HIf Nina Hagen had roared her media anthem “TV-Glotzer” into the recording microphone a few decades later, her legendary chorus lines might have been worded a little differently today – something like: “I can’t decide at all, everything is so immersive here”. With that she would have taken up the buzzword of the season in a trend-sensitive manner. In any case, at the first post-pandemic CES, the big tech fair in the gaming paradise of Las Vegas, the i-word was spoken almost every minute. New media formats, gaming techniques and the associated equipment compete in enveloping their addressees and involving all their senses in digital events – that’s roughly what the term means. He could be from the Metaverse, that new media phenomenon that’s hard to define in a few words.
Steve Koenig, Vice President of the trade fair organizer CTA, tried it like this in his presentation: “Nobody can really imagine what it is, but that’s how it was when the internet was launched. The metaverse, also popularly known as Web 3, will undoubtedly be the next big thing.” Young start-ups are already trying their hand at the web of the future – for example at beautiful new working environments in virtual space. The CES exhibitor Dentsu Nxt Space showed what this can look like: In a virtual office, project partners from all over the world meet as avatars, enjoy the luxury of the spacious property surrounded by greenery and work together in front of presentation areas on which content from apparently well-established Gathering sources: The Office programs from Microsoft show their unmistakable interfaces in this example.