Apple Vision Pro: Does Web3 'Fit' the Metaverse?

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Introduction 🔌🔧

Crypto is cool again, and numbers are going up.

But the news cycle might be sleeping on how impactful some of the headlines are.

The Bitcoin ETF inflows are gargantuan. Ethereum ETFs are being readied.

Louis Vuitton, Sephora, Mastercard and the NBA/Coinbase have all ‘done something’ Web3-related in the last seven days, but you wouldn’t know it unless you’re in the weeds.

There’s less ‘mainstream’ euphoria even though way more is happening now that it was the last time Bitcoin hit $50k, when the world was obsessed with every crypto headline.

🔌 Sporting Crypto Event: Barcelona → We are hosting our first Barcelona event on the 27th of February. RSVP here!🔌 ✏️ Sporting Crypto Collaborated in the 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗙𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗦𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝘀 𝗙𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗼𝗺 Report. Read it here!🔌 We are looking for sponsors for our events in NYC & Dubai (April) and Berlin & London (June). Email me back at this address if you want your brand to reach some of the most influential leaders in Sport & Web3.

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Move over Metaverse, there’s a new buzzword in town.

It’s ‘Spatial Computing’. 

With Apple’s launch of the Apple Vision Pro, there’s a lot of excitement about the sudden newfound possibilities of immersive media and augmented & virtual reality.

But what do all of these things tangibly mean for businesses, and specifically those in sport?

And how does Blockchain technology or Web3, which has so far been attached at the hip to the idea of the ‘Metaverse’, work now that the world has seen what is possible with immersive technologies?

How does all this ‘new stuff’ fit together?

Discussed in this newsletter:

🌐What does the Metaverse mean?👓 Apple Vision Pro 🍎What is Apple’s stance on Web3?🤔 Where does Web3 Fit into ‘The Metaverse’?⚽ The sporting applications

🌐What does the Metaverse mean?

There’s a nomenclature issue in emerging tech.

Hype cycles, media and social platforms have created a world that consistently proliferates ways of describing things that we struggle to explain. Which (shock) makes these things even more difficult to explain.

This is how we’ve come to have terms like Metaverse, Augmented Reality, Extended Reality, NFTs, Web3, Blockchain and so forth.

So it makes sense to preface this entire newsletter with some definitions.

When I say ‘Web3’ I don’t mean AI, Virtual Worlds or any other emerging technology — I’m talking about anything that is 'powered’ by a Blockchain.

When discussing different types of ‘reality’, I think it’s best to divide things into three buckets that can overlap:

1. Reality: The real world

2. Augmented Reality (AR): Our real-world augmented by virtual content (Think Pokemon Go or Snapchat filters

3. Virtual Reality (VR): Completely immersive virtual environments (Think having a headset on and being in a virtual world)

Now, many will say there is nuance to this and there are smatterings of ‘other categories’ in between the three above, but for the sanity of myself and my subscribers, I’m going to keep things in these three buckets.

Defining the M word

The discourse around the ‘Metaverse’ is being driven by convoluting ideas on what the thing is, and what the thing isn’t.

Many who say the Metaverse sucks, don’t know what they’re referring to or what they’re criticising.

Tim Cook himself said: "I always think it's important that people understand what something is. And I'm not sure the average person can tell you what the metaverse is."

With that in mind, let’s try and put things in some buckets:

1. The Metaverse: A global, interconnected, online, immersive experience that has a distributed system as its backbone (A blockchain?)

2. Metaverses: Siloed or fairly connected virtual world that includes digital assets which can be ported in and out of said world, and may be built on an open standard or blockchain (Decentraland, Sandbox)

3. Virtual Worlds & Digital Spaces: Fortnite, Roblox, Meta’s eventual plans — these are virtual worlds owned and governed by a single entity

4. This broad digital thing: For me, there’s something else to define. When I hear the word Metaverse — I often think we’re already in it. But people don’t think of the Metaverse as that. We have computers, game consoles and phones that are extensions of ourselves online that we depend on massively. The Metaverse feels just like a 3D version of the web, that you can interact with.

Each of these have issues.

(1) The Metaverse is so far hypothetical. We may have the building blocks, but arguably a dystopian Ready Player One-type world underpinned by a blockchain feels so far off, and potentially something we never see.

(2) Metaverses have so far done some amazing things. Decentraland have distributed the governance of their virtual world to their community, which is incredible. Some of the partnerships Sandbox have done, for example, are fairly impressive. The reality is these worlds are not high-fidelity enough to encourage mass participation and have seen active user numbers that are nowhere near large enough to be defined as successful. In this specific bucket, sports teams are being sold a lot of terrible Metaverse deals with partners who are nowhere near engaging the fans of said teams.

