Consumers don’t seem to really be ready for the metaverse
Many businesses have already started planning how to make business in the metaverse but it seems to be unclear how ready the market is. A survey shows that only 6% of consumers are comfortable enough in their understanding of the metaverse to explain it to others.
More than one-third of consumers (35%) have never heard of the metaverse, according to a by marketing and research firm Gartner. A hatch is that the survey is small comprising 324 US consumers but made in January after all publicity about expectations for the metaverse.
The survey finds that 58% of respondents have either heard of the metaverse but do not know what it means, or think they understand the metaverse but would struggle to explain it to someone else.
“This is a helpful signal to temper short term expectations of the metaverse, and its potential impact on consumer’s daily life,” says Kyle Rees, senior director analyst at Gartner.
“Companies with interests in the metaverse have a lot of work to change consumer’s attitudes,” says Rees.
“Contemplating the metaverse is a luxury that most people don’t have time for currently. Getting people on board to see past the individual pieces of AI or head-mounted displays is paramount to them truly embracing the multiple technologies that make up a complete metaverse. There are complex, innovative new opportunities and business models that the average consumer needs to be able to grasp easily, or companies risk losing their interest.”
Moonshot.News has earlier reported how commercialization of the not yet ready metaverse is increasing rapidly by companies establishing their business on what is expected to be a huge network of platforms using augmented reality and virtual reality plus concepts from social media to create a virtual world with users being able to interact with both the virtual and the real world.
When Facebook last autumn had announced it was rebranded to Meta to expand its reach beyond social media and into the Metaverse, over USD 106 million worth of Metaverse “land” was sold in seven days, cointelegraph.com reported.
Big players like sports fashion Adidas, fashion chain H&M and others are also already in the growing metaverse. Adidas has said the company is launching a new collection, available both in the metaverse and in reality at the same time, so that your avatar in metaverse can have the same type of trainers as you yourself have going to the office.
H&M has announced that it will offer its customers a three-dimensional shopping in its virtual store in the metaverse. Customers can purchase what they want in the CEEK City universe, a three-dimensional digital world shop and they can also order these clothes from H&M’s physical stores with CEEK coin, a metaverse coin project connecting.
Rees says it will be exciting to see how meta-aware companies begin to make sense of next-generation technologies to bring new products, services and experiences to the world around us.
“Technologies that are intertwined with the metaverse, such as projects on the blockchain or digital currencies, need to be highlighted as disruptive to the status quo thinking. Even properly communicating business use cases around metaverse-adjacent concepts, such as AI and augmented reality, will go a long way in demystifying what is still largely an unknown technology to the everyday consumer.”
The study says that of those who at least know about the metaverse, 60% have no opinion on it, and only 18% are actually excited about it. 21% say they’re concerned about the impacts the metaverse might have.
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