“There are a lot of infrastructural advances that will be necessary for the visions of the metaverse that we hear most often to become a reality, and those are advancing on their own trajectories,” MacDuffie said at the Mack Institute conference. Those include advances in 5G and 6G telecommunications capabilities, widespread availability of broadband, video processing chips and capacities, he added. as well. “These things are not the metaverse, but how quickly they advance will have a lot to do with how quickly we can experience some of what the metaverse is promising us.” Experts have also pointed to the risks and dangers around avatars, which enable users to pretend to be another persona. Avatars can be great ways to play online games or do virtual shopping, but the anonymity they provide could potentially be misused to harass people online. “All of the bad behaviors that people can do face-to-face, they can certainly do in the metaverse, as they can do on social media and everywhere else,” said MacDuffie. “Maybe the greater immersiveness and the greater engagement of the senses can make some of that even worse or have more of a negative impact.” “There's so much capacity for mischief and bad stuff to happen with deep fakes and the like,” said MacDuffie. Those concerns could prompt regulators and other participants to put up “guardrails around the application of those agents,” he added. “It is possible today to create technology that will validate who you are,” Prasad Joshi, senior vice president of Infosys said at the Mack Institute conference on the metaverse. “That is still not trust; that is security. And the society has to make transition from security to trust. I don't think technology can ever make it.”