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Inside the metaverse hype train at MWC 2023

Metaverse hype was hanging like a multicolored fog over the Mobile World Congress (MWC) connectivity trade show in Barcelona this week.

Conference organizer, the GSMA's, program pitched attendees into a smorgasbord of metaverse-themed discussions -- most of which seemed designed to generate maximum FOMO, as a parade of tech evangelists took to the stage in Spain, armed with a new generation of acronyms and luridly colored slide-decks, urging the audience not to sweat the detail of whatever this metaverse thing is (or isn't). And just focus on monetizing it before someone else does.

Europe's carriers are fully onboard the technicolor hype machine. At MWC they sought to train the show's global spotlight onto the role of network infrastructure -- arguing their pipes-cum-platforms will be essential connective tissue for all this sexy virtual world building, connecting "everything, everywhere", as one overly-ambitious show floor slogan put it -- and using that logic as a springboard to press EU lawmakers for a radical rethink of how connectivity is funded in the here and now.

The CEOs of Orange, Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom were among those taking to MWC's keynote stage to sound off about the hard economic realities of running such critical infrastructure. The returns vs investment situation is becoming unsustainable, they warned. Especially if policymakers want them to deliver a truly immersive future and make this metaverse thing happen. Subsidize our network upgrades or the connectivity party is over, was the thinly veiled message to EU lawmakers.

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The paradigm shift carriers are looking for is a new business reality under which they get to charge tech giants for piping data to popular apps in addition to billing consumers for their Internet access. They aren't calling this double dipping -- or even a Big Tech tax. Their lobbying brands the ask a "fair share" for building connectivity's 3D future.

Telcos' frustration at the relatively greater success of app makers, when it comes to monetizing highly scalable software running atop their fixed infrastructure, is nothing new of course. Nor is it the first time European carriers have used the MWC stage to try to lobby the EU for more 'support'. But metaverse hype creates a fresh opportunity to bring out their begging bowl, dressed up in a new brand of distracting dazzle.

It's too soon to say what will flow from an exploratory EU consultation on future network funding which was launched on the eve of MWC. But the current Commission does appear to have drunk some of the carriers' Kool Aid. And the EU's internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, dropped into the conference in person -- taking a turn on the stage himself, where he hyped a vision of "Web 4.0" as "seamless interconnectivity" powering "virtual twins" and "the copy of everything" -- before making some encouraging noises about the case for rethinking operator business models -- so this is, for sure, an area to watch...

But what is the metaverse anyway? Something immersive, which blends the physical and virtual, was about as close to a plausible-sounding definition TechCrunch heard across three days of connectivity industry chatter this week. However there was no shortage of takes on what it is (or isn't) -- and we also heard claims to the contrary; for example that immersion isn't a necessary component at all. Consensus there was none.

Predictions of how many trillions the metaverse opportunity could be worth by 2030 also ranged wildly -- from $1.7tr (PwC) to $5tr (McKinsey) to $8tr (Morgan Stanley), according to one over-enthusiastic speaker's slides. However he caveated these guestimates by conceding they're pegged to a flavor of metaverse that includes NFTs and Web 3... So not actually an immersive 3D future at all then?

With such shape-shifting definitions on show, splashy claims of "tremendous opportunity" felt more than a little unreal. And as TechCrunch hiked across vast exhibition halls, notably less populated than in pre-pandemic years, the metaverse concept seemed to be both everywhere and nowhere; both a major theme of the conference organizers' programmed discussions and yet elusive at the show itself -- at best, a fuzzily drawn theoretical future. One which, outside the pages of science-fiction, still seems largely out of focus -- hovering somewhere out there, over the horizon. Maybe.

Enter the metaverse?

Hold that thought! A Day 3 MWC keynote session -- emblazed with a call-to-action title: 'Enter the metaverse' -- was teed-up by a moderator in full hype mode. She kicked off by asking the audience if they'd already been in the metaverse. And a solid smattering of hands shot up immediately. Yet her hot take on this (frankly confusing) display was to express disappointment that she couldn't see lots more affirmatives. Which was discombobulating to say the least. As if we'd somehow wandered into an alternative reality.

The next speaker, from a Web 3.0/NFT startup called Dimple -- a self-styled "interactive metaverse platform" with the goal of bringing "Web 3.0 metaverse and digital goods/NFT projects to the mainstream", one QR-code bearing physical-to-digital teddy bear at a time (don't ask) -- went on to hype the size of the market opportunity by suggesting that looking at AI generated virtual influencers on YouTube or Instagram was somehow a metaverse experience... So, er, confusion seems to be the tech's strongest certainty at this point.

"We have a definition of the metaverse that it's 'the merge' of the digital with the physical," said Nokia's Leslie Shannon, head of trend and innovation scouting for the telecoms kit maker, taking a stab at defining terms on another of the many metaverse panels peppering the MWC23 agenda. "That's fundamentally it. There's a lot more you can put in there -- I would add real-time," she expanded before plugging her book (on, you guessed it, the metaverse).

Shannon went on to argue that the metaverse -- or metaverses, plural -- is not about immersion; rather she suggested the crux is "real-time presence".

