😲 These Metaverse Companies Will Crush Meta & Facebook - YouTube

When you think about the Metaverse, you're  probably thinking that it's in the distant  

future, slowly being built by some of  the biggest corporations in the world.  

Trillion-dollar companies with secret  underground labs, researching all the  

different ways they can make money off the  internet and the people using it. Or maybe  

you think the whole Metaverse thing is just some  sort of gimmick; a scheme put together by video  

game companies and the entertainment industry  to pump up sales of virtual reality headsets  

and the low-budget experiences they run. This  episode isn't about Facebook or Meta, and it's  

definitely not about Mark Zuckerburg's idea of,  uh, whatever this is. [Tiger and the Buffalo Art]  

I want to show you a different side  of virtual reality. In this episode,  

I'll show you the current state of the art tech  

and some of the publicly traded companies using  it to make the world a better place today,  

including some that ARK Invest doesn't hold,  at least not yet. Your time is valuable,  

so let's get right into it, starting with the  actual state of the art and how it got here.

You're probably already familiar with virtual  reality, or VR, which requires a headset  

device to immerse you in a completely virtual  setting. And you're probably also familiar with  

augmented reality, or AR, which overlays  digital objects and information onto the  

shared reality we call the physical world. That  means you can use it with smartphones, tablets,  

and even hands-free glasses. But there's another  application called mixed reality - not AR, not VR,  

but MR - where physical and digital objects  and environments can co-exist and interact in  

real-time. This isn't the distant future. It's the  state of the art in engineering and design today,  

from architecture to aerospace to automotive.  All kinds of new products and services are made  

possible by mixed-reality technologies. On the  software side, mixed reality drastically increases  

productivity and reduces time to value for one  simple reason: people can create organically,  

using their hands, instead of having to learn  industry-specific software, tools, and processes.  

Designers can swap parts and make adjustments to  a model by interacting with it in mixed reality  

and the modeling software translates and tracks  those changes in the background. We'll get back  

to these companies later in the episode. On  the hardware side, full visual immersion has  

already been reached, although it does  have a pretty big catch: we're only  

talking about objects that can be made to look  photorealistic with industrial-grade software.  

So we're not talking about giant robots or epic  space battles, or even human faces just yet.

It's important to talk about VR headsets because  nothing else really matters if you don't believe  

they're getting close to being ready for  prime time. They're actually a lot further  

along than most people think. Heck, they're  a lot further along than most experts think.  

Here's what ARK Invest has to say about the  state of virtual reality and visual immersion.  

According to their 2021 Big Ideas Report, the  best-in-class VR headsets today achieve only  

10% of human visual immersion. If consumer  VR is limited to the console gaming market,  

ARK Invest believes that fully immersive VR  headsets won't reach mass-market adoption  

in the same way that cell phones have. And to  reach that level of complete visual immersion at  

a reasonable price, VR headsets basically need to  follow the same adoption curve as the cell phone  

for the next 10 years - from now, until 2030.  Yikes! Well, let me show you that consumer VR  

may not be limited to the console gaming market  for too much longer. This is the Varjo XR headset.  

It uses two 12 megapixel cameras to pass video  of the real world into the headset displays.  

It also has about the same color range as  the real world, so photorealism isn't lost  

thanks to off-colors or limited lighting  and rendering capabilities. The Varjo XR  

headset uses a built-in LIDAR to calculate  the range of real objects in the environment  

and decide how to scale the virtual objects in  it, so there's no object jitter or flickering.  

It has integrated hand and eye-tracking to keep  interactions as natural and fluid as possible.

This blows the doors off industrial use-cases  because you can bring physical objects into the  

digital space. For example, pilots can bring  real checklists to a flight simulator and use  

their real hands to check things off as they go,  as opposed to the VR controllers we're thinking of  

for video games. Or, they can sit in a real  cockpit but fly a simulated flight with the  

aircraft turned completely off. Can you tell what  part of this scene is fake? Well, it's actually  

the entire scene. That's the power of mixed  reality. And of course, that power can be used  

to simulate computer monitors or screens of any  size and shape. Think about all of the different  

devices with screens you have today. Your phone,  your TV, your laptop or desktop computer, maybe  

an extra monitor or a tablet off to the side. Why  not just digitally simulate whatever computer and  

displays you want depending on the physical  environment you're actually in at the time?  

The possibilities are endless AND more convenient;  after all, this headset is smaller than your  

physical laptop. The only problem is... the Varjo  XR-3 headset is almost $8000. [disc scratch] These  

things are basically the Tesla Roadster of  headsets. That's actually what stopped me  

from making this episode sooner. ARK Invest is  right; no one except the wealthiest enthusiasts  

can afford these things right now, so they'll  never reach mass-market adoption at this rate.  

