The Attack Of The 50-Foot Metaverse

It’s happened to all of us over the course of the last year. Zoom fatigue sets in. Too much time looking at distracting backgrounds, too many hiccups in connections leaving participants frozen, too much frantically logging on for the 10th meeting of the day. Even if we didn’t want to be back in our physical offices, we longed for a virtual meeting that was somehow better. More interesting. With greater odds of offering a break to mow down a few zombies, aliens or guerilla warriors bearing an uncountable number of rocket launchers, perhaps.

But while many have groused about the many frustrations of life on Zoom, artist and illustrator Viviane Schwarz took to Twitter to hand off an out-of-the-box solution last year.

“Zoom sucks,” she reportedly tweeted. “We started having editorial meetings in Red Dead Redemption instead.”

“Red Dead Redemption” is a massively popular “open-world” video game where a player is putatively there for an epic, life-or-death battle to survive and, as the title indicates, redeem a life of ill deeds. Also, as it turns out, it’s not a bad place to hold an editorial meeting.

And if all of that sounds a bit weird, brace yourself. Because that is a snapshot of the coming metaverse that futurists dream of — the next phase of the internet that will offer a fully virtualized world where consumers can go and do … well, just about anything. Instead of navigating to flat web pages, in the metaverse we will shop in the virtual Amazon Mall, see movies in the virtual Netflix theatre, drop by a virtual concert hosted by a real-life superstar, ride the rides with the princesses themselves in a virtual version of Disneyland, gamble in digital casinos and play epic open-world games with friends from around the world.

In short, the metaverse — as conceived by enthusiasts — will be a fully immersive, game-like virtual world where consumers can go to work, learn, create art, shop, attend events, hang out with friends and live their real lives in a wholly artificial construct.

It’s not exactly a new idea — the term to describe the concept of the “metaverse” was first coined by sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson in his novel “Snow Crash,” and it has shown up in various iterations and sci-fi incarnations, from “The Matrix” to “Ready Player One,” for the last three decades or so. But until very recently, the metaverse was a fictional concept.

But no more, it seems. The metaverse slowly but surely is crawling into the real world in a variety of ways. It may not be here yet, but it is undeniably coming soon to a device near you. And the world is preparing for it, in many different ways.

Big Deals, Big Games

HiDef, a new game studio in San Diego, California, has snapped up $9 million in funding to build a metaverse game that will offer players “interactive experiences that transcend traditional gaming boundaries and demographics,” Venture Beat reported.

The metaverse, according to CEO Anthony Castoro, creates an opportunity to develop games-as-a-service offerings, which is very different from the rest of what is in the market. “We started prototyping something that no one else had ever done,” Castoro said. “That drove our success in putting together a team and raising the capital. We could show someone what it was early on.”

And the metaverse isn’t only for up-and-comers already playing in the gaming space — Disney is publicly counting its metaverse ambitions for its theme parks.

“It’s a shared magical world created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space,” Tilak Mandadi, executive vice president, digital and chief technology officer for Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, said at a late 2020 industry conference.

In more practical terms, he said, that means starting a connected park where guests can interact with their physical surroundings using digital access points like phones, wearables and other connected devices. From there, the goal is to bring physical and digital environments together into converged experiences using technologies like computer vision, natural language understanding augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and IoT tools.

Virtual Land Grab

Crowdfunding platform Republic is credited with creating the first virtual real estate platform. Not a platform that allows users to buy real estate digitally, but one that allows them to buy virtual real estate in the metaverse. Some of the hottest real estate is in Decentraland, a virtual world where those participating in the “land rush” are hoping to make money using the site’s cryptocurrency, MANA.

And the prices are reportedly going up.  The average price per parcel in Decentraland was $2,703 as of March 15, more than triple the price last year. Another virtual world, Cryptovoxels, has seen a price per parcel of land jump from $821 to $3,895 since 2020. Forget beachfront property — Crytpovoxels may be the real estate with a view you didn’t know you were looking for.

But even with so much infectious enthusiasm floating around, the metaverse has rarely been presented as a good thing for humanity when it has shown up in fiction. “The Matrix has you, Neo,” was not good news in the movie — nor was it a sign that Keanu Reeves’ character was about to have a great day shopping in the Amazon Mall or going to a virtual Travis Scott concert. The metaverse in science fiction is the problem far more often than it is the solution.

But science fiction has been known to be overly concerned about technological advancements, as TV, computers, radios and cars have all been the subject of apocalyptic predictions by science fiction writers. Thus far, none of them have successfully ended the world or caused the full-scale collapse of human civilization. We tend to think the metaverse won’t, either — though it might not be a bad idea to consult the fictional history while we’re in the process of building it out.

Because while it might not look quite like we expected (and we might want to consider getting a better name), the metaverse has come a long way from its fictionalized form, and it’s looking more likely that it will be an important part of our future.