I have just had a busy day undergoing retail therapy. Still unsure about which electric vehicle to buy after experiencing how Hyundai’s latest Ioniq model looks and feels, I popped over to the skate park to try on some Vans trainers. Then I headed to the Gucci Garden, where I was almost more interested in the exhibition and the butterflies flying around my avatar’s head than in checking out the new fashion collection.
This is the future of retail – today. You can already shop till you drop in the metaverse, albeit on a video-gaming platform such as Roblox, a system that more than 40 million people worldwide are familiar with. You can spend real money on virtual goods, fuelled by the likes of bitcoin, blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), where authenticity and currency are preserved in our virtual worlds.