Metaverse seems more like a marketing buzzword: Musk

San Francisco, Dec 23 (IANS) Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said that the Metaverse is more of a marketing buzzword than a practical concept.

In a recent interview with conservative satire site 'The Babylon', Musk said the concept of Facebook's Metaverse, which was first introduced back in October and focuses on augmented virtual reality (VR) experiences, was more hype than substance.

"I don't see someone strapping a friggin' screen to their face all day. I don't know if I necessarily buy into this metaverse stuff, although people talk to me a lot about it. In the long term, a sophisticated Neuralink could put you fully into virtual reality. I think we're far from disappearing into the metaverse, this sounds just kind of buzzwordy," Musk said during the video discussion.

The market for transactions in the Metaverse is expected to reach $6.1 billion this year, as tech giants like Meta (formerly Facebook) aim big on the VR/AR-based technology to bring deeper immersive experiences to billions in the future.

The global Metaverse market is forecast to hit nearly $42 billion globally by 2026, according to research firm Strategy Analytics.

Social media giant Facebook has said it will spend more than $10 billion to build out its vision for Metaverse.

"It's gonna ruin your eyesight, right? I'm currently unable to see a compelling metaverse situation or Web 3 sounds like more marketing than reality. I don't get it, and maybe I will, but I don't get it yet," Musk added.

In recent years, Metaverse has come to represent a utopian convergence of digital experiences fuelled by Moore's Law - an aspiration to enable rich, real-time, globally-interconnected virtual- and augmented-reality environments that will enable billions of people to work, play, collaborate and socialise in entirely new ways.

According to leading chip-maker Intel, building Metaverse -- at scale and accessible by billions of humans in real time -- will require a 1,000-times increase in computational efficiency from what we have today.