The Passage journey began in 2017 as Enva Division, a creative agency focused on designing custom environments for brands across digital, entertainment, and retail.
These digital environments allowed clients to view, test, and interact with real-world displays in 3D before they were actually built. This made the creative build easier and cheaper, giving teams better tools to put their ideas into action.
Through our work with brands like Warner Brothers Studios, Capitol Records, the Dallas Cowboys, Red Bull, Amazon Studios, and American Girl, we quickly saw the broader potential for these environments as a new frontier of digital experience began to take shape before us.
As the global pandemic forced brands to think differently in 2020, Passage became the solution to meet their evolving needs. During this time, we honed in on creating fun, immersive digital environments that helped our clients connect with and engage their audiences.
As the world was quickly forced to go virtual, the idea of combining digital and physical realities to create new value, efficiencies, and experiences grew.
Enter the Metaverse, the next iteration of the internet that cohesively integrates the digital and physical layers of reality.
The Metaverse is overlaid by Web3, its value layer. Built on decentralized blockchains that aren’t controlled by any single service provider, Web3 is transparent, permissionless, and immutable, with value and ownership created through cryptocurrencies, fungible tokens, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
In 2020, the NFT market was valued at $100 million, and by the end of 2021, it had grown to $25 billion (a 25000% increase).In November 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced his trillion-dollar bet, rebranding Facebook as “Meta,” with the aim of creating a future powered by Web3 technologies. Others, from Microsoft to Google and Nvidia, soon followed, and in the first half of 2022 alone, over $120 billion was invested in the Metaverse.
There has been a lot of criticism of Meta, in particular, for appearing out of touch with its intended audience. To many, its focus on “getting lost in the Metaverse” sounds like a ploy to continue farming data from its users.
So is the Metaverse just a fad driven by a billionaire and an economic bubble?
We believe there’s something much deeper at play.
