Why Wall Street Loves The Metaverse
Fortune India|February 2022
Until Recently, The Idea Of A 3d Immersive Internet Was More Fantasy Than Fact. Now Big Tech Is Going All In, And Goldman Sachs Thinks It’s An $8 Trillion Opportunity. Here’s Why Early Investors Believe The Metaverse Could Be Business’s Next Big Thing.
Bernhard Warner
Why Wall Street Loves The Metaverse

IN THE EARLY AUGHTS, David Baszucki stole the show at his kids’ middle school science fair. The software designer turned entrepreneur brought with him a new invention, a 3Dsimulator project he’d been working on day and night. Yes, the 59-year-old Baszucki is that dad who leans into his geekiness.

The project was based on a program he had created back in the 1980s, a two-dimensional simulator called Interactive Physics. His former company, Knowledge Revolution, licensed it to school districts around the country, where students could use it to simulate science experiments. But the addictive part was building and modeling digital objects—houses, cars, whatever. What’s more, users could take their simulated cars, for example, and crash them into something, and inspect the damage. That’s when a light bulb went off. Users “wanted to go into the worlds they were making,” Baszucki would later recall. Not only that, users wanted their own avatars and the ability to chat with their friends, also represented as avatars. Baszucki and Erik Cassel, a software engineer with whom he worked at Knowledge Revolution, set off to build that world.

Years later at the science fair, a crowd of kids formed around the screen of their early prototype. One by one, they used the simulator to build, play, and interact—and build, play and interact some more. This huddle of excited preteens would serve as a kind of early focus group for what would eventually become Roblox, an immersive virtual world of gamers with a following that has spread far beyond young STEM nerds.

Denne historien er fra February 2022-utgaven av Fortune India.

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Denne historien er fra February 2022-utgaven av Fortune India.

Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.