The future technologies we can not put off until tomorrow: The Metaverse, NFTs and Deepfakes

We had this idea that we were going to be doing a lot more already in these virtual spaces, and it feels like 2022 may be where we are beginning to see this stuff come to some fruition. None of it is particularly new. Let me give you this example. There is a video easily found by a search from the US shopping chain, Walmart, giving a sense of what shopping in the Metaverse might be like in the future.  

We see a shopper/user travelling around a virtual experience, talking to a synthetic avatar who is guiding us. You would think this is quite recent. Actually, this video is from 2017 and then it went no further, there was no advancement whatsoever. 

Virtual worlds are not a new thing. Second life, The Sims, we’ve all played around with them and more recently, you’re probably much more familiar with watching kids play Fortnite or Call of Duty. 

These are all ‘Metaverses’ and they ladder up into a broader train, which is maybe a more useful way of framing it – we are talking about Web 3. 

Let’s take a quick tour of the history of the internet. 

First, we had the early days of technology used by governments, we had programs and we were connected through data that was predominantly cables. The first real generation was the browser with websites, and we had servers and then more lately, over the past couple of decades, we have had bits of glass and plastic that we carry around with us since the mobile revolution began.  

This new Metaverse revolution of technology is what is coming for us next. 

It is made up of a few different components. XR, a mixed reality. You will hear Augmented Reality, AR, you’ll hear Virtual Reality, VR. We are going to go with a mix. XR. Mixed reality. This is the end of keyboards and mice, or glass and thumbs. Instead, moving entirely to virtual environments that we end up wearing in some way. AI is the logic that manages all of it, taking in many more senses and making predicted judgements on how we will interact with the spaces and then the blockchain is the underpinning of many of these new services. Particularly, as we think about the more centralised Metaverses. The tipping point has been the Augmented Reality and virtual reality headsets. Think Oculus, now most recently named Meta Quest 2. There was a moment over Christmas 2021 where everyone thought that suddenly everyone had gone out and purchased one of these because the Oculus app was top of the iTunes app store and then it dwindled away very quickly after that. 

So, we have these Metaverses, that are centralised and owned by the likes of Facebook, slash Meta. (You can see what they are going for there) and obviously Microsoft and others. 

So, this is where Microsoft and Co seem to think we’re heading and there are already virtual Metaverses for all sorts of things. The largest church in America, LifeChurch.TV has hosted their Metaverse church services on Sundays, where you can go in as a Metaverse avatar and watch a live worship service with other people and chat alongside them. 

You can go into the virtual coffee shop before and after to have discussions with people. It is going to change the way in which we meet together and not just in the professional sense but in all sorts of different ways.  

Of course, virtual is a hard thing to get our heads around. You have to wear it on your head and so there’s a high likelihood that this is actually going to be a lot more augmented than virtual reality. Ray-Ban spectacles, in collaboration with Meta, have now been developed which have a little camera on the top that allows you to get digitalisation.

The future versions of these will be living with digital objects and hanging out in these spaces and playing or socialising with digital experiences overlaid upon the real world and also intellectual world and be reliant on a way of managing and exchanging data. This leads us to the world of NFTs which will be one of the core parts of managing these Metaverse experiences. For good reason.

NFTs have made the press for the big-money deals and glamour more than their practical uses. You could join a  virtual club with celebrities to hang out with cool people – a possible outcome should you pay out for an NFT. Some of them have some interesting leverage such as appearing on podcasts which go out to a wide audience and helping NFT owners to build their own social following. 

Some of these contracts that are being set up have some interesting opportunities indeed. This is also true in the world of business where we are beginning to see smart contracts, blockchain and NFTs. 

A real example of this is a company called Imparta which is beginning to produce employment contracts entirely on the blockchain. When a job seeker wants to be employed, they would have their own digital certificate and their own employment passport, essentially, a version of their CV, plus their credentials. Maybe some biometric data to prove who they are as well. The job seeker can then validate that via a smart contract with the employer, it gets logged on the blockchain and the disclosure of that information is made public and recorded for all time. Helpful, particularly if there’s a tribunal down the line, or just to pass on employment history proof in the next company along the line. 

This is an interesting opportunity to talk about deepfakes, which will also feature in this next revolution. Not so much in recent times when we have been stuck at home, but we are used to putting on these different looks in places that we are going to be, such as the office or if we go to a restaurant, but, of course, when you are living in a Metaverse world, you don’t need a different look. Or do you? Virtual avatars that look the same for all interactions? Perhaps we don’t necessarily want our avatars to be wearing the same if we wander into the virtual church service on Sunday as we do going into a big business meeting or playing virtual volleyball with somebody. We are going to see an evolution of these avatars in many ways.

Dolce and Gabbana recently held a virtual fashion show not to view the latest in real-world clothing designs, but to showcase digital avatars.

We think of avatars as being very low polygon, cartoon-like and basic. Easy to render. But what we are going to see over time is, as more time is spent in the Metaverse, a deeper and more interesting space is going to emerge where we are going to have a lot more attention paid to what we look like and how we sound. An interesting evolution here is the development of virtual voices and virtual audio which will and already is emerging in things like call centre technology. Synthetic voices, essentially, digital deepfake voices can be created in a matter of just a few minutes. Synthetic copies of a real voice to scale for customer service sounds useful but will again come with security and misuse concerns. Especially in the voice authentication space.

This again will connect with the world of NFTs. You see, in the Metaverse everything is synthetic. The one thing that is live and in person at that moment is your voice.

If we are going to begin using these things for tasks like banking transactions, taking meetings, holding town halls and so much more, one of the important things we need to know, is that the voices we hear from one another are real.

When we live in a world where our image and our voice can be deepfaked, how are we going to be able to prove that our voice is our voice? And, if anything can be faked, surely we will start to question reality.

We’re going to see an evolution and we’ve already seen a couple of projects start recently on this with the exchanges of non-fungible voices. Not just non-fungible tokens because we are going to need a way to prove the ownership of our own voices in the Metaverse.