Introduction
The overarching metaphor of my new book, The Widening Turn: America & the Accelerating Sweep of Innovation, is the United States as obsessive innovator in the mode of the great discoverer Ferdinand Magellan. So it made sense that I would follow my recent book launch with a June visit to Fiji in the South Pacific—after all, Fiji is not too far from where, in late January, 1521, Magellan’s expedition sailed just northeast of Fiji at Pluka-Pluka and Flint Island on their way to Guam and the Philippines.
And wouldn't you know... it was in Fiji that I discovered the convergence of two primary themes of The Widening Turn—the continuing rise of the East (what I’ve been referring to as the “New Silk Roads”)… and the fitful but tantalizing emergence of a digital 3D world.
Mutiny on Deck
It all started one humid night driving to dinner in Suva, Fiji. I was chatting away with AI thought leader Simon Kriss (author of The AI Empowered Customer Experience) when a billboard appeared brightly in the distance. I clicked a quick picture through the bleared window. What a shot—Simon’s reflected visage hovers like a hologram above two headset-wearing young people floating above a bold declaration from Digicel Pacific:
THE FUTURE IS 5G. Coming Soon to Suva.
As the billboard vanished into the night, I wondered if a new day was dawning across the South Pacific. Today, Fiji’s economy relies on the twin economic pillars of tourism and agriculture. But a mutiny against the Old Economy means Fiji is setting sail for a more 21st century digital reality.
In fact, just weeks before my visit, in late May, 2024, a “National Digital Strategy Validation Workshop” was held in Suva to help shape Fiji’s digital future. “The National Digital Strategy,” notes a press release, “aims to provide a practical and impactful roadmap for Fiji, adopting a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach to ensure it leaves no one behind in the transformation process.” According to Dirk Wagener of the United Nations, “Digital transformation… represents a profound societal shift that impacts every facet of our lives. It is a journey toward inclusivity, efficiency, and sustainability.”
Digital infrastructure is indeed embedding itself across the South Pacific and Fiji already has one of the highest rates of ICT penetration in the Oceania region. Thanks to Google, construction of a new subsea cable from Los Angeles to Fiji and Australia via Hawaii is underway. Advanced Internet access via satellite is in the works as well. Entities such as Telecom Fiji and Digicel Telecom are building a new data center and incubation center for research and development. And Fiji’s Pacific Koro Business Park (construction started in 2018) aims to be a business process outsourcing (BPO) destination capable of housing up to 15,000 seats within two years (whether filling those seats is realistic is an open question, as discussed on the latest CX Files podcast).
During the digital workshop in May, Fiji’s Secretary for Trade, Shaheen Ali, noted that, “For a small island developing state like Fiji, digitalization can help us overcome the challenges of our small size and remote location from major markets, allowing us to leapfrog to newer technologies. However, embracing these opportunities requires a strategic approach.”
The aim of digitalization, as ever, is to drive innovation, dynamic growth, and prosperity. Reliable digital infrastructure aims at a new kind of wealth creation.
I stared out the window as ideas flashed like fireflies in the velvety night. If we take the digitalization process to its logical conclusion, doesn’t that process eventually bring us to something akin to… the metaverse? If so, shouldn’t preparing for a more immersive digital reality be a key piece of development strategy for nations large and small? In the case of Fiji, could virtual spaces eventually bloom like lily-pads across the South Pacific, allowing Fijians to leapfrog into the future, transforming the way people communicate, work, and live?
I kept staring out the window wondering about the possibilities….
Immersive Education
Imagine a potentially impactful use case for a world communicating in increasingly immersive ways—the field of education. In the future, students in American classrooms, enabled by devices such as Apple’s Vision Pro or Meta’s Quest 3, could take a virtual field trip to Fiji, where they’d be introduced to local Fijians in the metaverse as well as an array of visual education tools and experiences. Discussions could focus on subjects of particular relevance such as climate change. More virtual field trips would follow. Eventually, some students might fly all the way to Fiji to see the place up close.
