Trillions of dollars: that's how much private industry is investing into the metaverse. In this article, I provide a description of the value chain of this market, from the experiences that people seek out to the enabling technologies that make it possible. More importantly, I also provide a prescription -- a vision for a future metaverse that is powered by creators and built upon decentralization. Investments and decisions made now will determine whether this is the future that manifests: one that offers the greatest variety of experience, powered by creators who earn a living at it -- or one defined by the next wave of gatekeepers and rent-takers. I'm excited that we're well on the way to the former, which is the more egalitarian market -- and I'm hopeful it will continue. Many people think of the metaverse as 3D space that will surround us.

The Metaverse has become one of the hottest technology and socioeconomic topic. Combining different technologies like VR, 3D animation, blockchain and many others, lots of companies are already working on creating services for this new digital world. Even tech giant Facebook changed its name to Meta, demonstrating that the Metaverse is truly targeting to become the next big mainstream technology. While a lot has been said about the role of blockchain in the Metaverse, thanks in part to the big NFT hype, I was wondering what was being said about the intersection of the Metaverse and AI. But first, let's try to answer the question "what is the Metaverse?"

The Metaverse has become one of the hottest technology and socioeconomic topic. Combining different technologies like VR, 3D animation, blockchain and many others, lots of companies are already working on creating services for this new digital world. Even tech giant Facebook changed its name to Meta, demonstrating that the Metaverse is truly targeting to become the next big mainstream technology. While a lot has been said about the role of blockchain in the Metaverse, thanks in part to the big NFT hype, I was wondering what was being said about the intersection of the Metaverse and AI. But first, let's try to answer the question "what is the Metaverse?"

Should you follow the information on artificial intelligence, you will discover two diverging threads. The press and theatre often portray AI using human capacities, mass unemployment, and also a potential robot apocalypse. Scientific conventions, on the other hand, talk progress toward artificial general intelligence when acknowledging that present AI is feeble and not capable of lots of the fundamental elements of the human mind. But no matter where they stand compared to human intellect, now's AI algorithms have become a defining element for several businesses, such as healthcare, finance, production, transport, and a lot more. And quite soon"no area of human endeavor will Stay independent of artificial intelligence," as Harvard Business School professors Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani describe in their publication Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World.

There are many significant indicators of the rapidly increasing growth of AI applications. First, the number of start ups providing AI support to healthcare providers has escalated [1]. There have been over 100 healthcare start-ups using machine learning and AI over the past 3 years, offering support in everything from remote patient monitoring, drug discovery, image diagnostics, and much more. According to a 2016 report from CB Insights [1], about 86% of healthcare provider organizations are currently using AI in some way. Furthermore, this is likely to rise substantially during the next decade.

The effort points to ways in which Amazon and other companies could try to improve the tracking of trends in other areas of retail--making recommendations based on products popping up in social-media posts, for instance. For instance, one group of Amazon researchers based in Israel developed machine learning that, by analyzing just a few labels attached to images, can deduce whether a particular look can be considered stylish. An Amazon team at Lab126, a research center based in San Francisco, has developed an algorithm that learns about a particular style of fashion from images, and can then generate new items in similar styles from scratch--essentially, a simple AI fashion designer. The event included mostly academic researchers who are exploring ways for machines to understand fashion trends.

Five years ago, researchers made a sudden leap in the accuracy of software that can interpret images. The technology behind it, artificial neural networks, underpins the recent boom in artificial intelligence (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning"). Yann LeCun, director of Facebook's AI research group and a professor at New York University, helped pioneer the use of neural networks for machine vision. That's what would allow them to acquire common sense, in the end.

Five years ago, researchers made a sudden leap in the accuracy of software that can interpret images. The technology behind it, artificial neural networks, underpins the recent boom in artificial intelligence (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning"). Yann LeCun, director of Facebook's AI research group and a professor at New York University, helped pioneer the use of neural networks for machine vision. That's what would allow them to acquire common sense, in the end.

You can now put on a virtual reality headset with sensors which will predict your facial expressions before you even make them and have them instantly mirrored on an avatar. MindMaze unveiled MASK on Wednesday, a lightweight foam with sensors that can be applied to VR headsets, which brings human emotion to VR gaming and social networking. MindMaze, a Switzerland based company, has developed products to help stroke victims and amputees using virtual reality, computer graphics, brain imaging & neuroscience -- and now it's bringing that technology to gaming. "There's a lot of technology but none of it is human," CEO and founder of MindMaze, Tej Tadi, told International Business Times about the VR world. MindMaze unveils MASK, which predicts facial expressions and mirrors them on VR avatars.

And last year, one tech company, Alphabet's Google, published papers in all of them. According to the tally Google provided to MIT Technology Review, it published 218 journal or conference papers on machine learning in 2016, nearly twice as many as it did two years ago. "The top people care about advancing the world, and that means writing papers the world can use, and writing code the world can use." So when Apple hired computer scientist Russ Salakhutdinov from Carnegie Mellon last year as its new head of AI, he was immediately allowed to break Apple's code of secrecy by blogging and giving talks.