The theory says that people will stay in virtual worlds longer and longer.
Sony announced late last year that it has partnered with Manchester City to create a digital replica of the team's local Etihad stadium that fans around the world can visit virtually.
Investors said but the sound of football being absorbed into the Metaverse was deafening.
Companies exhibiting at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week expect an equally epic display of their offerings.
Among the contenders is Samsung, which will offer consumers the opportunity to decorate imaginary homes with digital versions of its devices.
"It's no longer a fad, but an established future trend," Samsung said of the Metaverse.
As another speaker put it, the metaverse, an umbrella term for the theory that people will spend an increasing part of their lives in increasingly immersive virtual worlds, lacks a sufficiently precise definition to claim they are an invertible game.
But for many, the parameters are already clear enough to predict strong demand for certain products.
In particular, said the manager of a large global tech fund, 2022 could mark the first year in which investors, after decades of disappointment, considered virtual reality headsets more seriously.
“Investors need to think about the metaverse as nothing less than the digitization of human activity and the disruption of everything that hasn’t yet been disrupted,” said Simon Powell, an equity strategist at US investment bank Jefferies.
He noted that metaverse projects such as that between Sony and Manchester City would join a near-constant stream of real-world activities mirrored in a virtual space.
The process, he stated, could in the long run require extra processors, hugely extra computing power, and wearable gadgets that could pressure a wave of hardware call for akin to the early years of smartphones.
The manufacturers of additives together with semiconductors, servers, sensors, cameras, and presentations stand to benefit.
“Think again to the early days of the mass-marketplace net funding gold rush. The great bets in the ones first levels have been at the hardware – the alternatives and shovels,” stated Powell.
Apple’s $three trillion (€2.6 billion) marketplace valuation, brought Powell, may already be fuelled with the aid of using hypothesis it changed into near unveiling a headset as modern to purchaser tech because of the unique iPhone.
For consumers, the kinds of hardware purchases they make will depend upon how they use the metaverse – whether or not for digital places of work or to wait for stay concert events carried out inside video games, traders stated.
How immersive the metaverse can emerge will depend upon the great of the digital fact involved, stated Choi of VIP Research and Management.
“3-d TVs have been released to a whole lot of fanfare however call for the product has fizzled. The metaverse calls for greater upgraded pix generation to beautify the feel of fact.
For example, the metaverse enjoy supplied through Naver’s Zepeto platform doesn’t experience actual sufficient yet,” he added.
Raw computing power
The significant rise in the share prices of US chipmaker Nvidia and Taiwan’s TSMC suggested that a metaverse-driven bet on demand for raw computing power and cloud storage was already getting crowded, said tech analyst Damian Thong at Macquarie in Tokyo.
Social media
Arthur Lai, a tech analyst at Citigroup, said investors needed to accept that the metaverse would substantially affect the way people consumed social media and entertainment and interacted with one another.
Smartphone, PC, and physical interactions could be replaced once tech sensitivity to voices, eyeball movements, and gestures advanced and headsets shed their reputation as “stupid and heavy”.
But that won't happen right away. Even according to the most optimistic manufacturers, the headphone market will lag behind smartphones for years, Lai said.
"But it's not about virtual reality versus smartphone. This is a general movement in which smarter devices are becoming increasingly complementary. There are several theories about what type of metaverse experience would ultimately dominate.
Metaverse experiences can span a range from virtual reality to augmented reality, mixed reality, and augmented reality (XR), from content that is completely synthetic to synthetic content that interacts with reality.
Either way, Lai said, investors looking for component manufacturers should expect at least 15 cameras and sensors to be mounted on future generations of headphones.
Long-running times, a major hurdle with current products. Names featured include Meta's Oculus series, Sony's micro OLED displays that analysts hope will be critical to Apple's future glasses or eyewear, and Taiwanese optical lens maker. Genius said, Lai.