What Kind of Experience is Right for Me?

As more and more brands, businesses and people enter the world of virtual reality and explore immersive web experiences, metaverse as a concept has become popular—but confusing. To us, the metaverse is one aspect of the immersive web; a more meaningful space connecting brands and people together in beautiful digital immersive spaces, formed by the internet’s evolution and accessible to all.

But not all experiences are created equal: there are two types, shared and owned. Read on to learn the difference and to help you choose what’s right for your business and your brand strategy.

So, what is the difference?

A shared immersive experience (or shared-metaverse) is a virtual platform or world hosted by a third party, popular platforms include Fortnite and Roblox. With these, while you won’t own the virtual world, you might collaborate with the third party to co-create a brand experience or display your assets—through advertisements or otherwise—within their world.

Travis Scott’s Astronomical is a great example of a shared immersive space, viewed by over 45 million people.

Shared immersive spaces are typically more accessible and cost-effective, offering a ready-made community of users and a well-established platform for businesses to get involved. This makes them great for tapping into an existing user base to bootstrap growth or create noise.

However, where shared experiences (shared-metaverse) gain points in convenience they lose out in control.

A shared experience just isn’t your world. With brand-owned immersive spaces (or owned-metaverse), however, you gain full ownership of all sales, design, branding, audience, user data, feedback, and even gain the ability to launch virtual products in your world linked to your physical products.

Which should I choose?

The most important thing before you decide whether a shared (shared-metaverse) or owned immersive space (owned-metaverse) is right for you is to understand its purpose. Setting up a strategy will be vital to creating a thriving, immersive digital space for your brand.

For example, if you’re looking for a short-term branding experience to create awareness boost around a new product, then you might want to consider using a shared immersive experience (shared-metaverse)—this way you can rapidly reach a target group and create awareness with less effort.

However, If you intend to integrate an immersive web strategy into your business on a longer time-frame to meet the evolving needs of a new generation of consumers, then an owned immersive space (owned-metaverse) to host your experience could be a better fit, giving you a fairer share in the new iteration of a more immersive internet.

Your strategy will depend on your specific business and use cases. If you’re looking to host an iCommerce store, digital meeting space or even an internal training space, then a longer-term strategy might be better and hence an owned experience (owned-metaverse) could be more suitable.

On the other hand, for specific brand activations or marketing strategies around new products, services or simply to drive awareness, then your strategy might better fit a shared experience (shared-metaverse).

How to Create Your Own Immersive Web Experience

Creating your own immersive virtual space (metaverse) is easier than you might think. With a few simple steps, you can go from Unreal Engine to live on the internet in just a few clicks through our JourneeX platform.

First, you should consider what sort of integrationsmight work with your immersive experience and how you can implement the technology seamlessly into your existing business model.

Through our versatile toolkit, we invite enterprises, brands and the creative industry to leverage the new wave of technology to connect with their audience in a more immersive way.

Conclusion

There are different types of immersive virtual space (metaverse)—shared and owned—both with different benefits and drawbacks. Deciding what’s right for your business depends on your business model, audience and the planned purpose of your immersive experience..

If you’re looking to create your own digital world or want to learn more, get in touch.