What Will Be A Foundational Technology For Creating Metaverse Apps?

As I have written in the past, the Metaverse is a work in progress. While it is the buzzword of the day, the concept of eventually interacting in a virtual world is a very real challenge and goal. 

Meta (formerly Facebook) has their vision of the Metaverse that is very VR and VR headset centric. Apple’s approach to a virtual world seems to be more AR-focused which allows for seeing the real world as well as delivering data superimposed on some type of Apple glasses in the future. 

When people talk about the technology that will be needed to create an open, interoperable virtual world, they most often point to Web 3.0 and its blockchain approach to creating a less centralized internet where apps and data are kept in blockchains and should be safer and provide greater security to users. 

While Web 3.0 will be an important technology that should help create a better way to deliver the internet and virtual worlds, there is another critical technology that already exists that will be a foundation for building 3D immersive virtual and hopefully, interoperable experiences. 

The recent move by Microsoft to buy Activision illustrates the role this technology will play in building out the Metaverse. Microsoft’s purchase of this gaming company focused on the existing apps and catalog of games that would come under Microsoft’s ownership. This would mean that Microsoft could supply games not only for Xbox but for PlayStation and other online gaming systems which is a win-win for them.

However, Microsoft was just as interested in the talent at Activision who have mastered the use of gaming engines that create hits like Activision’s Call of Duty and give them a way to create their Metaverse apps in the future. 

Indeed, Epic’s Unreal Engine, Unity, Roblox are just a few of the important game engines that are being used to create the powerful games that drive the $180 billion video game market today. 

If you have ever played Call of Duty, Halo, Marvel’s Guardian of the Galaxy, NBA 2K22, etc. you have already been in the gaming Metaverse. The game provides virtual worlds to play games in and in most recent VR games, one can use VR headsets to experience true 3D immersive games. What is important about these gaming engines is that the companies who created games on them have had nearly two decades of experience creating immersive gaming worlds, which makes them a foundational technology that will help companies build out many of their own Metaverse apps in the future. 

This became clear to me when I had a briefing recently with an enterprise company that told me that they had started working on a CRM app and were building it on a gaming engine. They started down this path with the idea of creating some kind of game for their marketing promotions. But soon they realized that the game engine they were testing could also be used as a foundational tool for some internal training apps, as well as promotional games. In essence, they will use a game engine to help them deliver specialized apps to be used in the Metaverse in the future.

The experience of creating virtual worlds on game engines is now set to be an important technology for use in creating Metaverse apps in the future. Don’t think of game engines just for creating games. 

Game engines are set to be important foundational technologies and a critical building block for the creation of virtual world applications well beyond its current realm of game creation tools.