Metaverse Bring Career And Job Opportunities
The Metaverse is Coming!
It wasn’t that long ago (2016, to be precise) that we were blown away by the idea of Pokémon Go.
A reasonably large portion of the smartphone-owning public was swept away by this tiny taste of augmented reality, and we all felt that we were standing on the edge of a significant AR revolution.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t feel like we’ve progressed much more since 2016. Here we are in 2022; Facebook has changed its name to Meta and is currently investing vast sums of money in moving the internet away from being little pods of information and towards being one big, interconnected hub.
The metaverse is once again a buzzword. Our imaginations are full of images of a Minority Report-style interface in every home and Ghost In The Shell-style internet interactions everywhere you look.
What is the Metaverse & which Job Opportunities will it bring?
The metaverse will be a fully immersive digital life experience when it arrives, but we have a long way to go yet. The metaverse will bring many exciting things into our lives; one of those is new job opportunities and jobs that may never have existed before.
The future of online games, shopping, work, advertising, and the connection is changing all the time; what new job opportunities will it bring along with it? Let’s take a few guesses.
1. Ecosystem Developer
No matter how powerful Mark Zuckerberg becomes, he won’t be able to just will the metaverse into existence. Somewhere, someone will have the task of constructing the ecosystem that it will need to function.
The more digitised the world becomes, the more complex the processes become; GPUs, CPUs, green electricity, data-lakes, and the beat goes on. A good comparison is the set of issues that the automotive industry faces as electric cars become more popular and start to become the preference of many drivers. The cars are in existence and ready to drive, but a huge obstacle in the path of viability is how few charging stations exist, and another is battery capacity.
So, while we already have the “cars” necessary to drive along the roads of the metaverse, we don’t really have the streets or anything else yet. Ecosystem developers will coordinate with various partners and governments and communicate with them to ensure that the metaverse functionalities will work worldwide. They’ll also be responsible for sourcing government investments in building the infrastructure. One of their key focuses will be interoperability, which means a metaverse user’s ability to use it in a variety of different ways.
For a position like this, you will need governmental and lobbying experience as well as a grasp of the XR industry.
2. Metaverse Cyber Security
Just like the internet was before users wised up, the metaverse will be an ideal target for thieves, hackers, and fraudsters. There are many horrifying cybersecurity risks that can lead to losing important information or coming under attack from unscrupulous individuals, so we’ll need a new breed of cybersecurity professionals to help keep us data safe rather than applying an unsecure DIY cybersecurity approach.
Current cyber security laws and practices will likely need to be amended for the changing world of the metaverse, so this will be a similar position to the current one under new circumstances.
3. Hardware Builder
While code is what will bring the metaverse to life, it’s not all we’ll need. The foundation of the metaverse will be the hardware it needs to run: the sensors, cameras, and headsets that we’ll need to use it. Augmented reality takes a lot of work to be implemented: if you want to feel the touch of someone halfway across the world, some very clever hardware designer is going to have to make it happen.
If there’s summer sun coming in through the window of the game you’re playing, someone’s going to have to put it there. There are going to be a lot of inertial measurement units, depth cameras, visual light cameras that need installing and configuring. The metaverse is going to be growing and changing for a long time to come, so the hardware builders that take it on are going to have a lot of expertise and be adaptable too.
Hardware will have to be built at several price points so that the metaverse is not another polarising factor between the haves and the have-nots; hardware designers will also need to keep that in mind.
4. Research Scientist
While AR and VR tech is already developed and in use, there are going to be a lot of changes and a lot of adapting that this tech will have to do to fit into the metaverse. We’re going to need the brainpower of a lot of research scientists to work out new applications for existing tech and adapt it to suit a new platform. We are going to need a whole new “theory of everything” for this new and evolving system just like we have the Internet of Things for example.
Taking this kind of research on is incredibly complex and will require experts to build and scale prototypes, match up computer vision algorithms, 3D computational photography, imaging, visual-inertial odometry, sensor fusion, mapping, localisation…the list is almost endless.
Wrap Up
While the metaverse is still in the womb that is the internet, there’s no doubt it’s coming soon. Will you be a part of it when it does and most of all, will you have the career skills required to be an attractive option for employers?