But, just like Tesla keeps innovating and  has moved downmarket since the Roadster,  

Varjo just released a $2000 dollar version of its  headset, called the Aero. While the Aero strips  

out a lot of the industrial-grade features like  the pass-through cameras and the LIDAR, it doesn't  

lose any of the VR functionality from Varjo's  $8000 XR-3 headset. That means industrial-grade VR  

is now available at around the same price point as  a flagship smartphone and costs will only continue  

to decline over time, just like Tesla's cars and  personal computers and laptops and cell phones.

ThrillSeeker is a great YouTuber who focuses on  all things virtual and augmented reality. Here  

are some of his first impressions of the Varjo  Aero VR headset. [ThrillSeeker Clips with Audio]  

If you're interested in learning more about the  state of the art of AR and VR, Thrill Seeker is  

a great channel to follow. I'll leave a link to  his deep dives on Varjo in the description below.  

Hopefully, you're starting to see that the  state-of-the-art for VR is being pushed forward by  

industrial applications, not just video games, and  amazing hardware is quickly coming down in cost,  

which will drive consumer adoption way up. As a  fellow investor, I think seeing this context is  

really valuable, so I appreciate you sticking with  me so far. Varjo isn't a publicly-traded company,  

at least not yet, so let's talk about the  companies that are. I think there are three kinds  

of companies that are important to industrial  VR. The first kind focuses on the infrastructure.  

Not just headsets but virtual collaboration  environments and platforms. The second kind  

focuses on digitizing physical stuff -- they scan  objects and environments in the real world and let  

people interact with their digital twin. The third  kind focuses on designing physical stuff -- they  

let people build objects and environments in a  digital world and then produce their physical  

twin, which usually ends up being a product.  Together, these types of companies are great  

long-term investments today because they offer  state-of-the-art products and services right now.  

Those offerings will scale very well into the  metaverse as VR technology continues to mature  

and become more affordable but doesn't rely  on that idea to succeed. So, if you want to  

bet on the Metaverse but against Facebook and Meta  Platforms, these stocks are a great way to do it.

Let's start with Nvidia, ticker symbol N V D A.  Nvidia makes the GeForce line of graphics cards,  

as well as tons of enterprise hardware and  software for every type of artificial intelligence  

application you can think of. They also build  the superpods, which are their commercially  

available supercomputers specifically designed  for artificial intelligence, as well as their DGX  

station, which is their server solution for data  centers. In my opinion, these machines or machines  

like them will run a serious portion of the  metaverse. Last week, NVidia held their annual GPU  

Technology Conference, or GTC, where they heavily  featured their Omniverse initiative. [Short clip  

of Jensen Huang] The Omniverse is a scalable,  real-time development platform for collaborative  

3D design and simulation. At the foundation of the  Omniverse is Pixar's open-source USD, which stands  

for universal scene description. This layer allows  large groups of people to work simultaneously  

across multiple software applications on a shared  3D scene, whether it's an automotive factory floor  

or the set of a movie. This open standard  foundation gives software partners multiple  

ways to extend and connect to Omniverse, whether  through USD adoption and support, or building a  

plugin, or via an Omniverse Connector. That  means Nvidia's Omniverse is an ecosystem of  

development tools and assets that grows whenever  a partner adds functionality to it. For example,  

Apple, Pixar, and NVIDIA have collaborated to  bring advanced physics capabilities to USD.  

NVIDIA and Adobe are collaborating on a Substance  3D plugin that will unlock new material editing  

abilities for Omniverse and Substance 3D users.  The list goes on and on, but the point is this  

Omniverse ecosystem is already connecting leaders  from every industry to be more than the sum of  

its parts, which means it will gain all sorts of  customers and use-cases in the future. Lockheed  

Martin is working with Omniverse to develop  strategies for wildfire simulation, prediction,  

emergency response planning, and fire suppression  efforts. Even South Park, which is obviously the  

greatest television show of all time, is exploring  Omniverse to enable several of its artists  

to simultaneously collaborate on scenes and  optimize their insanely limited production time.

Next on the list is Matterport, ticker symbol  M T T R. As their name suggests, they focus on  

porting physical matter into the digital world.  More specifically, Matterport creates digital 3D  

models of buildings and spaces for a wide variety  of applications. For example, real estate firms  

can offer virtual tours, and construction firms  can assess the progress of their current projects.  

Architects and engineers can streamline  documentation and collaborate directly within  

a correctly-scaled 3d model of a project, instead  of across a lot of different pieces of software.  

The 3D digital reconstruction market is largely  unpenetrated so Matterport enjoys a huge  

first-mover advantage. In act, they have around  100 times more spaces mapped than the rest of  

the market combined. They have a fully automated  end-to-end digitization process that works with a  

wide variety of compatible capture devices,  including their own cameras as well as cell  

phone cameras thanks to their android and iPhone  apps. Their revenue increasingly comes from their  

free-to-paid subscription model, where a team of  2 can digitize a space with their phones for free.  

