Now that we went over the key concepts of the metaverse, let’s go ahead and discuss how to become a part of the metaverse. For average users, it will be as simple as putting on their headsets and using an internet connection. However, you may want to seek a career related to the metaverse, or you may want to start a business and get a bigger slice of the pie before the market gets saturated. Even today, both are attainable goals, and considering the metaverse will influence the future, the time to plan is now.
You have two options if you want to work in the metaverse or start your own business: You can either join the ranks of infrastructure creation, or you can build on it. One is not better than the other, and the choice purely depends on what you find more exciting.
The obvious benefit of working in the metaverse infrastructure is its stability. As of now, the metaverse is being built by tech giants with a crystal clear vision of the foreseeable future. If you choose to work for them, you will not only be working on exciting new technology, but you will also receive competitive pay and benefits. Furthermore, you will be able to gain invaluable experience and know-how during your tenure that will come in handy should you want to start your own business later on.
However, the metaverse is clearly more lucrative when you start a business. Until the metaverse business becomes saturated, you have a great opportunity to become one of the first entrepreneurs to enter it. We will explore the infrastructure and market aspects of the metaverse for career and business opportunities in this chapter. Let us begin by talking about some ways that you can be involved in the metaverse's creation.
Creating the Metaverse
You can work for the metaverse infrastructure in a number of ways. The creation of the metaverse will consist of hardware, software, and content.
Hardware
Despite the fact that hardware is one of the building blocks of the metaverse, it is one of the least discussed. Part of the metaverse is about experiencing 3D environments in the most realistic way possible. Due to current technology, we need external hardware to assist us in doing this. Virtual reality glasses are often associated with Facebook's Oculus, a story of inspiring entrepreneurship in and of itself.
Oculus glasses were first envisioned by Palmer Luckey when he was just 15 years old. This is a great example of how your passion can turn into a billion-dollar business. Luckey was interested in the earliest versions of virtual reality glasses, a curiosity triggered by his fondness for console gaming. Early virtual reality glasses were introduced in the 1980s and 1990s. In those days, they were either too expensive or did not work at all, so they all failed as business models. Luckey started collecting these failed products as a hobby. Little did he know that his hobby would develop into a deep understanding of virtual reality glasses.
He created a Kickstarter campaign to build virtual reality glasses. The idea behind his campaign was to gather money for hardware parts and to create about a hundred virtual reality glasses. The campaign had a modest expectation of $250,000. However, the Kickstarter campaign raised much more than that. Within 24 hours, Luckey raised $680,000. In just three days, that number exceeded a million and caught the eye of game development giants like John Carmack and Gabe Newell. In 2014, they were acquired by Facebook for a whopping $2 billion. It seems that Zuckerberg's Meta was already beginning to boil then.
Luckey’s story teaches us a valuable lesson about entrepreneurship in uncharted territory. First of all, timing plays a big role. Virtual reality glasses weren’t Luckey’s invention. They were invented decades before. What changed was that Luckey had technology behind him to identify what wasn’t working and create what would work. Secondly, it is the idea that matters the most, not necessarily the product itself. Luckey’s affinity for virtual reality led him to success, not his prototype that he put on Kickstarter.
In conclusion, creating a hardware business around the metaverse comes down to the first economics lecture every student has: supply and demand. You need to anticipate the demand and when it will begin. Once the market is ready, supply innovative solutions that are affordable to the vast population. Remember that hardware is the bare minimum a user will need to have to enter the metaverse. Therefore, it will always be essential in the supply chain, and you will have many opportunities to participate.
