At the moment, there is a lot of buzz around the concept of the metaverse. Among academics and researchers, the biggest concerns are about avoiding to end up with a “lock in” type monopoly milking people’s data while bombarding them with even more intrusive and manipulative advertising.
But aside from these very real issues, what the metaverse will actually look like remains fuzzy.
In this article, I’ll have a quick stab at what the interface of the metaverse could look like.
First, it is important to understand what I believe the metaverse actually is, from a systemic point of view. The biggest problem, in my view, is that we tend to examine technologies and things like the financial system, the economic system, the political system or the Internet as separate from each other, which blinds us to the way they fit together and form a coherent global interconnected meta-system. It is as if one would examine solely an arm, a mouth, a stomach and an anus without looking how they relate to each other. One is bound to miss a lot of what makes these “systems” or parts work together.
In my mind, the metaverse is simply a manifestation of humanity’s collective imagination. It is a way to project one’s imagination outside one’s brain, to be able to mold it, interact with it. Humanity has gone through many stages in creating systems that help give a material form to their imagination. One could argue that language is such a tool: it helps convey to another person what one can only see in one’s “mind’s eye”. Artistic creations, be it music, drawing or sculpting, are also a way to outpicture what resides in one’s mind, one’s own imagination.
This makes me think of the mythical film “Amadeus”. In one scene, Mozart has been hired to write a new opera but fails to deliver it on time. The comanditaire then comes knocking at Mozart’s door and asks to see the score, to which Mozart replies: “It’s right here, in my head. The rest is just scribbling.”
Ultimately, humanity’s advancement and evolution is very much linked to the ability of humans to synchronize their respective imaginations, and to join forces in order to outpicture and materialize their synched imagination into a physical creation.
For instance, in order to convince thousands of people to work together to outpicture in the physical world a majestic cathedral, it is necessary to synchronize their imaginations via their shared beliefs in God and catholicism. Thus ironically, Neil Stephenson’s book is much more profound in understanding what the metaverse truly is, since in his book, the metaverse is used to disseminate a virus which “hacks” into a person’s mind. This is much closer to the truth than probably Neil anticipated. Indeed, the metaverse will not only be a tool for outpicturing individual people’s imaginations, but could also be a tool to forcefully synchronize people’s imagination by hacking into it, and molding it to serve various personal agendas, propaganda and more. Facebook already ran experiments to check how displaying negative and positive posts affects people’s moods. Imagine how being fully immersed in a realistic virtual world could impact your emotional state and your imagination! If one needs to convince people to rally behind one warring state against another, simply drag them in the middle of the battlefield by showing some atrocity or another committed by the “enemy”. At that point, people will be quick to forget the age old maxime: “the first casualty of war is the truth”.
But I digress. The point of this article is to narrow down the kind of interface that would power the metaverse.
In my view, since the metaverse is a manifestation of human imagination, the metaverse should actually take the form of a layered AR/VR interface above planet Earth.
Many experts have underlined that the metaverse will likely be an AR (augmented reality) feature rather than a VR (virtual reality) one, where one is completely cut off from the “real” world. I tend to agree. People already “blend” the use of their smartphone with real life, taking a peak at the news, sending a quick message or snapping a photo and sharing it, all the while spending time with friends or enjoying a real-life experience. One of the “layers” of the metaverse will therefore be a variety of AR “copies” of physical reality, with different add-ons and “mods”. People will be able to scroll through different versions of AR Earth. Such a feature is directly linked to the idea discussed above: that the metaverse is a kind of consensus layer for synchronizing human imagination and eventually transform physical reality to match some virtual version of it. I wrote an article discussing this at length here.
Above this AR layer, higher up in the sky or even, up in space, above the stratosphere, people would be able to see a personalized interconnected mesh of fully immersive virtual worlds, like floating cities in the sky, where they can “escape” from reality completely. They would literally have their “head in the clouds”. Such an interface would thus naturally reflect the degree of virtuality of the metaverse.
- The base layer, or layer zero, would simply be our current physical
- reality, which would include overlays of certain virtual elements such as floating websites, chat boxes or apps.
- The first layer would be an AR copy of physical reality.The second layer would be a network of various virtual worlds.
The more “immaterial” or virtual, the higher up in the sky they would appear. This would mirror our own imagination, which is layered between more concrete and “down to Earth” plans and projections, and wild fantasies that we like to escape to, but that we would never try to materialize.
