Are you looking for a really trendy Christmas gift for a teenager? With a bit of luck you can get yourself a pair of basketball shoes from the RTFKT line (pronounced Artefact). But it won't be easy, for a couple of problems. The cost, first of all, because the models sold like hot cakes at the price of 2.000 dollars each, but today they risk being worth much more. Second, to buy them you will have to enter the metaverse, because these shoes are meant to be worn in a virtual gym by an avatar. Except then reappear in the physical world with a certificate. Too complicated? “Rest assured. In no more than three years your daughter will be ashamed to let you take her to school if you don't wear a pair of sneakers equipped with an nft”, that is, a token connected to a blockchain capable of guaranteeing the authenticity of the brand's brand. It is the opinion expressed on the New York Times by Jason Banon, founder of Boson Protocol, a virtual real estate company that deals with the sale of plots of land in Vegas City, the betting district of Decentraland, one of the places most frequented by avatars where designer boutiques are teeming.
It sounds like a science fiction story, but it's not. RTFKT is a real company Nike, the giant of sports shoes paid the start-up born in March 2020 with its weight in gold to create objects to dress and furnish the virtual world that does not yet exist. In addition to the basketball shoes designed by a street artist, the three ingenious promoters of the brand have created and put on sale 20 thousand costumes destined for as many "avatars", the virtual doubles destined to populate the houses of the metaverse built and put up for sale by the real estate properties of the other world, where of course you pay in Bitcoin. Also to listen live to the increasingly numerous concerts of pop stars who have chosen to perform in virtual theatres. Without moving from home.
Welcome to the metaverse, the virtual world which, having crossed the threshold of the Internet, projects us into another dimension by questioning the concept of space and time. An adventure that, Nike demonstrates, promises to become the next frontier for finance looking for new stellar profits. You can enter it through Fortnite (already 350 million users worldwide) or the Roblox platform, where the Avatar (the double in 3D) of Alessandro Michele, the creative prince of Gucci, works as a salesman in the virtual boutique of Kering's most popular house. Or you can experience augmented reality with Google glasses or put Oculus on your head, the Facebook helmet, pardon Meta, which will allow you unthinkable adventures: face-to-face interviews, as happened to a journalist from the Financial Times, a character who is a few thousand kilometers away. But also have a virtual octopus-shaped waiter serve you a cocktail at the bottom of the sea. Or get hired like croupier at the Epic Games platform. This time to earn real money. And do you want to put the satisfaction of dancing in a Caribbean disco without leaving home with the avatar of a diva who is in Hollywood at that moment?
Sure, it's legitimate to look skeptically at this sci-fi future that you probably don't feel any need for. The fruit of the dreams of the super billionaires who, these days, traffic to make you fly away from the Earth to populate new worlds (the dream of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos) or, like Zuckerberg, to enter another virtual reality. But don't forget that, in the early XNUMXs, very few would have even imagined how our lives would change with the advent of the internet. In those same years, a science fiction author, Neal Stephenson, anticipated the existence of the metaverse in a novel "Snow Crash", which Mark Zuckerberg liked very much, an idol today a bit bruised by the swarm of fake news on social networks. Today mister Facebook promises to invest 10 billion a year (and enlist 10 European talents) to accelerate the race. But Zuckerberg is not alone. The growth of investments in 5G infrastructure (142 billion dollars, 33% more) combined with the need to minimize physical contacts have accelerated a phenomenon that is already in full acceleration: according to the IDC research center, spending in the sector in five years they will rise sixfold, from 12 billion dollars in 2020 to 72 billion in 2024. The world of consumption has in fact already rapidly taken possession of the last big thing. Not a day goes by without a fashion protagonist diving into virtual reality, from Renzo Rosso to Givenchy, while Moncler already supplies the jackets to the Fortnite boutiques which has grown from a gaming platform into a business center with a turnover of more than a billion dollars. But the possible applications of the metaverse are practically endless: BMW, for example, it has set up a metafactory which will help to avoid mistakes in the construction of new lines. And so on. "It is impossible to underestimate the effect that the metaverse can have on our future" reads a report by Jefferies, a broker generally alien to emphasis. In short, the world risks not being what it once was. Including Christmas.
