The grand vision of the metaverse as an enveloping, immersive space that brings us together within wildly interactive experiences is compelling. But what will it take to bring that vision to life? I believe there are seven factors that will make so-called “metaverse” experiences succeed.

Some of these factors are technological, naturally, but more importantly, they help recreate environments and sensations that we instinctively crave as human beings. After all, familiarity breeds utilisation. A successful metaverse will capitalize on what we love about the world and the experiences we’re familiar with, but grant us superpowers by suspending the laws of physics, space, and time.

Here are seven factors that will help usher in the next generation of immersive experiences:

1. Beautiful, Engaging 3D Content

Every new technology is just a curiosity until it discovers the unique type of content, native to the medium, that compels people to engage. For the web, that was the sum of human knowledge, tied together with hyperlinks. For mobile, it was location-specific experiences and the constant connection of social media.

For the metaverse, it will be 3D content that makes virtual objects and people feel like you can reach out and touch them. When business leaders ask me what they should do to prepare for the metaverse, I tell them to start creating in 3D now. Why? Because the environments that transport us will need to be lifelike to transcend our reality and imagination. Lifelike assets are ultimately 3D and contain natural-looking textures, materials, and lighting. Not only does creating in 3D help you prepare for the future of immersive experiences, it’s also helping many businesses today — from Salomon and BMW to Ben & Jerry’s — streamline the processes of designing products and creating marketing assets, like e-commerce images. Designers at Salomon, for instance, say 3D product design has cut the time needed to create a prototype by about 67 percent.

2. Open Standards

When new platforms develop, there’s always a temptation to make them walled gardens that trap content and visitors in a proprietary experience. But just as that approach didn’t work for the Internet, it will fail for the metaverse.

Creators and brands want to know that when they create new content, they can deploy it to any immersive experience across any platform. Fortunately, industry groups like Khronos Group and the Realtime Conference (both of which Adobe participates in) are hard at work on standards like USD and glTF that will allow people and companies to create rich 3D experiences once and publish them anywhere.

3. Portability

In the physical world, we express our personalities in part through what we possess and display — our car, our clothes, our tattoos. We’ll do the same in the metaverse with the virtual goods and art we choose. And just as in the physical world you wouldn’t want to have to change your clothes every time you go between school, a store, and a friend’s house, in the metaverse we’ll also want to keep our virtual possessions with us wherever we go.

Open standards and technologies powered by the blockchain will help us do that. But just as important is having a shared, agreed-upon digital economy so that your ownership of a digital asset is acknowledged in all immersive experiences. Just as they have for centuries, brands will continue to serve as an expression of taste and a form of cultural flex in the next era of immersive experiences.

4. Personalisation

In the digital world, we’ve come to expect experiences and recommendations that are honed just for us. If the last 10 movies you’ve watched are action flicks, you might be annoyed if Netflix recommends a new romcom.

That kind of annoyance will be magnified in the metaverse, given how immersive and enveloping those experiences are. It might be fun if a virtual Christiano Ronaldo popped up to recommend some football boots the first time you entered a sports store. But if your sport is tennis and you got the same spiel every time you came to the store, you’d soon switch off Christiano alongside that store’s immersive experience as a whole.

Personalising the metaverse isn’t easy — it requires tying together people’s experiences at a certain place and time with their later actions, like purchases. But that kind of coordination will be essential to make sure consumers don’t start to shut out the metaverse. Metaverse experiences will be hyper-personalised to each of us.

5. Interactivity

When we encounter virtual objects and avatars in the metaverse, we’ll want to interact with them, as we do in the physical world (and sometimes in ways we can’t in the physical world). We’ll want to open the door of the car, chat with the virtual assistant, or change the colour of a jacket in an instant.

Making that work will require agreeing on a broad set of common behaviours that all immersive platforms support and that creators and brands can rely on when they create metaverse content. The next generation of open formats like USD and glTF, mentioned earlier, must enable the behaviour of 3D objects across platforms.

6. Hardware

When people are skeptical of the metaverse, they often point to the failings of hardware: expensive virtual reality headsets that leave you nauseous or awkward-looking augmented reality glasses that no one wants to wear in public.

But this is not a good reason to write off the metaverse — hardware always evolves. Devices that start out bulky and ruinously expensive within a few years are sleek and within most people’s budgets. We will grow tolerant of new devices – much like we have for fitness trackers and AirPods – as we experience the sensations they add to our lives.

The metaverse hardware we need must be affordable and high-performance, eliminate dizziness (many current generation devices already achieve this), and, most important, give people a range of options for how enveloped they are. There are times and places when we want to be fully immersed in a VR world and there will be other times when we just want AR to show us directions or remind us to buy some bread when we go past the grocery store. I’m convinced we’ll soon have good hardware for immersive experiences of all kinds.

7. Human Experiences, at Scale

The best new products ultimately take us back to the way things once were, but with more scale and efficiency. It’s a funny thing; we all basically yearn for a small-town life, with the conveniences and relationships that make life full.

The metaverse will succeed by marrying the virtues of small-town life with the ability to transcend the laws of physics and probability. Being able to step into any shop, but be greeted like a regular at your local cafe. Or walking through a museum or park beside a friend who’s half a world away.

The obvious question now is: Can we accomplish what we need to in each of these seven areas? The tech world is littered with too many failures to say that any new platform is guaranteed to succeed. But we’ve already made great progress on many of these factors and I believe we’ll accomplish what’s necessary in each area for the metaverse to flourish.