Forget Virtual Land. The Metaverse’s New Currency Is Data

In the weeks since Meta laid off 1,500 employees and announced it was sunsetting its Horizon Workrooms platform, obituaries for the metaverse have poured forth from all corners. But while Meta’s Horizon Worlds and Workrooms platforms were certainly some of the better known metaverse platforms, they were far from the only players in the field.

Emerging from the aftermath of Meta’s announcement is a belief in some quarters that new space will open for independent players to step in and reshape the metaverse from a social network into a platform for research and data gathering alongside connection.

Evelyn Mora, who founded VLGE, believes that the next iteration of the metaverse will be focused on “world models” — the emerging approach to AI that relies on 3D representations of environments and the behaviors that happen inside them. Rather than just creating spaces for random hangouts and brand-building, companies can use the metaverse to gather data in real time at scale, with a focus on customer behavior and intention. As Mora says, “e-commerce in its current form captures clicks but fails to register desire. It records transactions but does not observe hesitation.”

Mora and her team focus on fashion, an industry where data gathering has historically been fairly weak. If you own a clothing store, for instance, you have a record of what people purchased and maybe some data about how long someone spent in a particular part of the store, but that’s about as far as it goes. Online brands can see who has spent time on pages and abandoned shopping carts, but nothing much more granular than that. “Unlike flat digital interfaces,” Mora said, “immersive environments enable brands to observe how humans move through space, how they explore, hesitate, return and engage.”

In the metaverse, every glance and movement can be tracked. Eye-tracking in a headset means that brands can tell how long someone looked at an item, or if they even stopped to look at all. AI can gather and synthesize volumes of this data and then act and update in near real-time, tweaking products to see if responses vary based on new inputs. What looks like a simple showing of a digital collection can actually provide valuable feedback for designers and brands, and while the idea of clothing lines being wholly algorithmically generated is anathema to many, plenty of designers can be informed by the feedback and then filter it through a creative lens.

While this data will initially be used to inform how consumers interact with products, there is an entire next step, where the data is used to train AI agents. In the not-too-distant future, a consumer could prompt an agent to find something for them to wear to a party, and rather than sifting through options for hours, the agent will scour the data and return three options seamlessly. Physical stores will also continue to exist, likely as premium experiences, and the data will inform how they are laid out and how customers interact with the items.

This one use case ultimately points to one of the paths forward for the metaverse — a place to gather spatial data to build new world models which can in turn be used to power AI agents and robots. Fei-Fei Li, sometimes referred to as the godmother of AI, is leading World Labs and betting big on spatial intelligence as the next wave of computing. Sources who work in venture capital also report seeing an uptick in pitches from startups focused on capturing spatial data sets to then be licensed by robotics companies and brands.

Once spatial data capture moves out of headsets and onto smartglasses, things will intensify rapidly. All of a sudden, companies can track millions of views in real time, if people opt in to having their interactions recorded, anonymized and shared. Of course, customers need to voluntarily opt in and ideally be compensated for their data in some way, but this will give companies newer and better data sets than they could have ever imagined.

While Horizon Worlds never quite caught fire, plenty of other metaverse platforms are succeeding — Roblox, for instance, has approximately 380 million monthly active users as of early 2026. And with Meta stepping back, more new players can enter the space without the immense pressure that a public, Fortune 100 company faces when trying to innovate and grow. Meta’s contribution to the space, however aborted, will still prove invaluable in the long term — and the metaverse will continue to evolve and grow.