How will the metaverse change customer experience?

Fan­cy meet­ing some inter­est­ing-look­ing new peo­ple at a vir­tu­al cof­fee shop? You’ll sit at home sip­ping your own brew, but wear a vir­tu­al real­i­ty (VR) head­set to expe­ri­ence the café and min­gle with your new acquain­tances as a car­toon avatar. Or how about wear­ing a water­proof head­set and enter­ing a swim­ming pool to sim­u­late the sen­sa­tions of space trav­el? Or let­ting your avatar walk round a clothes store and try items on for size? Vir­tu­al fit­ting will be an exact process, because your avatar will be mea­sured up for all your vital sta­tis­tics, from inside leg to col­lar size. 

These are just a few of the expe­ri­ences that will be made pos­si­ble by the meta­verse, the giant VR net­work that the tech indus­try is con­struct­ing. 

“The meta­verse pro­pos­es to trans­form the inter­net, which is large­ly a trans­fer of infor­ma­tion from a serv­er to a user, into a more immer­sive and real-feel­ing expe­ri­ence that can be shared by an unlim­it­ed num­ber of users,” explains Doug Stephens, founder of con­sul­tan­cy Retail Prophet.

A space where you can exist as an avatar, char­ac­ter or play­er, the meta­verse offers either an immer­sive vir­tu­al world or enables vir­tu­al expe­ri­ences to be super­im­posed on to the real world. You’ll prob­a­bly need to wear a head­set, which could be a deal-break­er for some peo­ple – 3D cin­e­ma has nev­er real­ly tak­en off because of those irri­tat­ing glass­es. But, for those will­ing to put up with this, the meta­verse promis­es a pro­fu­sion of expe­ri­ences that could vast­ly improve con­sumers’ lives. Inevitably, though, there could be some seri­ous down­sides. 

“We have ram­pant prob­lems on the inter­net, includ­ing bul­ly­ing and fraud, that we haven’t even begun to tack­le,” Stephens says. “To sim­ply hur­tle for­ward into a more immer­sive and per­sis­tent ver­sion of that would be reck­less, to say the least.”

Who’s averse to the metaverse?

Could the meta­verse real­ly turn out to be an unwel­com­ing world of vir­tu­al vendet­tas and 3D thiev­ery? How will its inhab­i­tants be pro­tect­ed from harm? 

Stephens believes that we need to appeal to our “bet­ter angels” to cre­ate a pos­i­tive vision of the meta­verse. Jonathan Manzi, co-founder and CEO of blockchain provider Beyond Pro­to­col, has just such a vision. He fore­sees a vir­tu­al realm that is autonomous, yet demo­c­ra­t­ic, decen­tralised and enabling. 

Manzi enthus­es about the pos­si­bil­i­ties for build­ing a bet­ter expe­ri­ence than that cur­rent­ly offered by Web 2.0, which has been over­shad­owed by the dys­func­tion­al­i­ty asso­ci­at­ed with some social media plat­forms. The meta­verse will be part of the next stage of inter­net devel­op­ment known as Web 3.0, he says. This will use blockchain tech­nol­o­gy to cre­ate the tru­ly egal­i­tar­i­an, par­tic­i­pa­to­ry inter­net that was orig­i­nal­ly envis­aged by its inven­tors.

The lat­est wave of Web 3.0 hype was trig­gered by the renam­ing of the par­ent com­pa­ny of Face­book, Insta­gram, What­sApp and Ocu­lus from Face­book Inc to Meta Plat­forms in Octo­ber 2021. Meta’s co-founder and CEO, Mark Zucker­berg, gave a pre­sen­ta­tion show­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties offered by the meta­verse, reveal­ing that his com­pa­ny had invest­ed $10bn (£7.45bn) in devel­op­ing the tech­nol­o­gy that year alone.

This sparked an ide­o­log­i­cal bat­tle between tech­nol­o­gists and human rights activists about the nature of the meta­verse. Would it be dom­i­nat­ed by cor­po­rate inter­ests? How would its users be shield­ed from inva­sions of pri­va­cy and the mis­use of data? How could real con­sumer choice be enhanced?

Manzi says that new blockchain-based unions known as decen­tralised autonomous organ­i­sa­tions (DAUs) will give con­sumers the pow­er to con­trol their pri­vate data and the expe­ri­ences they have in the meta­verse. A DAU would serve as a trust­ed inter­me­di­ary, run demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly in the inter­ests of its mem­bers, who join it via an immutable blockchain ledger and vote on their rela­tion­ships with brands and retail­ers by means of so-called smart con­tracts.

Imag­ine that a group of employ­ees are work­ing in a vir­tu­al office space and lunchtime rolls around, Manzi says: “You could have those users’ infor­ma­tion flow through the DAU, which decides whether it’s appro­pri­ate to serve them an advert about the food from trust­ed restau­rants in the area. The ad is served, the food is deliv­ered and mon­ey is exchanged to pay for it, all on a smart con­tract. That’s some­thing that adds val­ue. It’s good mar­ket­ing – some­thing that’s help­ful to my life.”

This con­trasts with the inva­sive adver­tis­ing prac­tices that have become a char­ac­ter­is­tic of Web 2.0. Some adver­tis­ers use psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­fil­ing to find people’s weak points and tar­get them with ads for inap­pro­pri­ate or even harm­ful prod­ucts and ser­vices. 

“The DAU frame­work has checks and bal­ances inher­ent in it all the way through –some­thing that has not been pos­si­ble in Web 2.0,” he says.

When can customers shop in the metaverse?

But such devel­op­ments are still thought to be at least five years away. The meta­verse will be a native world for gen­er­a­tions Z and alpha. It will require users to have tech­no­log­i­cal knowl­edge and an under­stand­ing of DAUs, blockchains, cryp­tocur­ren­cies and non-fun­gi­ble tokens, which will act as exchange sys­tems. So it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, sipped vir­tu­al­ly or not.

The ear­ly indi­ca­tors of how it will work are already avail­able, though, in meet­ing apps such as Gath­er Town and gam­ing plat­forms such as Ani­mal Cross­ing and Roblox. 

Kathryn Bish­op is fore­sight edi­tor of LSNGlobal.com, which high­lights trends pre­dict­ed by The Future Lab­o­ra­to­ry, a brand con­sul­tan­cy. She points to South Korea as a soci­ety that’s already mak­ing strong advances in meta­verse tech. It offers apps such as social net­work Zepeto, which uses facial recog­ni­tion sys­tems to cre­ate 3D avatars of users that can already inter­act vir­tu­al­ly.

Mean­while, Ralph Lau­ren has released a col­lec­tion on Roblox and even runs a vir­tu­al cof­fee shop. The fash­ion giant and oth­er brands that are get­ting involved in ear­ly meta­verse spaces all see this as a way to con­nect with the next gen­er­a­tion of cus­tomers.

As a con­sumer enter­ing such spaces, “you can meet oth­er peo­ple and have a com­plete­ly alter­na­tive brand expe­ri­ence to one that you’ve been used to,” Bish­op says. “It’s a great way to dis­cov­er new prod­ucts or per­haps unlock some kind of loy­al­ty bonus.” 

Stephens acknowl­edges that the shop­ping expe­ri­ence could be vast­ly improved by Web 3.0. In essence, ecom­merce is “dig­i­tal cat­a­logue shop­ping” in its cur­rent form, he says. “It’s not social, it’s not engag­ing and it’s cer­tain­ly not fun. The meta­verse could change that.”