Kerry Murphy, founder and CEO, The Fabricant

I think in the Western world, a lot of people already do, especially people who are avid gamers. But when is it going to go outside of the gaming realm? Once we start to see interactive experiences that have daily functional value outside of gaming, beyond just entertainment.

That’s the tipping point that I foresee for mainstream adoption: once it becomes more functional, becomes part of work, part of communication with the family or friends. That's when it's truly going to kick off.

Great question. We deal with that every single day because that's what we take most pride in: our digital craftsmanship. We still talk about the same things [as physical designers]. We talk about materials, but now it's digital materials. We're talking about stiches, but digital stiches. Every single thing that you have in the physical world as a craftsman is also in the digital world. It just comes with a layer of new technology and a new skill set that you need to be able to apply in order to make those digital stitches high quality.

I don't know if 'replace' is the right word. They're adding value. They can be a counterpart to physical possessions, but they can also have a life of their own, completely disassociated from physical reality.

What I think will happen, especially for the fashion industry, is that by introducing these digital business models, we're going to reduce the amount of physical items. People are going to start seeing value in digital items and realize that they'd rather interact with a digital item, or have an infinite wardrobe of digital fashion items but a very limited wardrobe of physical items.

But first, what needs to happen is those digital experiences need to become something that's better than the physical experience. Think about buying music—I used to love to go to the CD store and flip through all the CDs. But right now, everything is on Spotify for me. It's like I have the whole world. But I have all these CDs that are still somewhere in my wardrobe. I can't get rid of them because nobody wants to come pick them up, even for free.

That's what's going to happen with fashion as well.

Take sneaker heads. Their closets are full of sneakers, and they never get to show them to anybody unless somebody comes over. Now, wouldn’t it be much better if, let's say, those physical sneakers are being held somewhere in a warehouse. You know you own the physical counterpart, but everything that you own is just on your mobile phone. And, you know, if you want to show it to your friends on your phone. And if you really need to have the physical item, you can get it.

I think the simple answer is that the metaverse is just a digital layer of our lives. The metaverse will exist once everything that we do digitally is completely, seamlessly connected—there’s this whole interoperability side. So if I buy this yellow t-shirt in Fortnite, I get to wear it on Instagram, I get to wear it on Facebook, I get to have an AR wearing experience, and they’re all completely interconnected.

There’s a really good graphic, it’s called the Magicverse from Magic Leap. It illustrates all the different layers of infrastructure that we have in our lives, and the top layer is this fantasyland, and I think that’s what the metaverse is like.

The metaverse is just an extension of our physical lives into the digital realm. They’re actually going to stop blurring into each other. The metaverse is going to become part of our physical lives. You know, once glasses get an AR filter, I don’t need a laptop anymore. I could be having this video chat with you just with my glasses—just a virtual interface. And everything that I have in my physical space is connected to the Internet. So I would be able to interact with my digital items in my physical life without, let's say, this clunky laptop. Laptops are going to disappear. Maybe even smartphones are going to disappear.