Unraveling the Metaverse
Some say it is VR, some say it is VR+AR+blockchain, and some call it a subtle, fuzzy blurring of “the real and the virtual”. So, as designers and entrepreneurs driving a digital economy, how might we grasp the metaverse?
Some reflection to get our neurons firing.
Instead of asking “What is the metaverse?” how about asking, “How does the metaverse change how people live, behave and relate to themselves and to each other?”
Two starting points
The metaverse in not limited to VR+AR+Blockchain, although it includes all of those. Because the metaverse is not a technological construct. It is a psychosocial construct realised through our entanglement with technology.
The emergence of the metaverse is a recent and distinct fork in human cultural sensibility and consequently in human behavior.
The metaverse is a clear shift in how we perceive value. We are beginning to see the virtual as equally or more valuable than the real. This is an astonishingly new sensibility.
Note: I’m using the word ‘real’ here to refer to the physical, material, tangible world of people, places and things. You know, the world you were born in, the one made of atoms and chemicals. Where actions have (in digital terms) unprogrammed, and some entirely unprogrammable, outcomes. To distinguish this ‘real’ world from the metaverse, I am calling it atomverse.
Dematerialised-Material
Here’s a nice peek at how the notion of real estate - a traditionally atomverse asset - is being reshaped within the immaterial metaverse.
So people are spending millions on entirely unreal real estate. On the surface, this is a radical enough change in the perception of ‘land’. More profoundly, this is a significant shift in the very orientation of our consciousness.
Let me elaborate. Across time, we have been told by sages, seers and saviours: mastering reality is your door to existential bliss, to nirvana. ‘Reality’ was the stuff of the atomverse, the seat of transformation, of change. Enlightenment in this life or in the next, or salvation in death, would come from right conduct in this atomverse reality. In order to achieve such transcendence, such ultimate salvation, the externally-oriented advised us to follow a god or a guru. Others, more internally-oriented, suggested that the key lay in self-mastery, in going inward into the world of internal reality, in mastering the mind and in befriending the heart. And hence both these approaches, into the external and internal dimensions of the atomverse, came to be highly valued. The internal dimension of the atomverse - variously called mind, imagination, soul - has been our primary realm of the immaterial and the abstract.
Now here comes along this new dimension - potentially more compelling, more valuable, more interesting, more rewarding, more meaningful than atomverse itself. Enter virtuality - the domain of the metaverse.
This - virtual - metaverse is something else altogether from the internal abstractions that came before - in form, it a simulation that is external to us. But being accessible only via the human senses and cognition, it therefore entirely internal. It isn’t real if we aren’t.
I find the notion of the metaverse weird, strange, messily entangling. And not necessarily in a bad way. It is as if we have turned our consciousness inside out.
When reflecting and imagining, the mind is like a flaming torch, lighting up inner worlds. When simulating virtual worlds , the mind becomes more like a projector, externalising its contents via technology.
The metaverse is a dematerialised extension of the material universe. We are using imagination - whose contents we essentially consider ‘unreal’ - to augment and extend the real.
I feel like the metaverse has been encroaching in on us with the steady adoption of what we call ‘media’, over time. VR and AR are an evolution from older media that already had primitive metaverse properties. Because all media speak to the same means of information gathering and experience: the human senses and human cognition. Books, radios, television had primitive interactivity in the form of pages and channels. With books, the written word was transformed into worlds within our heads. With radio, you heard a voice and your imagination filled in the rest of the story. Television made unreal worlds visible and sensible. The web introduced that critical bridge between the real and the virtual: moment-by-moment, real time interactivity. Thats a key media moment. With VR and haptics+olfactory tech the lines blur even further. We can now enter and inhabit virtual worlds - hearing, meeting, feeling virtual people and things. And AR does something unique.
AR is a unique metaverse technology in that it brings the atomverse-metaverse bridge full circle, putting the virtual back into the real.
A lot of the breakout AR innovation is predictably happening in fashion. The problem with smartphone AR: it is a 2D overlay on a 3D world, falling at least a whole dimension short of the very thing it is attempting to augment. And so it would need to adapt, or evolve. 3D AR integrated with Haptics & Olfactory Tech would really bring the metaverse party home.
Above and Below: Virtual fashion for sale on Dressx.com (Screenshots : Dressx.com)
Decentralverse?
It is a fallacy to see the blockchain as intrinsically interwoven with the metaverse. The blockchain (and by extension DAOs and DeFi) is a co-occurring sociotechnical leap with its own lineage and raison d'etre, deserving its own credit. For metaverse to appropriate the blockchain within its own definition is straight out unfair.
