LG Doubles Down on Smart TV Metaverse Push at CES 2023

South Korean consumer tech giant LG Electronics has doubled down on its metaverse ambitions with a series of announcements at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

NFT aficionados will now be able to use a service known as Blade Wallet to buy, sell and trade their digital artwork at home using their LG smart TVs via the company’s LG Art Lab platform.

Blade Wallet is described as a “security audited Web3 wallet on the Hedera network”; Hedera uses Hashgraph, a distributed ledger technology that has been described as an alternative to blockchains.

LG previously launched NFT trading for all US LG smart TVs running webOS 5.0 and above in September, but users were restricted to using LG’s proprietary blockchain wallet Wallypto.

In addition, LG smart TV users will now also be able to access the metaverse platform Sansar, a “social platform” based around a User Generated Market (UGM) economy.

Enabled via cloud provider Ubitus, users will also reportedly be able to access live real-time events such as concerts.

Sansar isn’t the only metaverse provider that LG has partnered with; the firm also announced it has struck a deal with cloud streaming firm Oorbit to bring the “interoperable metaverse” to LG smart TVs.

The partnership will reportedly enable users to enjoy virtual worlds and experiences such as virtual concerts hosted on the music-focused gaming platform ELYNXIR, as well as AI generative multiplayer games hosted on the Auxworld platform.

Metaverse interest cools

Although LG is betting big on the metaverse at CES 2023, hype around the technology appears to have cooled since the term made its entrance into the Oxford English Dictionary for the first time as the 2022 Word of The Year.

Post-March 2022 many much-vaunted metaverse platforms, including The Sandbox and Decentraland, posted declines of around 80% in their user numbers, while The Sandbox owner Animoca Brands has halved the target for its metaverse investment fund to $1 billion.

Meanwhile, Meta’s stock slumped over 60% since the company rebranded with a focus on transitioning to a metaverse-focused business model.