Lorenz Beringer, Founder & CEO of the digital consultancy Lobeco, does not yet see great relevance for the Metaverse in Germany.
Shutterstock/thinkhub studio
Lorenz Beringer, Founder & CEO of the digital consultancy Lobeco, does not yet see great relevance for the Metaverse in Germany.
Shutterstock/thinkhub studio
At this year’s sports trade conference of SAZsport, sister medium of INTERNET WORLD, Lorenz Beringer, founder and CEO of digital consultancy Lobeco, explained what the metaverse actually is and classifies its relevance to business and trade.
Last October, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that he would rename the social media platform Facebook Meta and move forward with the strategy of having his own Metaverse platform. Since then, the media has been inundated with reports about the Metaverse.
Metaverse – what is it anyway?
Despite the media attention, the majority of people in Germany are probably not yet aware of what the Metaverse is supposed to be, let alone how to join it. Lorenz Beringer, founder and CEO of the digital consultancy Lobeco, gave insight into this on November 3, 2022 at the sports conference of the INTERNET WORLD sister medium SAZsport.
The term metaverse initially only describes a virtual world with digital avatars and virtual objects. This world can be experienced through VR goggles or digital end devices such as desktops or smartphones. The metaverse is a general term that is not tied to a platform or a company. However, since Facebook’s renaming, according to Beringer, many people would equate the Meta company with the Metaverse. Facebook even has its own metaverse called Horizon World, other metaverses are Decentraland, Spatial, Roblox or Sandbox.
Relevance for Germany
An international company like Nike, Puma, Samsung, Adidas, Ikea, Gucci, L’Oreal etc. enters such a metaverse almost daily. There are different types of platforms. Meta’s Horizon platform is a core metaverse owned by only one company. “Everything that is offered there is controlled by a company,” explains Beringer. Decentraland, on the other hand, is a decentralized metaverse where users can purchase digital land and design accordingly.
In the metaverse, brands and companies can map digital worlds where users can buy artwork, play games, hang out with friends, or even try on clothes, for example. Beringer defines a total of six areas of use: Gaming & Entertainment, Investments & Cryptocurrency, Work & Connect, Sports, Art, and Business.
The usage figures in Germany and worldwide are still limited. Apart from best-practice examples such as the Fifa World Cup 2022, many platforms are only seeing low usage rates of a few thousand people per day worldwide. In comparison: the social media platform Instagram registers about 500 million users worldwide every day. “For the majority of people, the metaverse is not yet relevant, although 40 percent of Germans already indicate that they can imagine using the metaverse,” says Behringer. So companies should definitely keep an eye on the platforms.
Star director Steven Spielberg presented Ready Player One in 2018, a film dedicated to the metaverse and virtual reality. The movie trailer shows what something like this could look like in the future.
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