What impact will the evolution of the Metaverse have on technology and product strategies:

The metaverse will not mature before 2030 . But the potential to change the way individuals and organizations interact with each other and with the world around them is so great that technology product and service providers need to strategize now. Gartner recommends starting now to assess business opportunities in interactions, content (interoperability), and infrastructure.

Gartner predicts that the metaverse will evolve through three overlapping stages: advanced, advanced, and mature. Technology Product Leaders should assess the growth and trajectory of emerging technologies and emerging trends that enable the Metaverse experience at each stage of strategy development.

As in previous periods of significant technological advancement, such as the industrial revolution, the mainframe era, the PC era, the mobile era, new types of technology providers will replace traditional ones. There is a possibility. Therefore, any organization should aim to secure a competitive position as the situation evolves.

Strategic Metaverse Goals for Technology Product Leaders

Gartner believes that there will eventually be one Metaverse, just as there is only one Internet. No single company will own/control/develop all the necessary technology or build their own metaverse or entire metaverse.

Therefore, the goal for technology product leaders is to understand the metaverse's evolutionary trajectory and take the following key steps to address it.

Building Metaverse Products/Solutions : Create innovation pipelines based on emerging technologies such as spatial computing, rather than single “killer apps” .

Identify Metaverse-inspired business opportunities : Integrate existing high-value use cases such as games, wayfinding/navigation apps, and virtual reality (VR)/augmented reality (AR) experiences with your products/services. Evaluate relationships.

Expand collaboration to support the Metaverse experience : Actively engage (or create) an ecosystem of standards, content, and service delivery partners to address the evolving elements of the Metaverse.

Readiness for business model transformation : Evaluate trends such as super apps, composable pricing, and API monetization.

Evolution of products/services at each stage of the metaverse

Built for modern devices, immersive content is made accessible via the Metaverse and complemented by purpose-designed content. Along with this, many existing technologies will be supported and eventually incorporated by the Metaverse solution.

The current metaverse is in its early advanced stages. So, in effect, we are developing a "pre-metaverse" solution. Each stage presents business opportunities to provide interaction functionality, content, and infrastructure in the following areas:

Technologies (features) needed to build the metaverse

market characteristics. This is turned upside down in a fully peer-to-peer (P2P) environment.

Products and services required to realize the attributes of a fully functioning metaverse and critical to enabling new markets and business models

Evolution of the metaverse takes time. However, market leaders will not wait for the metaverse to mature and will aggressively target future business opportunities now.

Go-to-market opportunities at each stage of the metaverse

For technology product and service leaders, different types of business opportunities exist in the interaction/interface, content, and infrastructure layers, depending on the evolutionary stage of the metaverse.

Phase 1: Advanced Metaverse

Until 2024, direct business opportunities will be limited. The market has begun to explore and experiment with long-term high-value applications and use cases. Many of the future use cases that demonstrate the potential value of the Metaverse are inspired by existing use cases (AR for field work, VR for high impact scenarios) and offer progressively higher value.

Most business opportunities are driven by technologies that are not directly/explicitly intended to create a metaverse, such as robotics or environment mapping for autonomous navigation. Still, at a later stage, it will contribute to the combination trend.

The interface layer, where the barriers to entry are relatively low, is likely to see the most movement. However, many vendors and companies will cling to the "killer app" idea, erroneously assuming that there are specific applications and use cases that would inspire widespread adoption.

Phase 2: Advanced Metaverse

From 2024 to 2027, the direct business opportunities for the metaverse will increase. Much of it will be focused on the content layer, the data , information, and underpinnings (other than the infrastructure) of the metaverse itself. For example, tools and technologies to map and understand the physical environment, and technologies to democratize the creation of virtual environments.

Other examples include technologies for analyzing physical objects, digital content, and physical-digital relationships and processes. This new content, interaction with content, interaction between content, and understanding of content will drive technology innovation through early combinations. These innovations will inspire new business models to support new applications and interactions. At the end of this phase, we expect to see opportunities for early metaverse-specific infrastructure such as Spatial Web interoperability frameworks, protocols and registries.

Phase 3: Mature Metaverse

After 2028, the vision and potential of the Metaverse will become clearer and more manageable for both organizations and individual users. Advances will build on the exciting use cases and applications identified in Phase 2 and will be enhanced by the maturation of neighboring technologies (5G, computer vision, immersive technologies, digital currency , etc.).

As such, there will be a broader understanding of the system aspects and capabilities necessary to achieve a mature metaverse. This creates a huge business opportunity in the infrastructure layer, with vendors competing to build the backbone of systems that have the potential to be innovative and ubiquitous.