In fact, the blockchain’s origins and impetus could not be more different than the those of the metaverse. The metaverse is the outcome of a long-ongoing human project to extend, augment, - or escape - atomverse reality, via the immaterial sensual and cognitive experience. The blockchain, on the other hand, is born from the shock of the 2008 financial crash, the crisis of global capitalism and the runaway global wealth gap. The blockchain is a concerted attempt to reconfigure and reconstitute a broken atomverse reality. Already competitors to Facebook’s monolith walled garden approach to the Metaverse have landed.
Metaverse and the blockchain could not be stranger bedfellows, and yet here we are!
Co-occuring with AR/VR, the blockchain becomes an enabling technology for a certain kind of, maybe the best kind of, metaverse yet.
Atomverse & Metaverse: A self-perpetuating feedback loop of value
Earlier this year, the artist Fewocious made history working with metaverse studio RTFKT when they created NFT sneakers that sold out in minutes for some USD 3 million. As this article puts it, studio RTFKT “has also executed “forging” events – granting NFT holders the opportunity to receive a hypercrafted physical reciprocal product of their digital sneaker, uniquely bringing their highly sought after brand of virtual fashion wearables for a users' online persona into the physically wearable world.”
To paraphrase: some people spent, (or invested in / speculated if you like), lots of virtual money on virtual sneakers, and then some people had them made-to-wear in the real world. Fun! And while the numbers involved are truly remarkable, the phenomenon - the creation of atomverse value based on originally metaverse creations - isn’t new. Something similar happened when a kid saw Mickey Mouse wearing a pair of sneakers on Disney TV and then demanded they get those sneakers for their birthday. Mickey isn’t real and the sneakers Mickey was wearing weren’t real. But both drove the kid’s experience and behavior in the real world in very real ways.
So', what’s different now? I hypothesize that for some cohorts of - especially Gen Z users? but others as well - virtual value in their virtual lives seems to be a higher priority than real value in their real lives. Hence their efforts to find place and purpose in community is more situated in the virtual than in the real. Real word - atomverse - behavior is increasingly influenced by their encounters and experiences in the virtual, and not the other way around.
Social media destroying young people’s self-perception in the real world is terrible enough. The power of the metaverse lies in that it can reverse this feedback loop, where the locus of self-worth, self-understanding and identity begin to be determined in virtuality. This is arguably true already for a lot of hardcore gamers especially inhabiting persistent MMORPGs.
In such an emerging scenario, only at the common ground of shared human values can the twain, atomverse and metaverse, rightly meet. Else, we risk the escalating divorce of the virtual from the real.
Realising a healthy and ethical metaverse is the great UX and information design opportunity
Art has always been steeped in personal identity. Understandably, this tendency extends into the metaverse. Identity arguably is one primary vehicle driving the popularity and demand for Fewocious’ crazy expensive art. So is uniqueness. Thats the real deal.
Mataversial products do not face many of the traditional constraints of their atomverse twins. Like identity, could virtual objects articulate other unseen dimensions of themselves?
Objects, as Sterling once remarked, are “frozen social relationships”. A very metaversial claim. And I find myself agreeing. Sneakers are not just colors and patterns on textures and material. What about giving space, form and expression to some of their immaterial dimensions? Dimensions such as:
The social: who and how many owned or purchased or traded the NFT sneaker? Who made them and where? Were those makers treated right and fair? Could this data influence it’s aesthetics, design and performance in the real world?
The environmental: How rightly sourced are its materials? How environmentally aligned / carbon-intensive is the product’s supply chain?
The historic: what foothold does this product have in the history of footwear? Where would it sit in the futurity of footwear?
You get the idea…
Would you wear sneakers whose shape was a data visualisation of their carbon footprint? Or perhaps of YOURS?
Virtuality is enormously freeing and unconstrained. The real potential of the metaverse is in harnessing the extra-real - and the surreal - possibilities of virtuality, in freeing up information from atomverse’s grip.
Building out the metaverse - as an expression of immaterial values that matter - may help reinforce those values back in to our daily lives, relationships and the environment.
A couple of complex questions to leave you with, then ..
Where reality and virtuality are locked in an eternal dance of value creation and transfer, where does one end and other begin, in terms of the user’s lived experience? Getting this right will mean the difference between a metaverse that is simply a weird twin of the atomverse - and one that both transcends and meets it in agreeable ways.
Is the making of the metaverse our great mental exodus, a desperate collective escape from a crumbling atomverse? After all, in a world literally on fire — is now really the time to get excited about virtual shoes, art, land, etc whose source of existence is - still - burning carbon?
Why does the rise of the metaverse coincide with the global collapse of traditional religion, with the decline in childbirth, a teetering environment, and right into an unimaginable pandemic?
Has atomverse become too harsh to handle?
I have never felt this positive.
Have a good weekend!
