People in the Philippines are most interested in the metaverse, or an immersive online world supported by virtual reality technology, according to a study by crypto education website Coin Kickoff.
Filipinos also placed second (at 56.20%) to the Vietnamese (at 56.80%) in terms of who had the greatest number of positive tweets about THE metaverse.
Coin Kickoff analyzed 1.6 million metaverse-related tweets in Sept. 2022 and found that the Philippines had 2,421 Google searches on the topic per 1000 people. The number was about 40% higher than the next highest searches from Grenada (1,472 per 1,000 people) and Peru (1,375).
Gaming has always been a mini-metaverse, and Filipinos already excel in mobile games such as DOTA 2, said Ferdinand M. Gutierrez, chief executive officer of esports company Ampverse.
“As interactivity levels grow, you’re going to see a lot of people escaping into these worlds,” he said in a Sept. 9 interview for a B-Side episode.
The other countries that round out the top 10 countries that most love metaverses are Ukraine (54.90%), Nigeria (51.40%), Indonesia (49.90%), Taiwan (47.30%), Sri Lanka (47.20%), Turkey (46.60%), Singapore (46.50%), and Portugal (46.30%).
The term “metaverse” is what companies use nowadays to refer to many different types of enhanced online environments. Because customers expect instant gratification from services, all sectors will be moving towards a 24/7 service delivery model that includes the metaverse, BusinessWorld heard in an IBM forum on June 2022.
Philippine companies have taken notice. Telecommunications provider Globe Telecom, Inc., for instance, announced in Nov. 2022 that it will offer virtual masterclasses in music, film, entrepreneurship, e-sports, and fashion in the metaverse. Art in the Park, an annual art event, also showcased a metaverse marketplace in its 2022 iteration.
The different metaverses being developed offer other use cases for Web3 (known as the decentralized version of the Internet), according to Peter Ing, chief executive officer and founder of BlockchainSpace, a data aggregator and tooling provider for Web3 gaming guilds. He said that digital assets can also be applied to virtual land that offers customized experiences.
“Let’s say you have a rollercoaster experience on that land. You can now charge for the experience to be able to use that roller coaster,” he told BusinessWorld in an Oct. 2022 interview. — Patricia B. Mirasol