Did you know that Fiji Airways just announced it’s planning a big U.S. expansion with a new direct route to Fiji? This is exactly what Matthew Ball, author of The Metaverse (the second edition is due out this month) meant on a recent podcast when he explained that when it comes to the metaverse, “it’s not a question of physical isolation or individuals receding from society into a virtual world, it’s actually… a complement to nearly everything that we do, it’s a tool, a wrench that we pull out in specific cases for an existence that is mostly physical.”
After all, precedence is already being set by none other than the World Economic Forum (WEF). Did you know that the WEF’s Global Collaboration Village is a 3D internet platform for world leaders to gather and collaborate in a virtual town hall for plenary sessions and other meetings? “Using immersive technology, it empowers decision-makers to tackle challenges through co-presence, real-time interaction, and dynamic visualization. Inside the Village, a growing network of leaders learn, host, showcase, and collaborate to amplify impact.” High on the agenda? Empowering climate action.
Ask yourself… if world leaders can come together virtually to collaborate and discuss issues of global import, why shouldn’t regular people across all kinds of organizations have similar opportunities to share ideas in the immersive town square emerging around us? What if countries could empower their populations by scaling global communications across virtual spaces? What if virtual town squares someday saw empathetic understanding for initiatives like climate action go exponential across the globe?
Even now in real-time, AI-powered translation services not only translate speech, but sync words with a speaker’s lips while doing so. The potential for seamless communication between vastly different cultures is unprecedented. Just imagine yourself in a future metaverse, offering insights to an assembled crowd of fellow global citizens. In fact, we’ve already seen something like this in the holograms of the Jedi Council in “Star Wars”… or to borrow a line from Seamus Heaney, “I glimpsed an elsewhere of potential which seemed at the same time to be a somewhere being remembered.”
A Digital Twin in the South Pacific
Indeed, when it comes to technology and the field of education, there’s much to think about. In a new thought-provoking piece, research firm HFS touches on how generative AI is disrupting the space in real-time:
In the world of education, long reliant on the legacy of dusty libraries, lengthy essays, and math drills, professors and teachers realize that GenAI is a threat to homework and how people learn. Professors and teachers now rely on GenAI to build courses, lesson plans, and assignments once sold online and part of the textbook industry. But what good is any of that if anyone who wants to learn anything can, with a handful of prompts and access to the world’s entire knowledgebase, do the same, and then learn anything and even obtain feedback on their work? What is the point of the university and training industry if learners can generate more effective, tailored learning models than teachers can?
Well said. Maybe someday an AI-enabled metaverse could offer an exponentially more effective model for education. I’d suggest education will become more collaborative and Socratic over time. Tests of knowledge will be conversations rather than regurgitations. In tomorrow’s more inclusive, questioning world, everyone will be a teacher. Everyone will be a student.
Did you know that Meta Platforms just announced “Ocean,” a new open-source, cross-platform framework for creating computer vision and mixed/augmented reality applications? “Meta notes in its Ocean developer page that the supported XR features can help create solutions for sectors such as education, tourism, and real estate.”
And speaking of oceans and real estate, did you know that less than two years ago the Pacific nation of Tuvalu (just north of Fiji)... which is on the frontline of climate change and as a result created a version of itself in the metaverse... is sparking a conversation about the threat of rising sea levels? It seems “the plan, which accounts for the ‘worst case scenario,’ involves creating a digital twin of Tuvalu in the metaverse in order to replicate its beautiful islands and preserve its rich culture.”
Meantime, we’re seeing an "alignment of the future of computing with the future of the climate" playing out in real-time. Venture capitalists in Silicon Valley are looking more seriously at clean power at a time when renewable energy will be needed across the world to power all those data centers training large language models (LLMs). Investors are backing startups focused on making data centers and chip manufacturing more efficient.
The aptly named cloud provider Crusoe Energy is one startup devoted to clean energy—it powers its data centers with natural gas and intends to turn to wind energy and solar (and in Abilene, Texas, “Oracle will lease a 200 megawatt data center from Crusoe, where it will place a whopping 100,000 of Nvidia’s forthcoming GB200 chips for OpenAI, making it one of the most powerful GPU clusters in the world.”).
