No Metaverse Without Openness

The term “Metaverse” has been gaining in populary in the last couple of months, and just as well – it’s an idea whose time has come. What isn’t as clear is what the Metaverse should be. Big companies like Facbook are more-or-less forcibly getting on the train to save or enhance their brands, often without a clear vision of what they should be building.

Here is what we are building in Equinox Vision, and it’s very much in line with descriptions given by Matthew Ball and Tony Parisi.

The Metaverse is about interfaces

New tech is cool, that goes without saying. However, for ideas and products to actually be useful and accepted, they also must be useful in a particular way – they must solve problems and provide new opportunities. While there’s a lot to be said about the current state of the Internet, it evolved this way exactly because it’s solving the needs of different groups of people in different ways. Ignoring that and simply building something brand new from scratch isn’t only inefficient, it’s very likely impossible.

We want new and better interfaces:

• … connecting people
• … connecting businesses
• … connecting systems which are themselves interfaces to people and businesses

Because of that, whatever Metaverse is, it must be open. It must be built from open APIs, protocols, schemas and frameworks which enable everyone to participate.

The Equinox Metaverse is exactly that: an open platform which can, and should, be used by third party businesses to do their business. They already have a ton of systems which are already working – they’re just somethimes not connected enough. The Metaverse must become a part of their sales funnels, CRM and ERP processes, and it must provide value while doing so.

Augmented Reality is an important part of the Metaverse

But jut slapping AR onto something doesn’t make that a part of the Metaverse – there needs to be an open platform as a supstrate for connecting different systems – and only after that is done, the AR is here to make the final interface – the one to the people accessing the system.

Since the founding of Equinox Vision in 2019, one important goal for us continues to be that we are creating the future where information is integrated with real-world processes. All our architecture is geared up to provide connectivity to third party systems. Equinox is here to:

• Bridge communication between businesses
• Maintain the concept of personal identity and personal data
• Interface personal identity and personal data with business needs
• Implement business activities in a more approachable, graphical way with AR

In this list, AR is deliberately at the end – while it’s technologically a bleeding-edge concept, it exists only to facilitate all the points which come before it. This is because AR is much more than just an entertainment or niche technology. We believe the current state of it is similar to the early web: everything can be plugged into it, and what’s lacking are the tools and platforms to do so. The Equinox Metaverse is exactly that tool and that platform.

The future is both gamified and entertaining, but it MUST be more interactive

Did you know that over 30 billion hours have been spent in Roblox last year? And incidentally, 30 billion kilometers have been walked through in Pokemon Go since its inception. Who does that? It’s very likely you don’t, so who does?

The users of the Equinox Metaverse do that. Here’s a simple example of what we are facilitating:

Imagine seeing Darth Vader walking in front of a shopping mall. You approach him and he does a light sabre demo, after which you two have a little chat, ending up with you buying a ticket to the latest franchise movie and taking a selfie with him. Fine and dandy, but look what’s involved in that interaction:

• A marketing campaign – a movie is being advertised by its character in AR
• Artificial intelligence – depending on the complexity of interaction, the movie character might be driven by a complex chatbot
• Interactive multimedia – bordering on gamification, the interaction between the player and the movie character is an interaction between a player and the brand
• A point of sale – the AR character itself becomes a point of sale
• Interfacing to business systems – to make the sale work, other systems need to be contacted and made to work together (choose a seat, buy popcorns?)
• Becoming a part of the sales funnel – the player becomes a part of the sales funnel, depending on their privacy settings
• Integration into the social networking world – at the very least by sharing your selfie, and expanding into social gaming and shared multimedia experiences

There’s so much going on and this is just a small slice of what we mean when we talk about the Equinox Multiverse, and a demonstration of why it absolutley must be an open system – every business will want to handle one or more of the above points in their own way.

We would be glad to hear your thoughts about these ideas! Write us at info@equinox.vision.