New paper: On your marks, headset, go! Understanding the building blocks of metaverse realms

The hype around the Metaverse may have subsided, but that doesn’t mean that the belief in the potential of this technology for business has decreased. On the contrary, technology research and consulting firm, Gartner, believes that the combination of Metaverse, Web3 and AI (and especially generative AI) technologies offers numerous possibilities for firms. 

Nevertheless, there is no denying many managers are unclear about what the metaverse is and how to use it, for business purposes.

So, in the paper “On your marks, headset, go! Understanding the building blocks of metaverse realms”, recently published in Business Horizons, Brendan James Keegan, Ian P. McCarthy, Jan Kietzmann and I go back to basics.

In the paper, we look at how the core functionalities of social media platforms, as defined in the classic social media honeycomb model, and apply them to metaverse technology to explain how it can afford specific immersive experiences for users and organizations entering this space. Figure 1 shows this application.

Figure 1– The Metaverse Honeycomb

Metaverse realms are not all the same, however. Just like Instagram has very different functionalities from, say, LinkedIn, which make it more suitable for one-to-many broadcasting than one-to-one interactions, so do metaverse realms vary from each other. For instance, we can distinguish between closed and open metaverse realms. Thus, managers can apply our metaverse honeycomb classification to specific realms to identify their respective strengths and weaknesses and decide which one is most suitable for their specific marketing goals.

In the paper, we exemplify the application of the metaverse honeycomb by comparing Roblox and Decentraland. Here is an excerpt from the paper: 

“In Roblox (Figure 2), the functionalities of identity and group drive the metaverse realm experience. Identity is important because users are required to perform various avatar tasks in each realm, equivalent to a gaming environment. This impacts how users share and engage in groups, as team events are commonplace. For instance, when Roblox partnered with Wimbledon tennis to create the WimbleWorld realm, users competed to win tokens through gameplay with other users or through interaction with tennis professionals such as Andy Murray. Furthermore, this realm represents a highly interactive environment where user interaction and engagement lend themselves to branded campaigns focused on community development as the anticipated goal.

Figure 3 presents the honeycomb for the Decentraland realm. Identity, sharing and reputation drive the experience in this realm. Identity is essential because users are regarded by their asset acquisitions in the realm. This impacts how users share and engage in groups, as the level of engagement with other users does not match a competitive team gameplay environment. For instance, the fashion industry widely hailed the Metaverse Fashion Week on Decentraland. However, it was essentially a platform for passively observing fashion items available for sale, with little interaction with the branded metaverse instances such as Gucci. Furthermore, the honeycomb model reveals that this realm is more suited to a brand awareness campaign than Roblox because of the former’s flexibility for asset creation”.

We believe that this paper makes three important contributions:

1. The model can be used to address questions regarding the strategic alignment between metaverse’s technologies and immersive features with market demands.
2. The model can help evaluate a realm’s internal fit, which involves understanding how different realm functionalities interact and align—or fail to do so. 
3. The model can help companies navigate a metaverse realm’s life cycle.

I hope that this paper helps you navigate this exciting but confusing metaverse space. Do let me know your thoughts with a comment below or by getting in contact with me.