Alternative Virtual Escapes
Short summary
Last week, I wrote about metaverses covering systems thinking and risk analysis. In short, I described how it is essential for us human beings to interact with each other and how that attracts all kinds of people with malicious intentions. Interactions in metaverse will easily be more natural compared to interaction in today’s social media thus making metaverses much more addictive. These kinds of interactions and digital 3D spaces would require more data to flow through the internet which, in turn, means more options for hackers to tap into. Speaking of social media, there aren’t proper global rules to follow so each company follows the policies which suit them the best. This is an ongoing issue and if transferred into metaverse realms it would be an even bigger obstacle to tackle since 3-dimensionalisation means including physical gestures in the catalogue of interaction modalities. How could you regulate them as they might carry different meanings in different cultures? The new interaction possibilities provided by social media made us more distant to each other. The immerse interactions in the metaverses could even further this issue. The only limit is your own imagination when it comes to deciding your own dystopia.
Design theory
Design and decisions are like fraternal twins — different yet sharing essential attributes. (Han et al., 2010) In their article, Design Basis: Insights about Design Thinking from the Perspective of Decision Analysis Han et al. define design basis to be the basic components which are supposed to be the same for all design situations. Those components are, in the chronological order, the frame, preferences, alternatives and state of knowledge. I won’t explain the aforementioned design basis any further as Han et al. (2010) have done great job defining the term. In this article, I’ll use those four pillars in the context of metaverse.
Analysis
For the frame, we can pick whichever of these sounds the most pleasing: solving cultural conflicts of online interaction, connecting people, utilisation of natural modalities, boosting the market share of social media, exclusion of poor people or trapping people into the digital worlds. Businesswise, the mastermind company strongly supporting metaverse, Meta, would most probably like us to choose “An escape, ( — ) genuine connection” (Oglesby, 2021) for the frame in designing a metaverse for them. Metaverse is a step in digital technologies we have to take in order to take another step. That in mind, we should be looking forward to seeing that happen.
Aiming to lessen the uncertainty, we’d need to discuss with the client a lot. This kind of future technology cannot be designed without a thorough iterative conversation. Alas, I am not in a position of power to do so thus you’ll have to do with what I can conjure from my imagination. Needless to say, the client would like to have a fully immersive metaverse at their hands. It’s not clear what it means though. Without any data to back this up, one could extrapolate that the UI should be a realistic looking virtual world and that it needs loads of design work. What’s meant by realistic is up for the client. The client also would be preferring to have control over valid interaction modalities, for example which gestures are suitable. Speaking of the company formerly known as Facebook, another probable preference would be what kinds of data will be collected; how the users are spied upon. As mentioned, there’s a lot to discuss before diving into the fun part of the design work.
As a designer, I’d like to bring some ethical considerations onto the table. I’d prefer the result of my work to be ethically considered, so to say. However, this matter has to be done with consent. In this very case I’d pay close attention to the users’ privacy. It matters what data is collected and how it’s used afterwards. Also, it would be ethical to convey the usage of the data to the users in an easily understandable way. To conclude, when the client’s preferences are clarified to a sufficiently low level of uncertainty and the designer’s ethical considerations are accepted, the actual design work can be started.
Metaverse being a novel technology, it would be helpful to not think too much before brainstorming the first design ideas. Being aware of the fact that metaverse is a philosophical concept at the moment, you shouldn’t bind your design up into existing solutions and technological applications. There are lots of known-unknowns as well as unknown-unknowns so thoughtal-action, as mentioned by Han et al. (2010), would be essential in progressing with the design ideas. Back in the day, they might have made the assumption that the cultural conflicts of online interactions would have been solved by now but that’s not the case. Not yet at least. Also, the company might have thought that VR goggles and other equipment alike would be much more common nowadays. Well, it isn’t. Both the technologies we possess and the society we live in are not yet ready to adopt the metaverse. The internet being only about 30 years old, it’s stunning to realise ourselves pondering this matter.
Future
In this chapter, I present some conceptual alternatives to the metaverse. As a short disclaimer, they’re not better in every way though they aim to be better with respect to sustainability. The ideas shall remain abstract and intangible as they are products of a quick tea-fueled late-night brainstorming session.
With culture-consciousness in mind, the platforms of social media, both current and new, could implement more natural modalities using cameras. Everybody has a mobile device or a laptop with a camera of some sort, right? All it requires is some machine learning magic to capture and interpret different hand gestures. Those could be mapped into a bunch of selected gestures. One could even use sign language as a way of typing! It’s time to learn the language. The same applies for expressions; they could be interpreted via camera and transcribed into emojis which all, except me, loves. Social media induced with natural modalities, what a time to be alive!
With the ongoing pandemic situation, people might be lonely and trapped in their own apartments. The four familiar walls start to feel like a prison of sorts. We are so used to having video calls nowadays that why aren’t we putting our money into some kind of an AR solution that would bring friends into our couches virtually? With AR tech it could be possible to project friends and family wherever you are. Socially, this would be a lifesaver to some folks. Environmentally, this would save some transportation emissions. Economically, there lies great business opportunities here. I mean, people are willing to pay dozens of euros to brainlessly stream different kinds of entertainment. Why wouldn’t they be willing to pay some money for spending time with their close ones more easily?
Why create a virtual world into one corner of the internet when you could transform the whole thing into an ultimate digital realm? What if all of the sites were 3D virtual worlds where, instead of browsing, you could walk around and smash, in its literal meaning, link buttons to navigate? How would you feel if the search results were 3D cubes and queuing to get your attention? Would it be more natural to “browse” the internet, the interverse? Problems arise when people get to interact with each other in multiple different ways. The more ways there are to interact the more ways there are to interpret the message wrongly. Instead of metaversifying the interactions, it would be socially more sustainable to not touch that part and focus on the interverse. This way we would get more data on how people would behave in virtual 3D environments. When we know how the lab rat behaves on its own it’s time to introduce interactions with others.
Give me some tea and I’ll provide you with some wild ideas. To be honest, I could go on forever, or at least while tea lasts. Metaverse is a novel upcoming application of our most developed technologies but there are some steps we could take prior to it. Although, metaverse sounds intriguing as a concept, is it good as a whole? Some chunks of it would be exciting to see in action and that would give us some crucial details on how people are affected by it. It remains to be seen what the future of this concept has to offer to us.
This article was originally written for the course Sustainable Development at Tampere University.
