Matterport offers another new way of connecting the real and virtual worlds.
I admit to being skeptical of Facebook's parent company, Meta Platform, for a metaverse vision of a virtual world that includes virtual conferences, virtual concerts, and the movie Ready Player One.
But recently while riding a modified road bike at home, I made a new discovery. The rear wheels of the bike were removed and the body was fixed to a smart trainer made by a company called Wahoo. I was riding my bike while staring at the MacBook computer screen in front of me, riding through a place called Watopia in a bike app called Zwift. It was then that I suddenly realized that I had been experiencing the metaverse for months, but I was not fully aware of it.
My colleague at Barron's, Alex Eule, also a virtual reality skeptic, wrote an article about Zwift a few years ago about the transformative impact the company could have. Since this article was published, Zwift and the company have come a long way in bringing people to experience.
First, Zwift has raised more than $600 million in venture capital to become a unicorn company. The company currently has nearly 4 million registered users in more than 200 countries. For $15 a month, you can ride more than 200 miles on the digital highway, including replicas of real-world locations in cities like Paris and Tokyo, and some scenes that are fictional, such as routes through volcanoes and the ocean floor.
While Zwift doesn't offer the headset-like metaverse that Zuckerberg envisions, it does offer an all-encompassing experience where people can meet, communicate, and use a virtual currency. All you need is a road bike, a pair of sneakers, a laptop or tablet and a smooth internet connection.
Eric Min, founder and CEO of Zwift, believes there is a lot of room for growth in the world the company has just created, and plans to raise more money to achieve this goal. One of Min's ideas was to provide developers with the same tools as Zwift to create virtual environments, and Zwift and Roblox (RBLX) intersected. Roblox is on track to generate $2.7 billion in sales this year by creating games and virtual worlds for users.
If anyone else doubts the authenticity of this virtual world, Min said Zwift cycling is considering becoming a potential Olympic sport that hopes to debut at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Min said: "Zwift offers more than just training and social riding. ”
It can be seen that the metacosm is not zuckerberg's sudden idea during the period of home quarantine of people during the epidemic, and this idea has been around for decades. In January 2008, a junior marketing executive at IBM created a platform called IBM and the Metaverse, which shows how to work, learn and play in the virtual world. IBM even has intellectual property related to metaverses, such as a 2010 patent to "promote products in virtual worlds," though IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said the company had no plans to grow in the metaverse.
The "IBM and Metaverse" platform contains images of the virtual game Second Life, which has been around for nearly 20 years. While Second Life may have been forgotten for years, the company is still there. Parent company Linden Lab was sold to an investment group last year at an undisclosed price, but there is no doubt that the transaction prices at that time would not have been as high as they are now.
Brad Oberwager, executive chairman of Linden Lab, who led the acquisition, remains passionate about virtual worlds. He noted that since the Launch Life service was launched in 2003, 73 million accounts have been created, although most of them are no longer in use. The company says the average monthly user base is currently between 650,000 and 900,000.
It's worth pointing out that the boom that Second Life sparked years ago didn't keep the company going, which is one of the reasons I'm still a little skeptical about the metaverse boom that's currently being set off.
For now, investors are still scrambling to find and buy metaversal concept stocks, with the most prominent companies including gaming companies like Roblox and Unity Software, as well as chipmakers like NVDA and Qualcomm (QCOM). But none of them are pure meta-universe concept stocks.
That's one reason why some investors are so fascinated by Matterport (MTTR), a company based in Sunnyvale, Calif., that makes cameras and software for shooting virtual and 3D images.
Matterport's main target market is the commercial and residential real estate market, and the company's software is used to generate images of virtual visits to offices and residences. Since going public through a merger with SPAC in July this year, Matterport's market capitalization has roughly doubled. Originally relying on dedicated cameras, Matterport now also offers a smartphone app where users can create digital copies of actual locations from Apple or Android smartphones.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives has been recommending Matterport's stock, but he acknowledges that the stock is overvalued by recent metrics, with a price-to-earnings ratio of more than 40 times on expected sales in 2022. Ives admits that this is a highly speculative stock.
But Mattelport CEO R. R.J. Pittman's description of his company is fascinating, saying that The secret of Matterport is to turn buildings into data by generating digital copies of actual locations, which is "dataization of the real world." The company now has more than 6 million digital copies of space. Pittman joined Matterport in 2018 after previously serving as chief product officer at eBay for five years.
Matterport recently announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services that makes it easier to create "digital versions" of real-world locations and, like Zwift, offers another new way to connect the real world and the virtual world.
I'm not going to bet on this stock with my investment money, but if you have spare money, Matterport is an attractive speculative target for betting on the future of the metacosm.
| Barron's writer Eric M. Eric J. Savitz
Edit | Guo Liqun
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Original barronschina articles, not reproduced without permission. For the English version, see "This Stock Is a Pure-Play Bet on the Metaverse" on December 6, 2021.
(This article is for your informational purposes only and does not constitute the provision or reliance of investment, accounting, legal or tax advice.) ）
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