitation as to the number of participants, which in itself represents a gigantic technological challenge – and makes it easier to understand the extent of Meta-Facebook’s investments in this area.

A much wider panorama of activities than in a video game

However, a metaverse differs from a video game in that it incorporates a lot of activities that are not necessarily playful:

• Zoom-type work meetings;
• possibility of attending events such as concerts (as experienced by Fortnite) without having to travel;
• meetings of various types for the simple relational purpose;
• distance education, etc.

Working in the Metaverse

For many professions, the metaverse will represent huge opportunities to work from home. Already, you can play certain games called “play to earn” in order to win certain objects, certain creatures or skills that can be cashed out to other players. This is already the case with Axie Infinity whose practice is for many inhabitants of the Philippines the main livelihood. This concept is bound to develop very strongly in the metaverses. And among the other lucrative activities that can be foreseen are:

• fashion designer for avatars;
• virtual house architect;
• decorator;
• creators of NFTs, unique works of art that can be exhibited at home;
• creator of games or applications;
• online trainer.

By necessity, payments within the metaverse will be made using cryptocurrencies. Read also: New Technologies and All Fields Examples of New Era Technologies

What equipment for the metaverse?

It remains to be defined what will be the appropriate equipment for daily use in such a world. If gamers are willing to don virtual reality headsets such as those from Oculus – a company acquired by Facebook – it seems unlikely that the general public would consent to the use of such accessories. Virtual reality glasses for instant use seem more feasible.

The Kinect accessory launched by Microsoft for its Xbox has shown that it is possible to use your hands as gamepads. It is therefore likely that the cameras included in the computers and smartphones and other accessories of tomorrow will be able to interpret the movements of the body and facial expressions, transpose them onto his avatar, but also react accordingly. Because the keyword of the metaverse will undoubtedly be: immersion!

Why go to the metaverse without waiting any longer?

Tomorrow, you will be able to do almost everything in a metaverse: see a concert, take an online trip, visit a museum, play with your friends, access virtual sports coaches, go shopping in all the stores you want, buy his insurance, settle his claims, and listen to his broker.

Their monetization potential is major: monetizing social and professional interactions on social VR platforms, monetizing parts of the World Wide Web in the form of NFTs, and monetizing cultural events by making them accessible to the whole world, where the gauge of a concert hall in real life is limited.

Beyond pure speculation, on real estate in 2021 land sales reached nearly $ 4 million on Decentraland or on Sandbox, or on vehicles, such as this superyacht created by Republic Realm studios sold for 149 ETH, or nearly $650,000, on the OpenSea auction site. “Navigable” on the game The Sandbox, we are witnessing a major change, the artist Krista Kim for example sold the first digital house thanks to NFT technology for 500,000 dollars.

Like ROBLOX, and its 30 million daily users (an increase of 80% in one year), the vast majority of whom are under 12 years old, which represents only one of the major METAVERS ( On can also cite SANDBOX, CRYPTOVOWELL, DECENTRALAND) it is easy to imagine that these digital flows, these spaces, these virtual properties, will have to be ensured quickly.

The METAVERS will tomorrow be the market where we will ensure the real (home and its business and its person in health life death) and its virtual (land, vehicles, avatars): going further than the Internet, metaverse will replace it and will therefore be the place where tomorrow’s multichannel digital customer experience will take place.

The insurance entry point will move at a speed that we find difficult to perceive, from the Batignolles agency to the metaverse without going through the internet which will have given up arms to be absorbed by the ultimate experience: Meta-insurance or Meta-insurance.

Talking about “the metaverse” is a bit like having a discussion about the precise definition of the Internet in the 1990s. The beginnings of a new form of communication were emerging, but no one could quite know what it would actually look like.

I start from a simple observation: we are facing a revolution already underway, one that will change our uses, and insurance is a use that will be Meta faster than we think.

Only you can decide!

Sources: PinterPandai, Time, Augustman, The New Yorker

Photo credit: Tumisu / Pixabay