"It's linking you in your physical reality with information or a person or a place that is physically somewhere else and bringing that to you in your physical reality but not taking you away from that physical reality," she offered, before coming to a self-induced hard stop (presumably to avoid things getting too confusing again) -- but not before sounding a sceptical note over Web 3.0 evangelists trying to shoehorn their stuff into the metaverse. ("There's some metaverse iterations out there that are kind of [fad or fraud]," she warned. "Not all metaverses are equal.")

Also speaking on this (McKinsey-sponsored) panel -- which, per its moderator, posed the "provocative" question of whether the metaverse is 'the future, fad or fraud' -- was VR headset maker HTC's Alvin Wang Graylin, the hardware firm's China president and global VP of corporate devices.

He offered a plainer take on what metaverse is -- dubbing it "just the 3D version of the Internet"; something he suggested researchers and technologists have been incrementally inching toward the past 30 or 40 years. So just an evolution of the connectivity we already have then?

But what does a "3D internet" actually mean for human communication? And wasn't Second Life basically doing that around two decades ago?

His remarks during the panel didn't illuminate why more immersive connectivity is going to be especially interesting or transformative. He just argued that Second Life had been too early but now, decades on, with better tech (and content) coming down the pipe, the same sort of 3D world experience would somehow become more compelling.

"Now you have AI happening all around us where you see, you know, amazing kinds of content created, amazing kinds of interactions," he offered. "Having hand-tracking, eye-tracking, full body tracking. Without AI, that's not possible, right. So all of these things are maturing at the same time -- so that now you can actually have a satisfactory experience [inside virtual worlds]. That's something that wasn't possible 20 years ago."

Nokia's Shannon had a more direct go at trying to identify a problem for the metaverse to fix -- by suggesting putting screens on people's faces could save us from having to stare at other types of screens, as we're doing now, here on the plain old 2D Internet.

"If we want to interface with a computer we have to stare at a screen. And [have] our gaze dead-ending in a screen. That's the problem you're talking about right there. And so the metaphor is by taking the screen away, and especially the head mounted devices, that reconnects our gaze with the physical world and the people in it," she suggested. "I think the metaverse is actually going to solve the kind of unspoken screen problem that we have right now."

But if we're talking about adding yet more technology into the already cluttered personal mobile and smart device computing mix -- stuff that explicitly needs to sit on the face to work (in the case of AR/VR googles) -- a more realistic scenario is surely that we'll end up with even more distraction and abstraction of the human gaze, not less. However no one on this evangelical panel wanted to talk about information overload and the metaverse.

A different set of speakers, programmed deep in the afternoon of Day 3, had been given a 45 minute slot on the keynote stage to pay lip-service to an emerging spectrum of metaverse-linked concerns -- from privacy and information overload; to disinformation/manipulation and new forms of tech addiction; to questions of equity and inclusion atop an already yawning digital divide; to the increasing challenge around explainability and transparency of AI-driven technologies; to the crippling environmental costs attached to energy requirements associated with all this immersive world-building, to name a few of the immediately obvious ones.

This panel was entitled 'Ethical approaches for immersive realities' -- a name that studiously avoids the M word (presumably as the GSMA didn't want to derail its own hype train) -- and the four speakers (plus talkative moderator) barely had time to make introductory remarks before their allotted stage time was up.

"Sometimes I think we're discussing problems that we don't have without solving the problems that we have," said Ricardo Baeza-Yates, a professor at the Institute for Experiential Artificial Intelligence of Northeastern University, who sounded world-weary and exceedingly pessimistic about the accelerating direction of tech industry travel. He went on to warn that people must have the right not to participate in these highly immersive commercial spaces being designed to suck them in.

"Today, it's very hard to have the right to the unconnected -- to talk to a person, to do something, to be able to complain without using Twitter, or to be able to ask something without using WhatsApp," he pointed out. "You see that every day. So if you don't have the right to be outside whatever some person wants to invent that's a problem because it's not a consensus between all the people to do that. So I think that sometimes we're being forced by technology. And ethics is always [lagging] behind."

"I think we are moving too much to perception," he also warned. "We don't understand reality... How many people will become addicted and then we'll have another kind of problem -- of mental health. Because there's already people addicted to these things. There's many people who are really addicted to gaming -- and this [immersive metaverse] is one step forward."

"The best case scenario is a metaverse that is respectful to the analogue," suggested another of the panellists, Carissa Veliz, an associate professor at Hertford College University of Oxford, also speaking up for the richness of living in the real world. "There's so much richness in the physicality of life, in how we feel when we see someone in person, when you embrace someone, when you go to a coffee shop and meet with friends.

"Virtual reality can be very rich, and it has a place and it can enrich our lives. But it can never substitute for the physicality of life. So if we neglect the physicality of life -- in virtue of the digital -- we're gonna regret it. And by the time we regret, it's too late. Because the coffee shop has closed, and it cannot be recovered. So the way ahead is to cherish the analogue as well as the digital."

