Metaverse Tech Adoption ‘Nascent and Fragmented’: Gartner

A quarter of the world’s population by 2026 will spend at least an hour a day in the metaverse for work, shopping, education and entertainment, predicted Gartner Monday. It defines a metaverse as a “collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical and digital reality,” it said. “Vendors are already building ways for users to replicate their lives in digital worlds,” said Gartner. “Eventually, they will take place in a single environment -- the metaverse -- with multiple destinations across technologies and experiences.” No single vendor will own the metaverse, so Gartner expects it “to have a virtual economy enabled by digital currencies and nonfungible tokens,” it said. “The metaverse will impact every business that consumers interact with every day,” but adoption of metaverse technologies is “nascent and fragmented,” and it’s still too early to know “which investments will be viable in the long term,” it said.