(3) Virtual Worlds & Digital Spaces have been unbelievably successful so far. Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft or any game you could put in this category have attracted tens of millions of users. The issue is that their business models are at risk with the arrival of NFTs. People will still buy Fortnite skins, but if an NFT alternative bites even 10% of that pie — it’s a huge chunk of capital. We’ve seen the NFL, for example, partner with Fortnite to sell over $50m worth of skins, and various soccer players partner with the Call of Duty franchise, Warzone.

The reason I’ve tried to bucket these things to some extent is because detractors often don’t know what they’re detracting.

They often think NFTs, Crypto and ‘The Metaverse’ are the same thing. Which means the discussions around it are scattered and often pointless.

With all that in mind, let’s try and simplify things a bit.

The way Email works is that you use Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail — and you can message each other using any of those email clients.

Now with social media for example or most internet applications built over the last 10 years, you can’t do this. X (formerly known as Twitter) handles only work on that platform. I can’t send an Instagram message to a Twitter account, and vice versa.

So if we define the Metaverse as a 3D internet that is built on open standards, that simplifies things a lot more.

Zuckerberg himself has recently ‘hit back’ at Apple Vision Pro by asking whether we want the future of the internet to be ‘open’ or ‘closed’, claiming that Apple will attempt to ‘silo’ the 3D internet of tomorrow.

And all whilst this is happening, in the background, the idea of blockchains being a big part of the future of the internet is no longer fantasy land, but far more likely than it is not. Because decentralised technology may well be key in negating any closed version of the 3D internet of the future, aka the Metaverse.

🌐 Apple Vision Pro

Apple’s launch of the Vision Pro headset and popularising the term ‘Spatial Computing’ has reinvigorated the idea of ‘The Metaverse’, whatever it means.

And whilst presently it is very much in the ‘finding product market fit’ stage, people are seeing the magic first-hand of what could be possible with technology like this in the mainstream.

Remember when Apple launched the iPhone and one of the viral apps was this ‘beer drinking app’?

That’s not what the iPhone was going to be used for forever, but the app was downloaded 10s of millions of times.

And the developers who saw the gigantic opportunity that the iPhone presented, began building applications and services that would be in some way inspired by apps like this one.

So what have we seen with the Apple Vision Pro so far, that can spark some wild future gazing?

• Learning the piano

• Multi-screen displays, without needing multiple screens

• Turn your mundane chores into a game

And so much more.

Again, much of this, like the Beer Drinking app feel surface level and gamified, especially when you consider the downside of having to wear a heavy headset.

There’s also been commentary around the lack of ‘shared’ experiences that the Vision Pro provides, but that’s surely to come with future editions of the headset. 🍎 What is Apple’s stance on Web3?

Apple’s stance on Web3 has unsurprisingly been standoffish at best.

In 2022, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said:

And later that year, in October 2022, Apple rolled out some rules for developers who wanted to incorporated NFTs into their applications.

“Apps may use in-app purchase to sell and sell services related to non-fungible tokens (NFTs), such as minting, listing, and transferring. Users can view their NFTs in apps, and that ownership can't unlock further functionality or features within that specific app.”

“These applications may not use their own mechanisms to unlock content or functionality, such as license keys, augmented reality markers, QR codes, cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency wallets, etc."

Fast forward a year, and NFL Rivals, an NFL Web3 Mobile game has 3 million downloads and is trending in the Apple store.

Of course, Mythical Games the publishers, have maintained that they have had to “make every effort to abide by the app store rules and shared important statistics with Apple to demonstrate that Web3 elements are not detrimental to the platform”

The reality is that Apple don’t need to have forward-thinking Web3 strategy. They are exceptionally well capitalised, and any part of the Web3 market that they think can capitalise on will be done so via acquisition (is my prediction).

Unless there’s a huge demand to see NFTs inside apps on the app store, they won’t budge. Why would they?

🤔 Where does Web3 Fit into ‘The Metaverse’?

How do you convince the most powerful and rich entities with digital empires to give up that control for the ‘greater good’ of the consumer web?

Why would a games publisher like Epic Games allow NFTs in Fortnite, their most popular title, when they sell ‘owned-but-only-on-our-servers’ apparel and skins?

It’s a very difficult equation to solve.

When Robby Yung, CEO of Animoca Brands joined the Sporting Crypto Podcast — he talked about how the incentive for this was building one ‘super highway’ where there is shared value accrual for all of the internet on shared open source infrastructure.

