Top Five Metaverse Stocks in 2021
After social media giant Facebook announced changing their parent company name to Meta, the hottest stocks in the market lately has to be Metaverse related stocks.
See our post on what is the Metaverse
For decades, virtual reality and augmented reality has long been something out of science fiction and Hollywood movies.
Many companies have attempted and failed, even for tech giant Google's famous Google Glass which became a roadkill.
The virtual reality industry took its first giant leap when Facebook acquired VR startup, Oculus, for 2 billion USD. Since then, companies such as HTC, Microsoft, Sony, and Samsung have all jumped on the bandwagon and released their own version of VR headsets.
In the recent year, augmented reality (AR) has crossed with virtual reality (VR), and is collectively referred to as mixed reality (MR) or extended reality (XR).
With Facebook changing corporate name to Meta made headlines across the world, announcing to the world that the company is now a metaverse company rather than a social media company.
The concept of a metaverse involves creating a complete online virtual environment in which people socialize, connect, play, learn, and work. Instead of looking at flat panel 2D screen, it is a 3D version Internet of the future.
Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, says
"I think of the Metaverse as the next generation of the Internet"
Facebook is now offering $150 million fund to empower developers and creators at all levels to build the metaverse hardware and software content.
The concept of metaverse will likely disrupt the way we work. During the time of Covid-19, most of us have experience working remotely from home, and often time joining in on remote zoom or Google meet calls looking at colleagues on small 2D grids. With the metaverse, you are able to see and collaborate your colleagues as if they are really there with you. You will be able to see their facial expression and making eye contact with photorealistic avatar. You can even shop for virtual goods such as clothing and NFTs. Startup such as NFT Oasis have already raised $4.4 million to help develop the VR creator's economy.
You can invite friend over to watch movies, hangout to play games, and learn just about anything inside the metaverse.
To achieve this with VR/AR/MR wearable devices, other technologies such as haptics, hand tracking, eye tracking, sensors, computer vision, graphics, and AI is required.
This is why we compose this article to outline some of 5 metaverse stocks you should looking out for.
Roblox Corp (NYSE: RBLX)
Unity Software (NYSE: U)
Fastly Inc (NYSE: FSLY)
Autodesk Inc (NASDAQ: ADSK)
Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ: NVDA)
Roblox
Roblox is a multi-player gaming platform closest to the idea of metaverse. Millions of developers and users form as community and essentially create their own immersive gaming experience using the design tool, Roblox Studio. Roblox continues to be the highest ranking online gaming platforms for audiences under the age of 18.
However, Roblox stock price fell shortly three straight day of weekend outage. Should investors continue to invest in the company after recent dip in stock price?
Unity Software
Unity Software is one of the two main 3D game engines on the market. Unity enables developers to develop 2D and 3D content that can be used in traditional gaming platforms as well is in VR/AR.
The top games around the world all uses Unity for its development. This could also be the go-to solution for Metaverse developers. Recently, Unity signed a partnership agreement with Tripolygon, a 3D modeling service platform that focuses on metaverse applications.
Could Unity be a good stock for investors?
Fastly
The Metaverse will certain require lots of cloud computation, and this is where Fastly comes into the picture. By combining servers and other hardware to the origin of data creation, Fastly provides infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform.
The company’s solution reduces lag and latency of decentralization, considering the vast amount of data transfer required to produce real-time virtual worlds. This would hard to accomplish without Fastly’s edge computing solution, and this is why some estimate the sector could reach $15.7 billion in the next 5 years.
Autodesk
Autodesk is a company that creates professional suite of software for engineering, architecture, 3D designs, and constructions. The software is used to produce anything from automotive to mobile phone designs that permeate our lives.
Autodesk now has an array of products designed specifically for VR and AR content productions. We can see this as the bread and butter for creating metaverse.
Nvidia
Nvidia is the world’s leading semiconductor company for high-end graphics and videos processing chips. The company’s foundation makes Nvidia a very strong player in the metaverse stocks to buy. Nvidia ICs could play extremely prominent role to supply the processing power required for the metaverse. Furthermore, Nvidia is also creating their own metaverse platform called Nvidia Omniverse. The Nvidia Omniverse platform connects 3D worlds to an integrated virtual universe with a wide range of applications including design collaboration and real-world architecture simulation for robotic training.
It’s difficult to imagine that Nvidia wouldn’t not have a important role in the metaverse.
