On your marks, headset, go! Understanding the building blocks of metaverse realms
Date
2024
Authors
Keegan, Brendan James
McCarthy, Ian P.
Kietzmann, Jan
Canhoto, Ana Isabel
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Business Horizons
Abstract
In 2011, Business Horizons published the social media honeycomb article to help managers and scholars understand what was, then, a new form of media, its various platforms, and how to engage with it and learn to use it. Today, we face similar challenges and opportunities with the metaverse as we try to discover how to attract, enable, serve and capture value from users in some form of virtual world. In this article, we introduce the concept of a ‘metaverse realm’ (i.e., a specific type of metaverse space and community) and present the metaverse honeycomb model to explain the functionalities and affordances for different metaverse realms. We present two applications of the honeycomb model to show how different attention to immersive functionalities can characterize different metaverse realms. To conclude, we outline how the model could be used to strategically evaluate metaverse realms in terms of their external fit (i.e., the who-what-how of realms), internal fit (i.e., the trade-offs and synergies of realm functionalities), and life-cycles (i.e., roadmapping and directing realm evolution).
Description
Keywords
Metaverse, Honeycomb model, Virtual reality, Non-fungible tokens, Blockchain, Digital economy
Citation
Keegan, B. J., McCarthy, I. P., Kietzmann, J., & Canhoto, A. I. (2024). On your marks, headset, go! Understanding the building blocks of metaverse realms. Business Horizons, 67(1), 107-119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2023.09.002