The promise of Web3 and the Metaverse echoes the launch of the internet in the mid-1990s. But along with the promise of potentially a multi-trillion dollar global marketplace leveraging immersive technology to evolve the “web” experience has come a new wave of “what-ifs.”
Those elements may drive excitement but may ignore the ultimate risks of moving large enterprises into new technologies and about when and how this revolution will unfold.
Lori H. Schwartz, CEO and principal of experiential marketing firm StoryTech and co-chair of the Web3 Council, NAB Show, is among many industry executives trying to make sense of it all.
The hype around the metaverse Web3 is “literally a party for curators because curators are all about creating an umbrella of understanding around topics and delivering that content in some form,” she said Sept. 21 at the Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES).
“And right now there is so much hype and so much hyperbole” about Web3, the metaverse and non-fungible tokens (NFTs),” she said during the session “Web3 & the Metaverse – What’s Real & What’s Not.”
“There’s always a couple of topics like that every couple of years that you could swing a dead cat and you’ll hit the word metaverse,” she joked. “In fact, I used to play a drinking game a couple months ago and whenever somebody said metaverse you did a shot and let’s just say I got pretty wasted.”
With “these expressions, the hype, all of it, it’s hard to figure out what’s real,” she told attendees.
During the session, she led attendees through the world of the metaverse and Web3 “as a curator because I’m working with a lot of industry associations,” and explained “what’s real and how you should be thinking about it too,” she said.
Noting that Web3 is just a “new iteration of the worldwide web,” she explained: “Basically at the heart, it’s the next version of everything and what it’s really about is decentralization.”
Along with blockchain-based technologies,” it’s also about “artificial intelligence (AI) helping to empower more intelligence and more adaptive applications; it’s all these things that are happening in our world right now, 5g as well – all these behaviors.”
She added: “Everything that’s being driven is all coming under this umbrella of Web3. And I want to just say right now that the metaverse, NFTs and all these other buzzwords are tactics inside of this larger Web3 environment.”
Meanwhile, although “everyone loves to throw around metaverse and Web3 together,” she stressed that Wedb3 is “just the next version of the internet,” while “the metaverse is an execution that becomes an example of Web3 inside a virtual environment.”
Blockchain, NFTs, the metaverse, languages are all “tools in the toolkit” for M&E companies, she said. “But it gets … very overwhelming because every article you read just uses two words: metaverse and NFT, and it makes me crazy.”
She told attendees: “If you walk away with anything today, I want you to go, ‘okay, what’s my strategy for moving forward.’”
The Entertainment Evolution Symposium (EES) was presented by the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School Institute for Entertainment, Media and Sports (IEMS) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and was sponsored by Iron Mountain, Signiant, Whip Media, Atos, Fortinet, FPT Software, invenioLSI, Perforce, Vision Media, and EIDR.