A future with the metaverse
The end result of what the metaverse will look like is still being debated but it will could range from using augmented reality to add a virtual layer over the physical world to fully immersive virtual reality headsets to enter a total virtual replica of the world, and day-to-day life.
It’s likely that digital assets will fuel the metaverse micro-economies that will be created within different platforms. The problem is, as customer adoption grows and with more new platforms including their own tokens, managing digital money is going to be increasingly more complex.
Regardless of its final form the metaverse will have advantages over our physical world. After all, the physical world has constraints on where we can go, what we can do and the things we can build. We know financial constraints prevent people from owning certain objects, socialising with friends and traveling to new places. The benefit of the metaverse will be the ability to interact with an environment where these constraints are reduced, or even non-existent.
It’s easy to see how, for some participants, the metaverse will offer the opportunity to achieve more than they could in the real world, enabling better, faster and more cost effective outcomes – imagine being able to travel anywhere on earth for less and without increasing your carbon footprint, for example. The metaverse, then, may well offer a solution to help breakdown social, geographical and financial barriers through its decentralised approach and content owner driven economy.
However, we must be wary of the some of the downfalls of the internet and learn with hindsight from those mistakes. Issues around Identity and knowing who you are speaking to in these spaces is a key point of concern. When integrating AI and avatars confirming the intensions and identity of different actors needs to be considered as it opens possibilities for fraud, bullying and inappropriate content. Therefore, as regulation is being created around this concept, we must build safety measures to prevent this from occurring.
Looking ahead
Looking ahead, the creation of the metaverse will require a large amount of upskilling for both our colleagues and our customers. This will include technology skills, adapting different business areas to change and new ways of communication.
Given all of this, we’re investing more than £3 billion in our people, technology and data and upskilling and recruiting in this rapidly changing field to ensure we attract – and importantly keep – the right technology talent. Indeed, at Lloyds Banking Group, we’re constantly looking for emerging technologies that provide opportunities for innovative new products and services or help us improve our internal ways of working with the purpose of helping our customers and clients.
And over the next few weeks, months and years, we also hope to bolster our understanding of how these technologies underpinning the metaverse can be integrated with our current underlying architecture and how it would change our current products and services. That way, we can be prepared for the future with the metaverse, so we can protect, educate and provide better offerings for our customers, clients and colleagues.
