In 2021 Meta and Microsoft announced their plans for the Metaverse or Metaverses which are likely to take several years to fully develop and will invite global collaboration and contribution. Anyone with the means, know-how and desire can participate in the Metaverse, either as a developer, brand or individual. In the meantime gaining the competitive edge in 2022 and beyond involves developing and delivering audience journeys that are ‘experiential on steroids’.  Commercial and creative focus are about bringing real objects into the virtual world and virtual objects into the real world.  A brand offering a personalized product with accompanying original digital design in the form of an NFT (non-fungible token), is one commercial possibility. 

As mobile and wearable devices for augmented reality become more accessible with new products launching, these technologies deliver far reaching opportunities for entertainment, leisure, shopping, education, and other information sharing and consumption. Multi-sensory essentials such as smell, taste and touch (haptic) are still in their infancy.  Proprioception (kinaesthesiais), the ability to sense movement, action or location is a vital ongoing area of research, which in the future, will have a powerful impact on entertainment, leisure and education.  In the meantime, spatial awareness technologies such as LiDAR, used for visualising store products in your home, or seeing the complete anatomy in a medical lecture, for example, are more quickly advancing and in commercial use.

Extract: Digital World Predictions 2022

About the Author

Deborah Collier is a strategic and futurist leader in business, digital, media and education. She is founder and President at Digital Skills Authority, a Non-Executive Director and media group CEO. She has delivered digital world and digital business predictions annually for 13-years, which have been featured in a number of national and industry publications.