After building the foundation of influencer marketing in India and helping young influencers gain millions of followers across platforms, Prashant Sharma is all set to dive into the Global Metaverse through the avatar tech company Plutoverse, which he has founded with Arjun Dhurve. He has 5 years of experience building strategies for the influencer industry, and increasing audience engagement for more than 50 brands. He has helped close to 60+ influencers. Born and raised in Jaipur, he moved to Mumbai to pursue higher education and instantly fell in love with the speed and magic of the city. He has always been fascinated by all the possibilities that Mumbai has to offer and that’s one of the reasons he chose to set the upcoming adult animated web series DeerDost in a futuristic version of the beloved city. Through the company, Prashant empowers and provides opportunities to young Indian tech whizzes, creators, animators, designers and writers who want to ensure that India is ready for Plutoverse’s metaverse and will soon introduce avatar-driven NFTs, digital goods, animated shows, virtual concerts, and so on.
Metaverse is the new phenomenal, highly immersive experience of internet users, which has implications not just in gaming but in every facet of our lives, and is the successor to the mobile internet. It goes beyond the two-dimensional experience of browsing, working, viewing, socialising and interacting to land us in a world of alternate reality.
In Metaverse, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and haptic gears are used to sense users’ motions and reactions to the Metaverse experience. It has already taken the gaming world by storm, where users under disguise interact with others in the virtual space.
The value of the Metaverse market is slated to be more than $758.6 billion by 2026. Therefore, it is clear as far as estimates go that by that time the world will see a Metaverse boom with the fastest developers raking in profits.
Metaverse offers opportunities for users to recreate content interactively, where they are immersed and engaged in the content. According to forecasts, by 2030 around 50 billion IoT devices will be in use, creating a gigantic web of interconnected devices, spanning everything from smart phones to kitchen appliances. According to statistics, over 127 IoT devices are connected to the web every second.
It seems like we are living in a world that is the prequel to the movie Matrix. In the Matrix, reality is a virtual Metaverse where a human-driven society has been taken over by a virtual one. It predicts an age where artificial intelligence has taken over. This is the new revolution — a watershed moment in technology and culture.
With Metaverse, we are set to outpace the imaginations of the greatest science fiction writers. As artificial intelligence takes over we may live in a world of alternate reality under disguises as these technologies develop to operate entirely independent of their human creators.
Not just our homes and personal devices but also our work places, health systems, governments, human bodies and our innermost thoughts are set to be reordered and reimagined.
Challenges are opportunities in disguise. Challenges in the Metaverse offer unlimited future opportunities for companies and consumers. Challenges like cybersecurity posed by hackers and privacy difficulties are emerging despite disguised user names.
With the boom of the internet the development of the HTML protocol saved the day. No such system has yet been developed for Metaverse. The challenge is to develop easy-to-use devices with the next emerging revolution to gaming. Companies are looking for alternate uses to Metaverse that go far beyond gaming.
With virtual disguises these other uses of Metaverse will call for digital profiling of users, creating a monster of a world as predicted by George Orwell in his novel 1984, in which he says: “Big Brother is Watching.”
There are many challenges posed in the Metaverse like ensuring digital ownership of virtual goods and NFTs, preventing fraud due to the development of new digital economies, protection of personal information, personal keys, seeds, and logins. Lack of privacy can lead to cyberattack risks, money laundering risks and data breach due to the sharing of data.
More and more people are increasingly participating in Metaverse both on the newly developed blockchain and web gaming interfaces. The Metaverse creates a fantasy world where people may not be careful about their actions, thus jeopardising their real-world identities.
Personal data leaks, money laundering, eavesdropping, and many breaches of privacy pose several risks to the use of Metaverse. Users may record actions of each other, like a digital paparazzi, with identity theft being a huge concern.
Many in Metaverse may show behaviours that are not in line with their real-world personalities but may impact their real-world reputations. Using an avatar may seem anonymous but weak cybersecurity technologies can lead to attacks by hackers and revelation of real-world identities.
Most users don’t use their real-world identities in Metaverse, and instead opt for pseudonymous identities so there can be a lot of scope for misrepresentation with fake companies, and increased threat of money laundering and fraudulent activities.
Identity is the most valuable asset in Metaverse, and weak cybersecurity systems may lead to identity theft and data breaches. As technology develops more people will spend more time in complex virtual worlds and identity protection is the call of the day.
No technology can perfectly protect identity in a fool-proof way. Therefore, the effort by developers is to enable a stable and secure digital identity in the virtual world. Therefore, freedom to build genuine societies in Metaverse with social, economic and political interactions, based on shared and common norms is the future.
A secure identity will allow individuals to navigate between several virtual worlds and easily from the physical to the virtual world. Identity today is understood to be stable and uniform but with the evolution of Metaverse it is slated to be more fluid and free.
Trading assets will not only build virtual societies but will also allow free movement in Metaverse. Our avatars will allow us to be a part of virtual social communities with the trading of virtual capital as has begun with the blockchain wave. These are the early stages of a robust and enduring Metaverse culture. Digital identity in Metaverse may be a form of our future identity.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg heralds the transformation of the world, in which the Metaverse is a normal platform for social interactions. Thus, social networking will incorporate the Metaverse where identity protection will be a valuable asset. There is huge interest and investment in the Metaverse space now as technologies are developed. The better technologies will be more adept at providing cybersecurity.
The prediction is that by 2030 we will all experience the Internet of Senses (IoS) where our sight, sound, taste, smell and touch will be enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), 5G, automation etc. with the brain as the user interface. Therefore, a world like the one predicted in the Matrix may as well become a reality.