• by Todd Wasserman , March 7, 2022

The big news at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week was that the metaverse is here -- but mainly as a concept. That may be the case for several years.

At the show, South Korea’s SK Telecom had a “4D Metaverse” ride where attendees sat down and wore virtual reality headsets. They were then “lifted up and carried around a digital representation of space,” according to a report on CNBC.

At the moment, the metaverse is still theoretical. Qualcomm said that chips will need to get faster and less power-hungry if the metaverse is going to work. Meanwhile, CNBC noted that what attendees saw this year at MWC was “a variation on the same 4D VR rides that Samsung and others have shown off at MWC in previous years.”

For some proof of the metaverse in reality, there was Wunderman Thompson, which showed off a metaverse space at CES in January. “Imagine the mechanics of Grand Theft Auto but, like, at a conference,” wrote Morning Brew, describing the space.

Paolo Pescatore, tech, telecom and media analyst at PP Foresight, told CNBC that “It still feels very much far-fetched. And it does almost feel kind of ‘Wild West’ right now.”

The metaverse, of course, got a huge boost in October, when Facebook announced it had changed its name to Meta and was committed to furthering the concept. However, as Denise Lee Yohn wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “With its rebranding effort, Facebook is making promises that it doesn’t seem able to deliver right now.  Until it shows that it’s making real changes, Meta will just be the same old Facebook by another name.”