A Physical Metaverse

When email became a standard form of business communications, it was often presented as a move toward a paperless society.?The reality, however, seems to demonstrate that paper consumption is actually growing due to the increase in online purchasing creating an increased consumption of paper boxes and filler material.?Thus, contrary to expectations, while the advent of electronic communications reduced the volume of paper correspondence, it did not diminish the consumer's appetite for paper.

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Similarly, the more recent embrace of virtual communications in the form of remote working practices, cellular communications, and teleconferencing was at one time expected to reduce our demand for travel.?While the shift toward these technologies could have portended a reduction in demand for transportation, they have been accompanied by supply chain issues, air travel, and continued highway congestion.?If the ability to interact remotely served to reduce the dependency on transportation, shouldn’t these problematic issues be reduced??Early data suggest that the increased use of technologies that allow remote interactions stimulate an increased need for transportation services to move goods between remote worksites and to replace physical interactions that would otherwise have taken place in the office.??

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Diving deeper into these trends, it is clear that a single email does save what, at one time, was a physical letter.?But because email systems make correspondence so much more efficient, many more emails are sent than the physical correspondence of the past.?And it has now become so easy to add multiple recipients to the email chain that the sheer volume of email messages dwarfs what could ever have been physically mailed.?As a result, if only a small fraction of these emails are printed for later reference, the aggregate change in demand is minor and, if some of these exchanges result in product purchases that must be packaged and delivered to the customer’s door, it is easy to see how the net demand for paper will necessarily increase.

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Similarly, while remote working environments might save an individual from travel that had become repetitive, it also increases the sheer number of meetings that can be scheduled in a day.?In an effective business environment, some percentage of these meetings must be conducted face-to-face to maintain team integrity and these interactions become even more important in a virtual world.?Thus travel is not eliminated, but only becomes a smaller percentage of a growing number of interactions.?Moreover, the virtual world also serves to drive an increased need for breaks that serve to change the scenery and even makes vacation and weekend times of greater importance as employees seek to avoid the burnout that can come from confinement to a locale that serves as both home and office.?The net result is that a more virtual world actually serves to increase consumer dependence on transportation services.?

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Recently, there has been much discussion about the emergence of the metaverse; a collective virtual environment that allows people to interact with one another with simulations of physical and imagined worlds through digital twins and artificial intelligence.?In its extreme form, the metaverse can be thought of as a simulated means of conquering time and space by supporting a real-world existence from the comfort of home.?However, given those disruptive technologies that promise to disaggregate people from the confines of their physical world have actually increased these dependencies, it appears that the metaverse could amplify the need for physical contact.?

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Some justifiably question whether the hype that centers on the metaverse is overblown and whether there is a real need for a virtualized world.?However, if history is any indicator, a more virtualized world that makes our interactions more efficient will ultimately create a need for increased intimacy which must be conducted in the physical world.?How this shifting dynamic ultimately manifests itself remains to be determined, but a virtual world does not diminish the need for physical interactions with stores, restaurants, and one another.??