It's a remarkable moment in time. The shift to a 21st century immersive digital economy is a vast reconstruction project, an exercise in reinvention. It's a storm of change sending mutinous digital waves across the world. And nobody knows how long it will take to play out... or how smooth a process it will be.
A Strange Meeting with Fletcher Christian...
The next morning I headed out of the Grand Pacific Hotel in Suva to walk off the Fiji Golds from dinner the night before, determined to catch a glimpse of the rudder from the HMS Bounty, which happens to sit just across the street from the hotel at the Fiji Museum, which in turn just happens to be part of the “Museum and Climate Change Network.”
Inside the museum I was still thinking about the opportunities for enriched educational experiences and their possible ripple effects on international relations when unexpected discoveries continued to pile up. It seems that in 2021, the Fiji Museum signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with four British museums for a knowledge exchange program. Staff from the Fiji Museum plan to provide cultural information about Fijian artefacts held in British collections. But there was a plot twist… a British government initiative called, “Museums in the Metaverse”—
As a part of its Innovation Accelerator, the UK government has funded a significant project called ‘Museums in the Metaverse’ with £5.6 million to develop a virtual reality museum platform. This project, led by the University of Glasgow's College of Arts & Humanities, aims to create a platform where professionals and amateurs can become ‘virtual curators,’ building virtual and mixed-reality environments with 3D-scanned objects from collections. Online visitors will have the opportunity to explore these spaces via VR headsets from anywhere in the world.
Just last year I was in Glasgow for the annual CXO Outsourcers event. Who knew the local university there is, in effect, evangelizing the metaverse?
It all made me wonder… how long before I’m inside the metaverse, aboard the HMS Bounty sipping a Fiji Gold, turning to Fletcher Christian (lieutenant to commander William Bligh on that fateful trip of the HMS Bounty in 1789)… speaking to him behind the hand…
Eh, Fletcha… helluva mutiny brewin’ against the Old Economy, innit?
Shaping the Technological Landscape
I headed back to the Grand Pacific Hotel and went searching online for more evidence of the possibilities for an emerging digital world in the immediate environs. It didn’t take long. Because in April, 2024, Digicel Fiji unveiled Fiji’s first “Gaming Experience Center” at Damodar City. Gaming, of course, is one of the primary industries laying the groundwork for a future metaverse and is sure to be transformed by the metaverse in turn (Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft are already metaverse-like platforms). Suva’s new Gaming Experience Center is an interactive space where customers can explore the “true potential of 5G.” In the words of Shally Jannif, Digicel Pacific Regional CEO:
The launch of the Damodar City Experience store represents Digicel Fiji’s ongoing commitment to providing Fijians with advanced technology and an exceptional network experience…. Our customers and visitors can step into the future and experience the incredible speeds that 5G is capable of offering, firsthand at the gaming experience center. Here, gamers can test their skills on cutting-edge devices powered by 5G… Digicel Fiji is helping to shape the technological landscape in the country.
The metaverse isn’t dead. As I wrote in The Widening Turn, progress is happening so fast it’s taking a long time to play out. The global landscape we’re seeing now is blanketed by the fog of change, and yet embryonic digital spaces such as gaming could one day morph into a more expansive metaverse with impactful use cases like education.
Or as Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games, put it in an interview this month:
Fortnite and Roblox and other immersive games like PUBG Mobile are growing at an amazing rate. People are playing them, enjoying them. You can identify now about 800 million people who engage in these kinds of experiences every month. And what they’re doing is very ‘metaverse.’ They’re going into a real-time, 3D environment with their friends. They’re engaging in a variety of different experiences…. they really are traveling through virtual worlds together socially and having fun together.
Enter William Bligh…
We’re living in amazing but disorienting times. Technology is leading a general uprising against old business models across the world. The more I thought about it, the more immersive the scenarios became. And then suddenly, the voice of William Bligh, ship's captain of the HMS Bounty, crashed into my consciousness, chastising Fletcher Christian and me….
