Passporting from one metaverse platform to another also needs to be possible, Al Olama said. “So if Meta develops something and Magic Leap develops another … there has to be some sort of interoperability between them.”
Speaking on the same panel, the chief product officer at Meta (formerly Facebook), Chris Cox, said the world needs international standards when it comes to the metaverse.
“There will probably be something like a rating system, which we have for film, we have for music, we have for other types of content so that a parent or a young person can have some sense of what the rules are in the environment they’re going to walk into,” Cox said.
On the topic of monetizing the metaverse, Cox said he expects Meta to generate revenue in the metaverse through ads. “If you want free services at scale, advertising is going to be the natural business model for it just like it has since print,” he said.
But the founder of virtual world platform Second Life, Philip Rosedale said on the same panel that the metaverse should be ad-free. “If we move those (advertising) models, which rely on making predictions about what you want and suggesting things to you, and in some cases, I think, manipulating your behavior … I think it’s a terrible risk,” he said.
Rosedale added: “The model that has to work in the metaverse, in my opinion, is a transaction or a fees model rather than an ads model.”
This would involve buying digital goods and subscriptions.
