Is this the world’s largest virtual fashion show? – Yahoo News
With five minutes to kill on your commute, or between meetings, which app do you open? For many of us, it is Twitter, Instagram, TikTok or gaming apps. But for more and more teenagers, it’s a metaverse platform to check-in on their avatar.
Your avatar can resemble how you look in the real world. Or, you could pretend to be someone, or something, totally different. That’s half the attraction.
“My avatar is who I want to be on that day,” says Monica Louise, who is also known as Monica Quin on South Korea’s hugely popular metaverse social media app, Zepeto.
“In the real world, it’s not easy for us to cut our hair and then grow it back, but in the digital world, we can do that with just one click.”
So what exactly is a metaverse? It’s an alternate world online – a bit of virtual reality and a little bit augmented reality. And it’s been touted as the next big thing in tech. Zepeto is Asia’s biggest metaverse platform, with almost a quarter of a billion users – it launched just three years ago.
Some 70% of these people are women, some are young teenagers, which is unusual, as most rival metaverse platforms such as Roblox are dominated by gamers who tend to be male.
“A lot of our users haven’t used Instagram yet, and a larger number of our users haven’t used Facebook yet,” says Rudy Lee, chief strategy officer of Zepeto. “We are the first social network that they are engaging with.”
Monica’s Zepeto avatar now earns her an impressive six-figure salary
And 90% of them are located outside South Korea, just like 28-year-old Monica, who lives in Canada, or 19-year-old Hannah who lives in the US.
They both joined Zepeto in 2018. For Monica, she liked seeing an electronic version of herself while Hannah found it by accident, scrolling through the app store and was curious.
Escapism in an alternate reality
“I’ve never been a huge fan of social media,” Hannah tells me. “There is a lot of pressure and I didn’t have the most pleasant experience but on Zepeto, you don’t have to show your face and there is no obligation.”
For Monica, her Zepeto avatar now earns her an impressive six-figure salary.
Monica is what is known as a virtual influencer, designing digital items such as dresses and tops which other avatars buy. Fashion plays a huge role on this platform, where …….
Source: https://news.yahoo.com/worlds-largest-virtual-fashion-show-000918933.html