“Fools!” shouted Bligh. “Meta Platforms and Apple will never find passage to your so-called metaverse! They’re cullin’ their ranks, mates! Meta has lost more than $55 billion on Reality Labs since 2019! Reality Labs’ hardware teams will cut spending by almost 20% between this year and 2026! And nobody wants your damnable Vision Pro!”
At this point, I suspected my imagination was getting a bit out of control when, in a flash, Neal Stephenson, author of the classic Snow Crash, manifested like a hologram next to Fletcher Christian. Stephenson jabbed a finger at William Bligh to point out that the players Tim Sweeney is talking about don’t need a Quest 3 or Vision Pro to engage in immersive experiences.
I looked from Bligh to Stephenson, and back to Bligh again. What was happening? Stephenson cleared his throat, sipped his own Fiji Gold, and declared that, “the reality we’ve ended up with, which didn’t seem plausible in 1990 when I was writing [Snow Crash], is that we’ve got billions of people fluently navigating highly realistic, immersive, three-dimensional worlds using flat screens and keyboard and mouse.”
A Road to Damascus Moment?
Still a skeptic about our possible future? I’d suggest gazing over Fiji’s watery horizon for a potential “Road to Damascus Moment”… the vast stretches of the New Silk Roads. Did you know that the gaming industry, potential harbinger of a future metaverse, is lighting-up the far away sands of Arabia? In fact, Saudi Arabia just hosted the inaugural “Esports World Cup.” Arabia hasn’t seen anything like this since Ibn Saud kicked off decades of conquest by taking Riyadh in 1902, culminating in the discovery of petroleum in 1938.
Alas, today’s Saudi Arabia is mutinying against that old oil-based economy. “As part of its plan to diversify its economy from oil, the Saudi government has said it will invest $38 billion in video games by 2030 through its Public Investment Fund, known as the P.I.F., a wealth fund that manages $700 billion…. Along with buying up game publishers and hosting extravagant esports tournaments, the Saudi kingdom is building a gaming city with its own esports district 30 miles west of Riyadh called Qiddiya.”
According to Rod Breslau, a gaming and esports analyst, “They’ve used unlimited resources to pretty much make whatever they want to happen, happen.” Saudi Arabia’s influence in video games is rippling across the world.
In a recent interview with author Matthew Ball, Meta Platforms CTO Andrew Bosworth offers the following insight:
So I think we do always think of technology in our industry as almost in its own terms. That’s not fair. Technology exists inside the context of a society. And the more comfortable society is in technology, the more you can execute freely. And the less comfortable society is, the more cautious you need to be as you bring that technology to market. Because if you’re not careful, you could actually impede its adoption over time.
Yet suddenly, Saudi Arabia has thrown caution to the wind. As The New York Times puts it, “Once a country that effectively banned movie theaters and strictly restricted tourism, Saudi Arabia has poured wealth into sports and entertainment at a staggering rate.” If a society as strict as Saudi Arabia’s can embrace technology in such a massive way, the metaverse’s future might be so bright we’ll all have to wear shades.
Which may be why Meta Platforms is looking to build on the surprise success of its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses by taking a possible 5% stake in EssilorLuxottica. In the words of The Wall Street Journal, “Maintaining ties with Luxottica is crucial for the success of smart glasses devices and the company’s ambitions to build the so-called metaverse, which is a term used to describe people interacting in a 3D version of the internet simultaneously.”
Positioned Between East & West
But what of Fiji specifically? Might its economy, like Saudi Arabia’s, benefit from investing more resources into the video games industry? After all, it’s well-positioned to attract massive investors from both East and West. In 2024, China is expected to generate the most revenue in the video games market in the world, while the United States isn’t far behind. Should Fiji start to consider fostering some kind of gaming ecosystem?
Perhaps Fiji is uniquely positioned to take its strengths in tourism and turn those to greater advantage. The video games industry fits nicely into the larger sports and entertainment space writ large. And wouldn’t you know, it seems Fiji might soon attract an $895 million casino and hotel project courtesy of an investor from Macau. “If given the go-ahead, the casino project based in Nadi, a city on Fiji’s main island, would employ more than 600 people and aim to increase tourism, particularly from China.”
