Will the Metaverse Really Be All It's Cracked Up to Be?

From visiting virtual art galleries to attending parties with the avatars of your online friends to traveling to far-flung parts of the world, all from the comfort of your home, proponents of the metaverse predict an exciting reality that could enable users to explore the farthest reaches of their imaginations. In this segment of Backstage Pass, recorded on Jan. 11, Fool analyst Asit Sharma and Fool contributor Rachel Warren discuss. 

Asit Sharma: The article that I wanted to discuss was actually an editorial by Keza MacDonald, who's the video game editor at The Guardian over in the UK. This is entitled "VR worlds are no better or worse than anywhere else online." I thought this was interesting, this video games editor just took a walk through a few metaverse environments.

He discusses how Meta's (META 0.58%) Horizon, which is their metaverse world just now. I'm quoting "attempts to coming sanitized futuristic look with soft colors and cartoonish humanoids." Then he talks about a pretty popular space called VRChat and says, "VRChat is a total mismatch dominated by anime aesthetics, neon cities, cat ears, big busted, scantily clad 2D women, and of course, furries," which I won't get into here.

The point here is that this space which is again not a big brand that any of us might know about, it's not Meta's version of the metaverse, is attracting a lot of teenagers and kids who are in that liminal age between being just around the teenager and growing up.

He compares it to online spaces of the past as text expressions grew into visual expressions on the internet. This is something we've seen before that it's not necessarily the friendliest of places. The internet has a lot of great things in it, but it's got a lot of bad things too.

There is definitely, unfortunately, an environment which isn't policed in any way. I'm grasping for the term, I don't believe that online experiences should be policed, but doesn't at this point have enough of an oversight or critical mass of users to understand exactly what's going on.

Spaces like VRChats, they naturally attract teenagers. They're full of snark, they're off-kilter. Those are some of the wonderful things about it, but you can see how this opens itself up to maybe some not-so seemly characters working around in this space, cyberbullies, etc.

This is just maybe another warning signal that despite all the hype here that surrounds the metaverse, it's a space still to be created and it's going to have both a very bright side and perhaps a not-so-bright side. Those of us who invest should, I think, always be thinking of this and think carefully about the players that we invest in.

I think we as a society have a little bit of responsibility to make sure that spaces for kids and more vulnerable members of society are somewhat safe and then have some type of eyes on them.

This was some food for thought for myself. I think a lot about the ethics of this brave new world that we're entering into. An avid, enthusiastic investor in it, but not blind at all to some of the pitfalls.

Rachel Warren: I think it's interesting because I feel the idea behind some of these virtual realities, virtual worlds, and metaverses is almost like a better iteration of reality, is how it's marketed I think in some spaces. But I mean, there are people behind those technologies.

If you're in this metaverse with other players, I guess if I'm using the right terminology, being not a very techie person myself.

There's people behind in that universe that you're dealing with. The same very human real-world issues I think can continue to creep in. I don't think it's this bubble completely independent from reality.