But when you have a large piece of the pie already, letting go of that never happens.

And very few of those who own the digital pie currently are open to Web3.

Some are, however… and some may be alluding to the hope of a more open model. Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games said as recently as a year ago:

Mark Zuckerberg as recently as last week said, in response to the Apple Vision Pro:

Roblox CEO David Baszucki said in late 2023:

To me, there is this idea that many people in crypto think that the technology will completely uproot every system we have in place, whether it be finance or gaming.

This has always felt quite far-fetched to me.

However, I do think the lower bound of probability is that decentralised technology plays a huge part in creating a more open and egalitarian digital infrastructure.

Another further to be answered: 

How does the digital rental economy, and proposed ownership economy using blockchains, co-exist if the likes of Apple, Google and co still have a stranglehold on our digital experiences?

There’s some friction there, to say the least, as this edition of the newsletter has already discussed.  ⚽The sporting applications

Of course, this is Sporting Crypto, and the sporting angle must always be covered and emphasised.

The big players in sport already view spatial computing and virtual realms as an incredibly big opportunity. That’s been emphasised by a multitude of things, including the PGA Tour announcing ‘PGA Tour Vision’, and MLB and the NBA also announcing their own applications.

The way we interact with sports is going to change a lot over the next 30 years, that is one certainty we have with this abundance and speed of technological change. And whilst the very tangible experience of being in an arena or stadium may never be replicated one-for-one, we will get to an experience that is incredibly close, far quicker than many will have imagined.

The digital footprint of Sports entities is so vast now, and is clearly going to only get bigger.

My worry and question is the interconnectivity of this all, especially when you add Web3 to the mix.

How does a team’s NFT program, connect to their immersive experiences, their apparel lines and so on, and so forth down the line? The vaster these digital footprints become, surely we cannot expect fans to live in several silos?

Web3 does have an issue in that the lack of connectivity it has to the rest of a sports brand’s business, for a variety of IT, security, optics and business model reasons, means the penetration of these programs (on average) is limited.

But that may soon change.

Not in terms of the connectivity between virtual environments or something transient like Apple Vision Pro and Web3, that’s something I don’t expect to change over the next 2-3 years at least. But the building blocks outside of that, so that Web3 is inherent and native to sports loyalty solutions, databases, engagement programs and so forth are needed so that the connectivity is even possible.

The utopia (to some) is that a fan’s digital experience is connected from the point of clicking sports channels to being immersed virtually in the game, to being rewarded for your fandom outside of the game itself and so on. Sports generally is so far away from a coherent experience digitally that the idea of a digital asset program being connected with something immersive feels alien, but who said it would be easy?

💡 Sporting Crypto Spotlight - Ep. 14 of the Podcast!

In Ep. 14 of the Podcast I was lucky enough to speak to Richard Ayers, Co-Founder of Rematch to discuss Web3 optics in sports and Fandom vs. Audience

Watch the episode on YouTube!

Or your podcast player of choice… if you’d prefer not to see our faces!

🍎 Find us on Apple Podcasts here [Link]

✅ Find us on Spotify here [Link]

More Sports & Web3 Stories

• Coinbase had an in-person activation at the NBA ALLSTAR Weekend called Moonshot (Read more here)

• UFC Icon Michael Bisping Teams Up with Crypto Gaming Leader Lucky Block (Read more here)

• Chiliz and Ultimate Champions creators UNAGI have partnered together (Read more here)

• Chiliz signs strategic deal with South Korea Premier League (Read more here)

• Web3 Sports Challenge Platform, LILLIUS, Secures Investment from Global Blockchain Fund GBIC (Read more here)

• Fischer Celebrates 100-Year Legacy with NFT Ski Package (Read more here)

• Cleo Tech’s ‘Marketing for Good’ Token Launches on MEXC (Read more here)

General ‘Stuff’ that Could Impact You

• Mondelēz International Joins Hedera Council to Accelerate DLT Adoption (Read more here)

• Empire State Build Launch NFT-Powered Ambassador Program (Read ore here)

• Black Mirror Goes Web3 With Pixelynx 'Smile-to-Earn' Experience (Read more here)

• From Simon Taylor: Tokens are the future of finance, the economy & everything (Read more here)

• Sephora launches SephoraUniverse (Read more here)

• Louis Vitton Devuts LV Diamonds Line with Mine-to-finger Traceability via Blockchain (Read more here)

• YUGA Labs, Bored Apes Creators, have acquired Moonbirds (Read more here)

• Franklin Templeton joins to race to launch Spot ether ETF (Read more here)

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