One might imagine an esports tournament at the sparkling new casino in Fiji, broadcast across the world. Gamers and armies of intrigued fans—from Saudi Arabia to China and Australia to the United States—dive into the metaverse to partake in the action and all its attendant experiential offshoots, learning more about Fiji as they do so. Education and entertainment comingle in unexpected ways. Immersive experiences morph seamlessly into commercial transactions.
Remember that network effects impact wealth creation. Recall Metcalfe's Law: “The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users or devices in the network. In simpler terms, the more people or devices that are connected to a network, the more valuable that network becomes.” Or as Tim Sweeney noted this July, “What’s happening in the metaverse is Metcalfe’s Law at a huge scale.”
Tapping into the Whole
It was time to get back to the presentations in Suva, so I pulled myself away from the intense back-and-forth between Fletcher Christian, William Bligh, and Neal Stephenson and headed back to the conference. I sat down and started scribbling notes. There are some 8,000 people working in the BPO industry in Fiji today, up from some 3,000 prior to the Covid economic shock. Approximately 80% of those workers are under the age of 35 and approximately 72% are women. 46% of the total population is under the age of 25. The market is currently valued at about $200 million, and Fiji is ambitiously aiming for a $1 billion outsourcing industry within a decade (to include BPO, KPO, and shared services).
Case studies range from partnerships such as CentreCom and Hertz (six Fiji locations handling Hertz operations in Europe that include English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Dutch); Vuvale Outsourcing and Lowes (debt collection that expanded into other services, such as customer service, online store agents, software development, etc.); Duco Consultancy and The Warehouse Group (global delivery center for retail services in New Zealand); and Bula Outsourcing and The Finance Brokers Association of Australia (FBAA).
But imagine what could evolve from an ever more immersive economy of the future. What could the convergence of AI and the metaverse someday mean? How might more metaverse-like experiences proliferate globally and how might Fiji tap into the whole, from education to entertainment? The turn toward a more immersive future might be more gradual than some expected—a widening turn rather than a sharp one—but it’s happening nonetheless.
Just look at how AI is helping accelerate the 3D mashup of video games, sports and entertainment—Electronic Arts (EA) just released its “EA Sports College Football 25” videogame, with AI bringing 11,000 college football players to digital life in three months. “EA collected photos of the athletes’ heads from their schools and then used its AI to create their videogame doppelgängers in seconds. The technology isn’t generative AI that creates new images such as OpenAI’s Dall-E, but rather a kind that takes data from photos and creates full 3D avatars.”
Better yet, consider the 3D animations popping-up on X and Youtube to better illustrate and explain… the recent assassination attempt against former U.S. President Donald J. Trump.
Crazy times. In 2024, we’re all immersed in a disorienting river of information, events, personalities, and entertainment that James Joyce foresaw in his masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, and which I wrote about for The Irish Times way back in 2015.
Conclusion: A Living Symbol
A recent editorial in the Fiji Sun newspaper told us that:
The recent Exploring Outsourcing in Fiji (EXO Fiji) Famil event highlighted an aspect of Fiji’s burgeoning economy—its potential as a hotspot for Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO). As International consultants toured the local enterprises like Vuvale Outsourcing and Mindpearl, it became clear that these sectors could be pivotal in diversifying Fiji’s economic landscape.…
But I see something more—Fiji, distant outpost of the New Silk Roads, a living symbol of a more collaborative, immersive world emerging, a place that’s joining in the global mutiny against the Old Economy, poised to grab the standard of a more spatial sphere of experience… offering perspectives and expertise on seemingly contradictory realms it understands well—from a changing climate and sustainability to tourism and entertainment—and, through savvy strategic partnerships…. aiming to reimagine its very future as a niche digital hub between East and West.
To make such an immersive future real, infrastructure will need to continue to improve. It’s a point Go4th Research made in a recent piece. Fiji still has a long way to go.
But I remain an optimist for the possibilities inherent in a more immersive, collaborative, sustainable world.
Image credit: Stephen Loynd photo of a billboard (and Simon Kriss) from a bus in Suva, Fiji (June, 2024)
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