I really wanted to dip my toes in the metaverse, but there were always long lines at the booth of South Korean company SK Telecom, which offered a “4D Metaverse” ride at the Mobile World Congress Barcelona (MWC22), one of the world’s biggest connectivity events. The lucky visitors were sitting on the ride wearing virtual reality headsets. It looked like fun.
Metaverse was one of the most discussed topics at this year’s MWC. Since it is still in an early stage, there are a lot of experiments and a lot of guessing going on. The metaverse is certainly not going to happen overnight. Several big tech companies, such as Meta, Nvidia, Apple and Google, and even more small firms have already been working on projects to tap into the metaverse, which is expected to change fundamentally how we meet, work, learn, shop, create and entertain. In the next ten years, Meta (formerly Facebook) aims to bring in a billion people to the metaverse and drive hundreds of billions of dollars to the ecosystem that is supporting it.
As I couldn’t get on that cool ride, I attended a session titled ‘What’s Meta?’ instead.
How Industry Leaders Define the Metaverse
Leading voices in the space describe the metaverse as the next evolution of the internet—one built around immersive, shared digital environments. Chris Weasler, who leads special initiatives at Meta Connectivity, explained it as a new internet layer where people can interact, create, and explore together in virtual spaces, regardless of physical location. A key element, he emphasized, is the sense of presence—the feeling of truly being with others, even at a distance—while still complementing, not replacing, real-world interactions.
He also highlighted that, much like today’s internet, the metaverse will not be controlled by a single entity. Instead, it should be developed as an open and interoperable ecosystem, accessible to a broad global audience.
Cathy Hackl, often referred to as the “godmother of the metaverse,” described it as the next stage of the mobile internet. In her view, it revolves around shared experiences that span both virtual and physical environments, powered by a wide range of technologies and built collaboratively by multiple companies.
According to Hackl, the metaverse will unlock entirely new economic opportunities. It is expected to create new job categories, introduce fresh revenue streams, and bridge the gap between digital and physical worlds. It will also empower creators to monetize their work—particularly through digital assets like NFTs—while enabling innovations such as machine-readable environments, autonomous systems, and new forms of interaction between humans and technology.
Additionally, the metaverse is set to transform commerce by introducing new models, including virtual-to-physical and physical-to-virtual transactions, alongside existing digital and physical frameworks. This shift will redefine customer journeys and open up entirely new engagement channels.
Telecommunications providers are expected to play a crucial role in this transformation. The infrastructure required—such as 5G networks, higher data speeds, lower latency, and expanded device connectivity—will be essential to support the scale and performance demands of the metaverse.
Nvidia has been working on the Omniverse platform, an immersive 3D shared virtual world that is based on the laws of physics, for quite a few years now. Even though this world is photorealistic, it is much more than gaming, said Ronnie Vasishta, Senior VP for telecom at Nvidia at the session. Omniverse is an open platform built for virtual collaboration and real-time physically accurate simulation.
Omniverse will create and trigger an explosion of new opportunities across industries when it comes to innovation, Vasishta said. The growth and creation of virtual worlds are connecting millions of artists from around the world. In the industrial sector, AI and digital twin representation of supply chains, as well as scenario planning, could be used to improve the efficiencies of supply chains. Think putting distribution centers and warehouses into the virtual world and doing scenario planning there before you deploy it in the physical world!
Nvidia has been working with both virtual worlds and AI frameworks for quite a long time now. When you are driving an autonomous car, for instance, it is based on Nvidia’s training done for millions of miles of high traffic, low traffic, different weather systems, all in the Omniverse. So when that car is eventually deployed, it is done so with a high degree of certainty and safety. Carmaker BMW, for instance, is using Omniverse to design, plan and operate its future factories virtually before anything is built in the physical world. Ericsson is also using Omniverse to build digital twins of cities to help it understand how a 5G wireless signal propagates. Moreover, languages and language understanding were all being trained in the virtual world first.
The era of digital twins is upon us already, according to Vashista. Nvidia is creating a digital twin of the Earth in the Omniverse, which will be probably able to predict climate change in a few years. The Twin Earth allows scientists to interactively analyze weather and climate data in 3D.
“With web 3.0 we can create a bridge between virtual and physical worlds,” said Vasishta. “We can put on a pair of glasses, a headset, an augmented reality overlay on a smartphone and all of a sudden we are in that virtual world. With haptics, we will have the ability to feel in virtual worlds. We are enabling some of these capabilities with the convergence of telecommunication and 5G, where you have bandwidth and latency challenges to overcome. These are going to be game-changers for the virtual world.”
Further reading:
What’s next for crypto? – MWC22 Conference Notes
Fintech trends in 2022 – MWC22 Conference Notes
What is NFT? – MWC22 Conference Notes