IFI Insights: Inventing the Metaverse

The Wondrous World of the Metaverse

Understanding something that doesn't yet exist in its fullness is no easy task. For all the recent buzz around the metaverse, the implementation of this ecosystem that blends both real and digital worlds with help from augmented reality technologies is still in its formative years. But the term and concept of a metaverse is nothing new: you might have only just heard of the metaverse recently, but it was first coined 30 years ago by futurist author Neal Stephenson in his book Snow Crash. In the early aughts, there was Second Life, a popular multi-player video game that had users creating avatars, which interacted in a virtual world. Second Life, a forerunner to the metaverse, was all the rage for a while, but flattened out over time.

The computing world is entering the next big era of the internet—a.k.a. Web 3.0—at a moment in history when meeting in virtual spaces is becoming ever more accepted and the idea of transacting in crypto takes shape as having a place in this future (current market rout notwithstanding). As with any technology in the cradle, there will be starts and stops, pivots and shake-outs. The initial metaverse hype has settled down, and now businesses are grappling with how to build it out and how to invest their resources in an increasingly challenging economic environment.

Nobody can say what the prospects of the metaverse will hold or how far out in the future it will fully materialize. Still, companies see the opportunity and are placing wagers now. Investment bank Citi recently predicted a metaverse market at between $8 trillion and $13 trillion by 2030, with some five billion users. Banks JPMorgan Chase and HSBC now have footprints in the metaverse. And, of course, late last year, Facebook rebranded itself as Meta, an unmistakable indication of where CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees the future of the social media company. But while the opportunity may be enormous, figuring out how to make money during the development stage is another story; profits are further down the road. Case in point: Roblox, a game platform company, has millions of users playing in its metaverse but hasn't yet posted any earnings.

One of the best predictors of who the frontrunners are in any nascent technology is patenting activity. That's why IFI CLAIMS, the industry's most trusted patent data provider, asked the team at IALE Tecnología, which helps R&D centers evaluate the competitive intelligence around their technology, to take a look at the invention landscape around the metaverse.

But first a note on patents in the metaverse space: Patent professionals generally use established patent classification systems to restrict searches within specific technologies. Currently, there are no existing classifications specifically associated with metaverse technologies because the area is still in its infancy, and as such, is vague. That said, there is a convergence of various technologies forming this future paradigm of living, working, socializing, and transacting. IALE’s CEO and patent whiz, Enric Escorsa led the review by looking at technologies in both wide-ranging (computing, games) and narrow (cyberspace, virtual economy, human-computer interaction) classification areas. Escorsa tailored a query using a series of key words and defining concepts around the metaverse, as it exists at this time. As such, the search he created is more subjective than most patent searches. His findings, nonetheless, are eye-opening.
Below are the highlights.