According to multiple market analysts, the virtual reality industry will grow into a business worth hundreds of billions of dollars by 2020, and we’ve already seen a massive uptick in VR developer jobs in recent years.
The first-ever “President of Virtual Reality,” Jon Jacobs, claims he can seize on this growth and jumpstart the creation of 300,000 new jobs that will exist in virtual worlds by the same year.
Jacobs, who played the in-game famous avatar Neverdie from the 2003 MMO Entropia Universe, won an online election held by “Swedish VR developer Mindark PE AB and supported by a coalition of game developers.”
He earned himself a place in the Guinness Book of World Records when he sold a virtual asteroid in Entropia Universe for $635,000. Like in Entropia Universe, Jacobs says virtual reality communities present opportunities to make a living in cyberspace.
Expecting a call from Trump pretty soon asking about VR jobs for Americans 😉https://t.co/BhQkvekLpP#NWO #VR #billionjobs #basicincome
— NEVERDIE (@nevereverdie) December 5, 2016
Jacobs told VRScout in an email his job-creation plan involves creating a monetized “teleportation” system for the global VR community, where users spend and earn tokens to “teleport” across worlds, apps, and experiences through public VR teleportation pods.
“My objective here is to champion a new monetization model to be adopted by all developers who wish to build a democratic VR/AR universe that will address global challenges,” Jacobs said.
But to build the cyber infrastructure to create 300,000 VR jobs, Jacobs says he needs a sizeable investment.
“Creating 300,000 jobs will cost me $200 million. I can do this and I will prove that this system really works,” Jacobs said in an interview with Sputnik.
Jacobs further claims the jobs he’d create would be permanent, unlike government programs that create temporary jobs in infrastructure for highway or bridge repairs.
“The jobs are permanent because there will always be teleporter fees and a portion of that revenue will always go to gamified jobs,” Jacobs told VRScout. “As opposed to only back into the developer’s and investor’s pocket.”
He says he has an end goal of raising $1 billion for the teleportation VR system.
“My goal is to raise $1 billion for the teleportation system which will be used to create gamified jobs as well as to finance games, worlds and apps developed by a wide variety of developers who wish to embrace the system,” Jacobs said.
Why $1 billion?
“$1 billion is very little in terms of the total amount that will go into VR/AR content development over the next few years but it will go a massive distance to creating a thriving global mixed reality virtual goods trading and job market,” he added. “I believe [this] will then drive billions of dollars of additional investment into this system thereby creating millions more jobs and opportunities for users.”
But Jacobs also initially made a campaign promise to help create 1 billion VR jobs in his 4-year term, which is an incredibly unlikely goal when you consider the planet has roughly 7.2 billion inhabitants with around 3 billion employed, according to The Guardian Data Blog.
You can see an infographic made by Jacobs that explains his teleportation job plan below.
Image Credit: Jon Jacobs / PresidentofVirtualReality.com
