MACAU BUSINESS By Paolo A. Azevedo By Tony Lai
Heralding the Metaverse Era
Jeju will be as big as Singapore in terms of Gross Gaming Revenue, predicts Lawrence Teo. The Chief Operations Officer and Vice President of Dream Tower, the tallest Integrated Resort under construction on the Korean destination island, explains to Macau Business why Lotte Tour decided to enter the casino business and create a landmark. All bets are on making the casino resort the crown of the tourism jewel the company has been dominating for four decades
More than a buzzword, metaverse is seen as the next big thing. How is Macau jumping on the bandwagon? This explainer details the A to Z of the metaverse, from what it is to its possible applications in the city.
T
he Covid-19 pandemic aside, one of the hottest topics worldwide in the past year is certainly the metaverse. From the change of the official name of technology firm Facebook to Meta last year, to the designation of 2021 as the “First Year of Metaverse”
Jeju – the new Singapore
by the Mainland Chinese media, to renowned brands and corporations venturing into this virtual world for opportunities, all signs pinpoint it is the next big thing. And this virtual wave has also arrived in this region — several local administrations across the border have included the development of the metaverse as one of their tasks from this year onwards, while activities of the metaverse and the related technologies like NFT (non-fungible token) are also brewing in Macau. Is the metaverse the future or is it just the scam of the century? Let’s get ourselves ready!
What is the metaverse?
Despite its futuristic nature, the term metaverse was coined three decades ago, when United States author Neal Stephenson wrote about this concept in his 1992 dystopian science-fiction novel Snow Crash to describe a virtual 3D world accessed by people via goggles and other terminals. Almost 30 years later, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook Inc-turned- Metaverse Platforms said at the rebranding and renaming of his company last October: “The next platform will be even more immersive — an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it. We call this the metaverse, and it will touch every product we build.” “We’ve gone from desktop to web to mobile; from text to
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immersive virtual world, where people can reside through their digital selves — such as avatars — as well as socialise and interact with others. Though many people talk about it, there’s not yet a concrete definition. “The concept of the metaverse is actually very broad, covering numerous aspects, so there is not yet any uniform definition,” says Zhou Jinquan, an associate professor at the Centre for Gaming and Tourism Studies of the Macau Polytechnic University (MPU). “The metaverse is the process of virtualising and digitising the real world.” Also a member of the state-backed China Mobile
Communications Association’s Metaverse Consensus Circle (CMCA-MCC) — a group founded last year to promote the development of the matter in the mainland — Prof Zhou uses the internet as an example to further explain why there are
What is the connection between the metaverse and NFT, VR and more?
Critics of the metaverse lament that it is just an old wine in a new bottle, branding the existing technologies and ideas like VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), AI (artificial
acau Business – From Lotte World, a major recreational complex [with the world’s largest indoor theme park, in Seoul] to an integrated resort with casino in Jeju. A different beast. A
natural evolution? Lawrence Teo – Business is the same. But building
photos to video,” he said in a statement at the time. “I believe the metaverse is the next chapter for the internet.” In other words, the metaverse refers to the concept of a highly
a landmark. M. B. – The group [Lotte] has created other landmarks in different types of business. Why would this be different? L. T. – Yes, Lotte Group has already created
intelligence) under a new umbrella. But this might actually be what the metaverse is really about. “Again, just like the internet, the metaverse is the convergence of different types of
to do the Dream Tower in Jeju. Lotte here is being just
family company; we’re a different company
[Lotte Tour]. It’s not going to be [just] the tallest and technologies rather than a single technology,” says Prof Zhou.
the largest building in Jeju, that’s just the hardware. Thomas Ao, co-founder and president of another newly-
established metaverse group in the city, shares a similar perspective, describing the metaverse as “a master concept”. “It integrates high-performance computing, AR, VR, blockchain, gaming, NFT and more,” the president of the Metaverse Industry Association of Macau (MIAM) says. Using the movie industry as an analogy, which has only gotten
We say that a landmark should be the most visited destination, where tourists will go to eat, shop and maybe [visit] our observation deck. A must-visit point destination. Because of the hardware, and also the software.
downtown Seoul and Lotte Super Tower. We’re trying
off ground following the screening of the world’s first commercial film in France in 1895, he remarks: “We had people writing scripts, we had factories producing [film] equipment [and] we also had actors way before [1890’s], but all these only turned into a big business — the movie industry — after the French had invented the first commercial movie.” “The metaverse is similar — it’s not entirely new” but bundles
M. B. – What are the main goals that you definitely
want to achieve with this Integrated Resort (IR)? L. T. – Number one EBIDTA on IR in Korea. There’s
challenges now to visualise this novel idea. “We are still at the beginning stage of the development of the metaverse, just like what the internet meant for us twenty years ago — our definition of the internet was limited and narrow at the time compared with what it is now,” he exemplifies Wen Linjian, president of the newly-founded Macau
Metaverse Association (MMA), also offers his take on this new cyberspace. “The metaverse can be understood as a world composed by our digital selves, which is in parallel to our real world,” he illustrates. “There’s a popular saying about the metaverse on the social media [in the mainland]: ‘Everything in this world can be part of the metaverse’.”
some existing ideas and technologies, he says. “Many [tech] companies want to call themselves metaverse [-related] now just to get higher evaluation in the capital market,” he agrees. Among an array of technologies, Mr. Ao, the founding partner
of venture capital fund Mindfulness Capital, which is specialised in start-ups of fintech, blockchain and NFT, regards NFT as a key feature of the metaverse. Adopting blockchain technology like cryptocurrencies, NFTs cannot be replicated and can serve as proof of ownership of digital assets in the metaverse, including art, collectables and property.
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