The uproar over Facebook’s sudden rebranding to Meta has demonstrated that the twenty-first century’s biggest technological space race will be fought on Wall Street’s battlegrounds — but the stock market has also helped identify some of the overlooked players. They will be crucial to the mechanics of this brave new world.

The metaverse race is a unique prospect for the twenty-first century, owing to a lack of understanding of what such a revolutionary mixed reality digital realm will look like in practice — or how businesses will seek to capitalize on the new technology.

So, who will get the most significant benefits from the metaverse? To answer this riddle, you must first comprehend the metaverse’s anticipated shape and how technology will need to adapt to the sheer enormity of what promises to be the century’s most significant technical achievement yet.

Getting a sense of the metaverse’s size

Forecasters predict that the metaverse will grow at a breakneck pace over the next decade.

The worldwide metaverse market is anticipated to be worth more than $1.5 trillion by 2030, according to PwC data. This incredible growth rate explains why firms like Facebook have been willing to modify their name to fit this developing market while ensuring that they have the best possible opportunity of becoming a market leader early on.

As a result, the newly rebranded Meta has surprised Wall Street investors with its name change, resulting in a significant stock sell-off compounded by a more considerable tech stock drop after rising inflation rates.

Following the announcement of its name change, Meta’s (NASDAQ: FB) shares have dropped roughly 35.5 percent in value. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is likely to have factored in the possibility of a short-term drop in business shares and embraced short-term losses while keeping the larger metaverse’s long-term growth in mind.

A bird’s eye view of metaverse battlegrounds from Wall Street

The .com boom at the turn of the millennium was a unique technological phenomenon. It sparked such a clamor that spread to global stock markets and beyond; however, the race for the metaverse appears to be fundamentally different because it’s prompted battles between some of Wall Street’s biggest names as firms look to cash in on the market’s vast potential.

Here, we can see companies like Meta and Microsoft employing completely different techniques to gain early traction before the technology’s mainstream adoption takes hold.

Today, we had a #Metaverse day full of wisdom and inspiration!

Thanks to the #Metaverse and #Web3 experts from @Meta, @Microsoft and @UXservices for their presentations on ‘Web3 UX & Metaverse Design’, ‘Approaching the Metaverse’ and ‘MetaVerse: A World of Endless Opportunities’ pic.twitter.com/lziESlDiqQ

— Virtual UXistanbul Conference (@ux_istanbul) April 18, 2022

The rebranding of Meta in November 2021 set the stage for the emergence of new stocks that are inherently related to the metaverse. Although many of these tech stocks have been impacted by recent inflation-driven tech stock sell-offs, many firms that are intrinsically linked to the mechanics of the metaverse are having their movements scrutinized on Wall Street, providing investors and analysts with some of the most reliable indications as to how the metaverse will work.

With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at what Wall Street has to say about the metaverse’s architecture:

A new frontier’s architecture

Despite Meta’s apparent efforts in recent months, little attention has been paid to the metaverse’s mechanics and how such a massive technological advancement would be possible. According to Raja Koduri, vice president of Intel’s accelerated computing systems and graphics department, the metaverse will require 1,000 times the current computer power.

Also, read – Top 10 Ideas for Making Money in the Metaverse

Sensors that can track audio and physical data inputs and the ability to interpret real-world objects to interact with are required to provide speech capabilities and correct motion. To simulate genuine avatars with intricate and varied clothing, hair, and skin, Koduri continued, it would take a lot of processing effort to arrange only two people in a realistic virtual setting. Incredibly high bandwidth and low latency would be required to bring such avatars to life. This would have to be repeated hundreds of millions of times to accommodate people of the size predicted by many experts. In light of this, it’s worth considering how, and more crucially, who can provide such processing power.

Nvidia looks to be planning to use its expertise in GPU technology to make the metaverse of the future a reachable frontier.

Nvidia’s Omniverse is a digital place that is highly likely to be used, at least in part, to construct tomorrow’s full-fledged metaverse. Fifty thousand users have downloaded it since its beta launch in December 2020. Due to interfaces with other significant platforms like Blender and Adobe, the number of artists engaging in Omniverse has lately increased, allowing millions more people to operate within the framework.

NVIDIA’s stock (NASDAQ: NVDA) is an excellent example of a company that has remained relatively strong and stable in large stock sell-offs. The company’s worth has increased by more than 100% in just one year.

Investors are confident in NVIDIA’s GPU history to provide the power needed to construct a functional digital space for tomorrow, despite a massive level of advancement in computer graphics being required to offer the metaverse tomorrow.

Big data will be crucial in the metaverse’s evolution.

Big data and artificial intelligence will undoubtedly play a prominent role in the emerging technological landscape, and businesses aspiring to be metaverse leaders will need to adapt to this. The metaverse is bound to have new issues. The recent rise of AI solutions will play a crucial part in the continued advancement of data modalities, including speech, language, and vision – all of which are native Web modalities.

According to Joelle Pineau, co-managing director of Facebook AI Research, big data and AI will have to work incredibly hard to produce a mass-distributed, seamless experience for the massive quantities of metaverse users’ online time.

Because of the massive amount of data we’ll be sending into the metaverse, machine learning capabilities will be required to analyze our movements, speech, and browsing habits in order to reply in real-time. While the metaverse’s demands may open up new potential for AI, Pineau admits that it will also necessitate “some big advancement in our AI models.”

Data and AI models must be united throughout different endeavors to fulfill their aims if the metaverse is to genuinely be as widely dispersed as corporations closest to it imply. In order to offer a metaverse that functions on a global scale, it may be necessary to establish a “world model.”

Could gaming be the birthplace of the metaverse?

Many diverse companies competing on various fronts are competing in the metaverse space race. Along with the apparent activities of industry leaders, we’re seeing companies like Microsoft make intelligent acquisitions to create an industry-wide monopoly in the gaming business.

“Gaming is the most dynamic and exciting area in entertainment across all platforms today,” Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadell said in a statement following the company’s $68.7 billion acquisition of video game giant Activision Blizzard in early 2022.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard is one of the most recent video game and digital media acquisitions by the computer titans. Microsoft’s approach has been widely interpreted as a bid to become a metaverse market leader by developing compatible video games, which the corporation believes would be the first frontier of the new technology environment.

Microsoft’s strategy could be modeled after the company’s free-to-use Internet Explorer browser, which was launched in the mid-1990s to attract a large number of consumers to its Windows software. Microsoft’s acquisition-based strategy has helped it surpass the likes of Meta, Roblox, and other companies vying to become industry leaders in the space on Wall Street.

There’s still a long way before we’re all using the metaverse to hang out with friends and do virtual reality grocery shopping. However, because firms are scrambling to adapt to the new digital world, we can see prominent tech stocks battle it out on Wall Street in real-time. With this in mind, the markets are likely to provide the most accurate predictor of where the metaverse space race will be won or lost.