Organizations should consider cautiously investing in the Metaverse, or at the very least explore it in detail because their digital future may be molded by it, said Marty Resnick, VP Analyst at Gartner, on the occasion of Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2022, taking place in Barcelona last week.

During his presentation, Marty Resnick addressed the strategies that leverage how the Metaverse will provide innovative digital product or service opportunities. "CIOs and IT leaders must consider the Metaverse as a key trend that will provide opportunities and drive strategic business innovations beyond technology," he said.

According to Gartner, six trends are driving the use of metaverse technologies today: Gaming, Digital Humans, Virtual Spaces, Shared Experiences, Tokenized Assets, and Spatial Computing. These trends and technologies will continue to drive its use over the next three to five years.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, the serious games market will grow by 25% due to the impact of metaverse technologies. "Enterprises will adopt 'serious games' - gaming technologies, experiences and storytelling for training and simulation of specific work tasks and functions," said Marty Resnick.

"Organizations are already planning on using digital humans to act as identified digital agents within metaverse environments for customer service, support, sales and other interactions with current and potential customers," he said. Digital humans are interactive, AI-driven representations that have similar properties as digital twins.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 10% of workers will regularly use virtual spaces, up from 1% in 2022. "Virtual spaces engage multiple senses and provide participants with the ability to immerse and interact with the space," Marty Resnick explained.

He added that "The metaverse will move shared experiences out of siloed immersive applications and allow for more interactive opportunities to share experiences across applications, consumer events and services."

"In metaverse experiences, most tokenized assets will use NFTs - non-fungible token technologies," he told the audience. "The new features and functionalities enabled by the metaverse will inspire new ways to not only compete and monetize virtual products and services, but also to acquire physical, real-world goods."

And lastly, "spatial computing will allow organizations to get more out of physical and digital assets by surfacing related, 'unseen' digital information and content anchored to people, places and things."