Emerging Technologies on the 2023 Gartner Impact Radar

• The metaverse fuels the smart world by providing an immersive digital environment.

• It will take eight-plus years to cross over from early-adopter status to early majority adoption.

• The metaverse will have a very substantial impact on existing products and markets.

The metaverse enables persistent, decentralized, collaborative, interoperable digital content that intersects with the physical world’s real-time, spatially organized and indexed content.

It is an example of a combinatorial trend in which a number of individually important, discrete and independently evolving trends and technologies interact with one another to give rise to another trend. The emerging, supporting technologies and trends include (but are not limited to) spatial computing and the spatial web; digital persistence; multientity environments; decentralization tech; high-speed, low-latency networking; sensing technologies; and AI applications. 

The features and functionality these ETT bring to the metaverse will need to reach an early majority in order for the metaverse to cross the chasm. We consider all current examples to be precursors or premetaverse offerings because they are potentially capable and compatible but do not yet meet the definition of the metaverse.

While the benefits and opportunities from the metaverse are not immediately viable, emerging metaverse solutions give an indicator of potential use cases. We expect the transition toward the metaverse to be as significant as the one from analog to digital.