"There's so much a stake," she added. "Our way of life is at stake. Democracy is at stake. So yes, we have to convince corporations that there is a competitive advantage in being ethical -- in having privacy."

There were not that many people physically sitting in the hall to listen to this panel (albeit, some of the MWC23 keynotes were streamed) -- and the audience seemed a bit disengaged from the discussion. But, frankly, it was hard to hear what the speakers were saying (Baeza-Yates had been given a particularly crackly microphone) -- let alone start to unpack all the nuanced issues they were raising in the quantum of time allowed.

Conference-goers could also be forgiven for being distracted by thoughts of how to achieve their next coffee 'pitstop' -- far from any friendly local coffee shops. Tracking down places to get fed and watered at MWC is a very tedious business -- involving long walks and queues and paying airport-style prices for airport-quality fare (after which you typically have to hunker down on a corner of bare carpet to eat your expensive plastic salad bowl as all the chairs and tables are already taken). In such hostile physical surroundings, the prospect of being able to teleport into a 3D world and attend a virtual version of the conference almost felt like a disruptive use-case for the metaverse. But, well, that's probably not the massive selling point the tech industry is dreaming of.

In any case, not attending MWC in person would have meant missing out on experiencing some of the things this year's exhibitors were touting as metaverse experiences.

Case in point: If you walked a little way over from the hall where HTC's Wang Graylin had suggested there's no true metaverse tech to be tapped into yet -- and you were willing to queue up for maybe an hour (or just blag your way to the front by claiming to be an influencer), you could take a trip in a VR urban mobility ride parked at SK Telecom's stand -- which was explicitly branded an "AI metaverse" experience.

SK Telecoms urban mobility vehicle AI metaverse experience at MWC 2023
SK Telecoms urban mobility vehicle AI metaverse experience at MWC 2023

Image Credits: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch

TechCrunch took a very similar VR trip at MWC a full seven years ago -- the main difference being the earlier VR ride installation was a ground-tethered hot air balloon. (VR + hot air? Yes, really.)

Back then, there was no talk of metaverse; it was all virtual reality hype. (And, well, we know what happened next.) But both these VR rides delivered a very similar experience of scary mock proximity, with the craft seemingly (not actually) soaring alarmingly close to virtual objects that left you clutching on to the physicals for dear life and hankering to be back on terra firma.

Both rides also left a stomach churning sensation that lingered like a bad lunch. So if this is really a taste of the metaverse it's going to be a tough sell.

But if HTC's Wang Graylin is on the money, neither of these experiences is really metaverse (yet).

And, well, we tend to agree. Both rides felt more retro than next-gen -- harking back to arcade (or fairground) simulator rides from the 1980s. (The ones that paired high octane on-screen motion with jerking locomotion as the faux car you were strapped into jigged atop a cluster of pumping pistons for a thrilling (or sickening) few minutes.)

The updated urban mobility joyride SK Telecom was showing off was immersive enough, sure. We even had to close our eyes a bunch of times to avoid feeling quite so unwell during the visually erratic flight. But, basically, it served up the same rollercoaster-style stomach lurches and drops as the VR hot-air balloon, all the way back in March 2016. Nor was there an obvious improvement in the quality of the content all these several years later. The vista of the high rise harbor city we 'flew' around this time looked more myopic than crisply rendered -- even mediated through the more modern VR goggles strapped to our faces in 2023. (Screens in 80s' simulator rides weren't exactly high def, either of course, but those rides could still give you full-throttle motion sickness.)

At bottom, it's the same (old) trick. The human brain doesn't need a lot of stimuli to feel physically unsteady -- just sit on a stationary train as another passes slowly by and you can feel like the carriage you're sitting in is rolling backwards. Certain visual illusions can create a feeling of self-motion (vection), as a result of a large part of your field of vision moving, which may also trigger vestibular illusions (dizziness, vertigo etc) that can leave you with biomechanical illusions (aka, sea legs) once you're done.

And getting shakily out of SK Telecoms' mock flying taxi at the end of our brief virtual trip that didn't really lifted off the show floor we could check off a bit of all three... Tbh, though, it feels like the far bigger trick for the metaverse to pull off would be to deliver a stable, comfortable virtual world experience -- one that doesn't leave the user feeling dog-sick and hankering to get back to the real world.

Bottom line: The idea of spending long stretches of 'effortless immersion' in virtual 3D worlds -- without nausea, eye strain, headaches or vague and/or unpleasant sensations of discombobulation -- still sounds like pure science-fiction to this reporter, more than half a decade after our last unpleasant ride on this hype train.

Far better devices and radically retooled networks -- not to mention an infinite supply of amazing content -- are going to be needed to get to a more comfortable and/or capable place, metaverse evangelists suggest. None of which are on the horizon as far as we can see. (Unless you're betting on Apple's long rumored but much delayed mixed reality headset being a category game-changer -- if/when it does eventually land.)

Plus, if you believe Europe's carriers, the network side of things won't be ready for lift off unless/until we're prepared to let telcos generate revenue off of others' digital content and creativity -- with goodness knows what kind of implications for the stuff we get to experience online.

Let's get phygital, phygital...