Inside the metaverse hype train at MWC 2023

Metaverse hype was hanging like a multicolored fog over the Mobile World Congress (MWC) connectivity trade show in Barcelona this week.
Conference organizer, the GSMA’s, program pitched attendees into a smorgasbord of metaverse-themed discussions — most of which seemed designed to generate maximum FOMO, as a parade of tech evangelists took to the stage in Spain, armed with a new generation of acronyms and luridly colored slide-decks, urging the audience not to sweat the detail of whatever this metaverse thing is (or isn’t). And just focus on monetizing it before someone else does.
Europe’s carriers are fully onboard the technicolor hype machine. At MWC they sought to train the show’s global spotlight onto the role of network infrastructure — arguing their pipes-cum-platforms will be essential connective tissue for all this sexy virtual world building, connecting “everything, everywhere”, as one overly-ambitious show floor slogan put it — and using that logic as a springboard to press EU lawmakers for a radical rethink of how connectivity is funded in the here and now.
The CEOs of Orange, Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom were among those taking to MWC’s keynote stage to sound off about the hard economic realities of running such critical infrastructure. The returns vs investment situation is becoming unsustainable, they warned. Especially if policymakers want them to deliver a truly immersive future and make this metaverse thing happen. Subsidize our network upgrades or the connectivity party is over, was the thinly veiled message to EU lawmakers.
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Enter the metaverse?Hold that thought! A Day 3 MWC keynote session — emblazed with a call-to-action title: ‘Enter the metaverse’ — was teed-up by a moderator in full hype mode. She kicked off by asking the audience if they’d already been in the metaverse. And a solid smattering of hands shot up immediately. Yet her hot take on this (frankly confusing) display was to express disappointment that she couldn’t see lots more affirmatives. Which was discombobulating to say the least. As if we’d somehow wandered into an alternative reality.
The next speaker, from a Web 3.0/NFT startup called Dimple — a self-styled “interactive metaverse platform” with the goal of bringing “Web 3.0 metaverse and digital goods/NFT projects to the mainstream”, one QR-code bearing physical-to-digital teddy bear at a time (don’t ask) — went on to hype the size of the market opportunity by suggesting that looking at AI generated virtual influencers on YouTube or Instagram was somehow a metaverse experience… So, er, confusion seems to be the tech’s strongest certainty at this point.
“We have a definition of the metaverse that it’s ‘the merge’ of the digital with the physical,” said Nokia’s Leslie Shannon, head of trend and innovation scouting for the telecoms kit maker, taking a stab at defining terms on another of the many metaverse panels peppering the MWC23 agenda. “That’s fundamentally it. There’s a lot more you can put in there — I would add real-time,” she expanded before plugging her book (on, you guessed it, the metaverse).
Shannon went on to argue that the metaverse — or metaverses, plural — is not about immersion; rather she suggested the crux is “real-time presence”.
“It’s linking you in your physical reality with information or a person or a place that is physically somewhere else and bringing that to you in your physical reality but not taking you away from that physical reality,” she offered, before coming to a self-induced hard stop (presumably to avoid things getting too confusing again) — but not before sounding a sceptical note over Web 3.0 evangelists trying to shoehorn their stuff into the metaverse. (“There’s some metaverse iterations out there that are kind of [fad or fraud],” she warned. “Not all metaverses are equal.”)
Also speaking on this (McKinsey-sponsored) panel — which, per its moderator, posed the “provocative” question of whether the metaverse is ‘the future, fad or fraud’ — was VR headset maker HTC’s Alvin Wang Graylin, the hardware firm’s China president and global VP of corporate devices.
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