Coke's landmark moment had an absurdist tinge: After all, you can't taste a virtual cola or get a caffeine hit from it. But it would have been almost odder if the company hadn't staked its claim in the metaverse. Over the past year, many high-profile brands have trumpeted their own arrivals in this curious netherworld, from Zara (fashion for avatars) to Ferrari (a digital 296 GTB supercar) to Nike (an entire virtual theme park called Nikeland).
Yet here's the strangest part of this mad rush: The metaverse doesn't exist yet.
Sure, we've got virtual worlds such as Fortnite and Roblox, Minecraft, Decentraland, and many others. But they aren't the metaverse. What the metaverse's true believers are imagining is a universal, global 3D environment that seamlessly merges digital and physical realities possibly via lightweight goggles you wear throughout your waking hours. That might still be many years away, if it comes to be at all.
So what is this metaverse that all these brands (and venture capitalists and startups) are talking about? For one thing, it's a white-hot buzzword that intersects and overlaps with other trendy concepts such as Web3, virtual reality, augmented reality, NFTs, cryptocurrency, and the blockchain. It's an obsession among the leaders of today's most powerful tech companies-most notably Meta, née Facebook, which changed its corporate name to underscore its pivot to colonizing this emerging world. It's also a concept, a potential reinvention of our relationship with technology that some see as democratizing and others regard as downright creepy.
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Denne historien er fra October 2022-utgaven av Fast Company.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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THE NEW RULES OF BUSINESS TRAVEL
In the era of hybrid teams, everyone is a road warrior-not just sales teams and C-suite execs. It's part of why business travel spending is expected to finally reach, and perhaps surpass, pre-pandemic levels by the end of the year, according to Deloitte. But, as with everything, work trips are not what they were in 2019. From airlines to banks, companies are finding new ways to make business travel easier-and even a little fun.
INTELLIGENT IMPACT
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10/10 - THE 10 MOST INNOVATIVE PEOPLE OF THE LAST 10 YEARS
In honor of Fast Company's 10th Innovation Festival in September, we identified 10 industrious leaders whose groundbreaking efforts defined the past decade in business. We spoke to them about their extraordinary achievements in tech, medicine, entertainment, and more. And we explored how the impact of their work has withstood passing fads, various presidential administrations, a pandemic, and many, many quarterly reports.
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The Fast and the Furious
High prices at McDonald's, Taco Bell, and other chains are sparking consumer revolt.
Lost in Truncation
Lost in Truncation Generative AI was supposed to unleash our creativity. Instead, it became our cultural trash compactor. Welcome to the age of summarization.
Campus Radicals
Welcome to UATX, Austin's new well-funded and controversial anti-woke university.
