How Google and Epic think of the Metaverse

Image: Epic Games

Epic boss Tim Sweeney is an advocate for the Metaverse and sees it as a place for digital and social entertainment. Google boss Sundar Pichai is thinking in another direction.

Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the Metaverse hype and put the rest of the tech industry in a predicament: Jump on the Metaverse bandwagon or come up with an alternative vision for the internet of the future? You can find some metaverse definitions from industry giants behind the link.

Epic boss Tim Sweeney sees the Metaverse as a fun social platform

Zuckerberg may have brought the Metaverse to the public’s attention, but Epic boss Tim Sweeney has been talking about it for years. As far back as 2016, when Facebook really got started with VR, it was furious that Facebook wasn’t allowed to control the metaverse. In May 2017, Sweeney predicted that the 3D VR metaverse was “three years away”.

Sweeney’s 2017 vision has not been realized, but his approaches have at least matured: for Sweeney, 3D social entertainment worlds such as “Fortnite”, “Roblox” or “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds” are examples of metaverses, says the boss of Epic Bloomberg.

Now it’s growing rapidly: “The next three years will be crucial for all emerging companies in the Metaverse such as Epic, Roblox, Microsoft and Facebook. It’s a kind of race to reach 1 billion users , and whoever reaches 1 billion users first is the supposed leader who sets the standards.

With the Unreal 3D construction kit from his company Epic, Sweeney wants to provide the building blocks for the Metaverse, which Sweeney says could become “part of the global trillion-dollar economy” in the coming decades.

Sweeney is certain that the Metaverse cannot be attributed to a single company: “The Metaverse is a term like the Internet. No company can own it.

Google relies on ambient computing and a bit of augmented reality

Google CEO Sundar Pichai continues to avoid the metaverse debate. He’s excited “for the future of immersive computing, ambient computing, and augmented reality,” which belongs to the evolution of the internet, not just one company.

Like Niantic boss John Hanke, Pichai sees the Metaverse as an immersive augmented reality extension of current computing systems, and he also sees application scenarios for virtual interactive worlds. Google recently founded Google Labs, which aims to bring together augmented reality, virtual reality, ambient computing and new computing technologies in general.

Pichai sees potential for further development of Google’s business model, particularly in conversations with computers and “multimodal experiences” via Google Search – ultimately the next evolutionary stage of Google’s current commodity search. Google.

“People will want radically more conversational experiences. They will want what we call multimodal experiences. You can talk to research. They look at something and ask what the relevant information is. The ability to adapt to all of this and scale research will continue to be the greatest opportunity in the future.

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