The Metaversal Experience

It certainly seems so far like 2022 might be the year of the metaverse. Kicked into high gear last year by the company formerly known as Facebook's rebranding as Meta and its stated new direction around all their investments into VR and AR the last few years, "the metaverse" has quickly become a catch-all descriptor consuming not only virtual and augmented reality technologies, but also most video games and 3D animation, and perhaps even such notions as world-building and immersive storytelling. That expansive definition covers an awful lot of the work that I do and the fields that I work in. So I'm obviously paying attention.

What's this Metaverse of which You Speak?

Much ink has been spilled (ok, not literally – pixels pushed, perhaps?) in debate about what exactly the metaverse is and what it isn't. As a relatively new term, cribbed from not-so-distant science fiction, it's obviously taken on different meanings for different constituencies as it's entered the tech and business lexicons. For the sake of argument let's stick with a broad construct that includes all manner of digital and virtual environments that mimic in some way the physical world. This clearly includes all of AR, which by its very nature brings digital content into the physical world. It includes much of VR and video gaming and architectural CAD models and engineering digital twins.

In the grand scheme of things, the most compelling long-term vision of the metaverse (to me anyway) is one built around persistent augmented reality and integrated seamlessly into the physical world. The problem with that vision in 2022 is that we completely lack the hardware to achieve it. The best AR headsets we have right now are Microsoft's Hololens. They are great for business uses and some kinds of experiences, but they are heavy and bulky and have limited field of view, so they can't revolutionize the metaverse just yet. Meta and Apple and others have promised AR glasses closer to the persistent metaverse vision but they won't be available for several more years at best.

In the meantime, we are left with a much more VR vision of the metaverse. Unlike, AR, the hardware for VR has gotten pretty good, so a fully immersive experience within a virtual world is completely achievable now. The experience of playing a well-crafted high-end VR game like No Man’s Sky or Half-Life: Alyx might be the most metaverse you can get at present. Peripherals like haptic gloves and force-feedback vests can improve the realism of gameplay. Adding physicality and locomotion to VR experiences a la The Void can make it even more engaging and immersive.

But VR remains an experience cut off from the physical world around you, and not quite able to replicate the feeling of being there. In fact it actively blocks you from interacting with the people around you – a key element of our humanity and of social society. Even the inventor Playstation just panned the metaverse experience in VR. Foregoing VR to encounter such virtual worlds on 2D screens instead of headsets can help make them more communal but at the expense of the immersion that makes them so powerful in the first place. Telecommunications technologies might one day bridge such gaps but certainly haven't yet.

Still, as the closest approximation we currently have to the imagined metaverse, existing 3D environments are where much of the metaverse energy is currently going. And that makes sense – many of these virtual worlds have been built up over years or even decades. Whether viewed in VR or on mobile phone screens, there are hundreds of mature and well-crafted virtual worlds to choose from. And they are well designed for a variety of virtual excursions.

But let's be honest — these spaces still leave much to be desired, especially when trying to serve roles for which they were not originally designed. One need only look at some recent takes on metaverse raves or wandering around Decentraland to understand the palpable sense of disappointment. On many of these platforms I'm not sure we've really advanced all that far experience-wise from the original iterations of Second Life (another platform recently given new life by the current metaverse momentum.)

Don't get me wrong. I'm actually as excited about the metaverse as anyone, I just think we might be looking at it all wrong.

Experience First

I live and work in the experience economy. So my natural bias is towards thinking first about what's going to provide a compelling and engaging experience. These last few decades I've been working with all of the same technologies and creative techniques that have been used to build the existing generation of metaverse platforms, from mobile computing and 3D animation to visual design and storytelling. But I've generally used them to create physical experiences as opposed to purely virtual ones.

Especially in a time when we're entering the third year of a global pandemic, I believe the fundamental desire for human interaction and physical experiences is stronger than ever. So my question is why can't we simply harness this powerful drive towards the metaverse, and all the technologies that drive it. to create more engaging physical experiences?

The state of our technology actually makes it much easier to integrate digital presence into our physical spaces than to replicate our physical world in virtual ones. So isn't that the path of least resistance? I, for one, would love to see what the theme park of the metaverse looks like. And more importantly what it feels like. Let's get to work building it...

Originally posted at: https://iconoclast.com/blog/2022/the-metaversal-experience/