Then, if customers want to scale up  their team, digitize more spaces,  

use better cameras, or export their data  in a wide variety of technical formats,  

they have to upgrade to a paid monthly plan. That  makes Matterport very scaleable to businesses  

of all sizes, from individual projects  all the way up to enterprise clients who  

want to use Matterports integrations with other  Building Information Modeling tools like Revit.

Speaking of Revit, the third stock on the list  is Autodesk, ticker symbol A D S K. One of  

the other big growth drivers for AutoCAD right  now is Revit, which is a leading tool for BIM,  

or building information modeling. Building  Information Modeling is the process of creating  

and managing information for a built asset, like  a building. The model integrates different kinds  

of data, including the structure of the asset,  to produce a digital representation of the asset  

across its entire lifecycle, from planning  and design, to construction, operations, and  

maintenance. BIM is quickly becoming mandated for  large civil engineering projects around the world,  

which is really good for Autodesk in general and  Revit specifically. That's one reason Matterport  

integrates with it. Autodesk is also famous for  making AutoCAD. C A D stands for computer-aided  

design and AutoCAD is one of the industry  standards in infrastructure, architecture,  

city planning, and product design. Chances are,  the device you're watching this video on was  

designed in or at least mocked up in AutoCAD.  But Autodesk makes much more than AutoCAD.  

They also make 3DS Max and Maya, which are  visual effects software suites used in Hollywood  

Blockbusters like Pixar's Monster's Inc, as well  as triple-A video games like the Uncharted series,  

Call of Duty, and even Halo. So, regardless  of your opinion on the future of the internet  

and the Metaverse, Autodesk is already positioned  for long-term success. It has in-demand products  

that are leaders in their respective industries -  AutoCAD for drafting and design, 3DS Max and Maya  

for visual arts and effects, and Revit for  building information modeling. By the way,  

Autodesk is one of the companies currently  connecting to Nvidia's omniverse.

And finally, we have Unity Software, ticker  symbol U, which allows developers to create  

2D and 3D interactive experiences for every  type of platform, including PCs and Macs,  

gaming consoles, and mobile devices.  Unity's solutions are very scaleable;  

they support everyone from huge studios that make  multiplayer games requiring powerful computers  

all the way down to individual  creators who just want to make  

a simple mobile game. Unity's platform follows  a develop-once-deploy-everywhere model where  

creators can deploy their work to Playstation,  Xbox, Nintendo, MacOS and iOS, and Android and  

Windows. This is a big selling point. That means  different operating systems and device makers  

need to enter into long-term partnerships with  Unity Software, to ensure that creators don't have  

to learn to write any extra code just to get their  projects onto one specific platform. As a result,  

Unity's platform has become an industry-standard  content creation tool. By their own estimates,  

over half of the top 1,000 mobile games  in Apple’s App Store and on Google Play  

have been created using Unity’s solutions. Their  primary audience right now is game developers, but  

they're extending their development ecosystem to  support much more than just video games. In fact,  

Unity has been used to develop nearly 60% percent  of ALL AR and VR content, and something like 90%  

percent of the content on emerging AR platforms is  made using the Unity engine. They are consistently  

investing to expand their platforms to  cater to industries like architecture  

and engineering 3D designs, automotive designs,  3D film, and animation creation. Importantly,  

Unity Software's biggest competitor is Unreal  Engine, which is owned by Epic Games, the company  

that makes Fortnite. Epic Games, and thus Unreal  Engine, are not publicly traded. I think that's  

why Cathie Wood has over 1.5 billion dollars in  Unity Software stock today, making it ARK Invest's  

4th biggest position overall. Interestingly  enough, ARK Invest doesn't have a position Nvidia,  

Matterport, or Autodesk but they haven't  really published anything that suggests why.

So, comment below or tweet me at Ticker Symbol  YOU with your thoughts on the current state of  

VR and these companies that are connecting  the physical and digital world. Do you think  

the companies I talked about will be key to  the Metaverse or is a different one at the  

top of your list? Do you think these companies  will continue to succeed even if the metaverse  

never becomes a reality? I'm excited to hear  your thoughts. As for me, Nvidia and Unity  

Software are both already in my 100,000 dollar  portfolio on Public dot com. I'm building that  

portfolio from scratch to compete directly with  ARKK, ARK Invest's flagship innovation fund,  

which also holds a lot of Unity stock. If you're  interested in following that investing project,  

consider liking this video and subscribing to the  channel with all notifications turned on. That  

way, you'll be the first to know when I come out  with more coverage like this, as well as exactly  

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which has been especially exciting during this  choppy earnings season. So, if you'd like access  

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whether you're looking for a new home for your  own portfolio or you just want a different way  

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the description below as well. Thanks for watching  and until next time, this is Ticker Symbol You.  

My name is Alex, reminding you that the  best investment you can make... is in you.