Finding the Metaverse

from Casino Life Issue 147 Volume 17

New Dimensions

By Raymond Chan

he metaverse is definitely having a

Tmoment these days, as when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the world about his ambitious new initiative. Originating in Snow Crash, a Neal Stephenson 1992 sci-fi novel, “metaverse” refers to a common world of physical, augmented and virtual reality in a shared online space. It is supposed to be the successor to the mobile internet, as stated by the Facebook CEO and effectively transition from people seeing Facebook as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.

Metaverse isn’t just virtual reality. It’s going to be accessible across different computing platforms like virtual and augmented reality, and also traditional websites, alongside mobile devices and game consoles. The metaverse is going to start primarily for gaming, and entertainment is clearly going to be a big part of it. It probably is going to resemble some kind of a hybrid between the social platforms and an environment where we can embody ourselves in it for gaming. Simply said, a realized metaverse could be the next best thing for our industry to grow upon.

No doubt that the metaverse will bring enormous opportunity to individual game creators and artists as well; to individuals who want to build and run games. With the power of what virtual and augmented reality can do, the metaverse is going to help people experience more naturally the way that we’re made to interact – and the interactions will be much richer and feel more real because you have a sense of being in a space together.

The metaverse is not one for a specific company to build, and it has to have the sense of interoperability and portability. Players should have their own avatar

About Raymond Chan

Raymond is an engineer, tech founder and venture partner. He co-founded Alphamirai Lab and Alphaslot Foundation to help the daring build emerging startups. Previously, Raymond cofounded two tech-savvy gaming companies, served as CEO to lead an in-depth customer intelligence and regulatory technology business from 2007-18. Earlier in his career, Raymond was part of the founding data science team for E*TRADE Financial, which was later acquired by Morgan Stanley. He played a key role in the design of the TiVo customer intelligence system for the Internet unicorn in Silicon Valley. The metaverse is not one

for a specific company to build, and it has to have the sense of interoperability and portability. “ Players should have their own avatar and digital goods, and you don’t want to just be stuck within one company’s creations. More importantly (and eventually), many people will be working in and creating content for the spaces, the virtual goods, or doing related work inside the spaces and keeping it running. This is going to be a huge new economy.”

and digital goods, and you don’t want to just be stuck within one company’s creations. More importantly (and eventually), many people will be working in and creating content for the spaces, the virtual goods, or doing related work inside the spaces and keeping it running. This is going to be a huge new economy.

Every new ecosystem starts with a chicken-and-theegg problem: The supply won’t join the system unless there’s a demand. And demand is challenging to prove without real supply. Initially, a very large amount of capital would come from NFT investments which can directly benefit from the growth of the metaverse. As a balance, some investment could also come from the public sector, with startups and gaming operators filling in a good amount of this as well.

The metaverse creates a great deal of economic opportunity where game developers and operators around the world can be doing creative work that is more inspiring than the entertainment values we are already bringing to the market today. I’m really looking forward to playing some role in building out this next chapter for the Internet.