Designing the Metaverse
What is Metaverse without pretty AR/VR?
My definition of Metaverse: Suppose you have visited a virtual pub under a pseudonym, used cryptos to pay for your groceries and commented on live news comment sections anonymously. In that case, you can brag to your friends about how you are one step ahead of Facebook (Meta), living the metaverse experience at its fullest.
This, of course, is just my definition of Metaverse. With the blurry concept of Metaverse at the moment, a lot of speculation is happening. Most of them seem to be about how it is going to ruin humankind. My opinion? No, humankind is safe this time. Metaverse is not an alien technology, but it does have the ability to destroy things here and there, as all innovations do.
With some experience in building digital services, I see Metaverse as a gigantic digital platform where many different digital services happen. People get an online identity that helps them access many digital services with a bit more freedom. This online avatar is no longer just lines of information for registration but another identity that works the same as your real ones. You can develop your personal online character, even do a little role-playing maybe. Metaverse is a platform that allows interactions to happen between each avatar and identity. It is not a fake digital world, but just another place with man-made rules that is exactly the same as how our society functions.
I am writing this article just as Facebook announced its name change into “Meta”. I would believe that Facebook would naturally want its platform to link all sorts of existing digital services you can think of. Sounds familiar? Facebook is already a platform for many digital services. The way I see it, Meta is another package with a strong emphasis on a “different” AR/VR entertainment experience, but essentially the same thing. This definition is, of course, not finite. Before we see major companies with their Metaverse product on the market ready for end customers, there is no concrete definition of what a multiverse can be. Now, it is just a wild, sometimes dystopian, sci-fi fiction.
If you haven’t experienced any of those fiction titles, I strongly recommend you dig into those incredibly creative pieces. Pieces such as Tron, Ready Player One or the Matrix give you the idea of what a metaverse may look like, good or bad.
As a designer, it is interesting to speculate a bit about how human-centred principles would work with an entirely virtual environment. Essentially, this article is going to be about my speculations of the challenges Metaverse is going to have and how designers might just be able to help tackle it.
As with all design projects, learning the context is important before digging into the actual design. Luckily, being both a gamer and a designer, I have always been exploring and enjoying the concept of having a virtual identity, way before COVID forced everyone to have a taste of it.
Metaverse and entertainment
Aren’t we talking about digital platforms? How can we possibly relate video games to digital platforms such as the British Airways’ booking system and Monzo bank app?
Though it’s been said that Metaverse would be a digital platform for all services rather than a gamers’ heaven, the tie it has to gaming can not be ignored. Gamer demand, together with AR/VR gaming, has been supporting the industry to grow for years.
Video games are a highly creative and competitive industry, and they have always been the industry leader of online social entertainment. Fortnite and Minecraft are the famous examples many articles are written about. AR/VR and those famous digital gaming titles mostly are strictly entertainment with occasional crossovers with education and training purposes.
The downside is that these online venues are strictly limited to their player base, and the public would usually be less interested in joining this gamer environment. Most virtual gaming events are a smart way to generate traffic but nothing more.
For gamers who are used to investing a lot of time in different titles, video games are a perfect format of entertainment, just like movies and tv programmes. It provides a non-linear form of entertainment that, in a way, satisfies their thirst for more content beyond what movies and tv dramas can provide. If we add sociable content into video games, it will turn into a Massive Multiplayer Online game, MMO for short. MMO platforms often need a fair amount of commitment to allow people to be engaged with the story. MMO platforms are designed in a way that encourages long term participation. In the other sense, it discourages people who want a casual experience from joining the platform, compared to a movie.
A common entertainment platform with a permanent online identity would encourage the general audience to be a part of these games. It would be one of the definitive experiences to provide the whole package of entertainment across all titles.
Some video games work as a digital platform, providing different services and options that are beyond the main course of gaming content.
Niche demand for a virtual world is no news
VR/AR can do a lot of great things, but making you yearn to own a virtual identity? Urgh…
A need for virtual identity is not news. It is just too niche and too unique that the majority couldn’t give a hoot. To those who have just heard of Metaverse, the demand for virtual identities seemed to come out of nowhere. That’s because the demand has mostly come from a rather unique group of people that has nothing to do with digital services and straightforward businesses.
Gamers, who enjoy an immersive virtual open-world experience, have been around for decades.
Fortnite and its use of digital venues get a lot of attention on the internet. Those virtual events are indeed very impressive digital experiences. Yet, they are not addressing the need for a virtual identity for many gamers. For these gamers, Fortnite is just a semi-online game as the way to interact with other strangers on it is fairly limited in comparison to major MMO titles. At the same time, interacting with people socially online is the need that is pushing the boundaries for more innovative online social hubs. This is basically the stage of MMOs.
When talking about the virtual world experience, we have to talk about EVE Online. EVE Online is a huge sandbox MMO with entirely player-driven economics, politics, and lore creation. The lore the content creators created is just part of the experience. The most amazing content of the game is, however, generated by the players. The players in the game can set up their own laws, government style and the distribution of power to run their own player organisation with real spies that actually hurt people’s feelings (I am very against it), security measures and basic constitutions to secure their power structure. The economy is entirely driven by players with constant embargoes and resource cartels between major establishments competing for dominance. Want to talk about API keys for identity verification, player-owned journalism and basic banking system? EVE players run them all. After all, it is hard to finance wars without some sort of financial structure and political agenda. Remember how we struggled to jump into remote working with everyday video conferencing? EVE players already lived in that sense of digital world, years before the pandemic.
Many EVE players have the same feeling that playing EVE online feels a bit more like having a full-time job, and that just hits the spot.
Building a virtual world is not a cutting edge idea. EVE could be by far the most immersive online virtual experience with a faint resemblance to the real world we have and potentially what Metaverse could look like. Most importantly, games like EVE Online showed that it is possible to build a fully digital online world, and there is a need out there for it. Nonetheless, it is important to know that though EVE players find the game to be a good experience, the majority of other gamers do not. So to assume that a fraction of the population would be down for it? That is a gap that needs to be filled.
Why Metaverse might fail: The niche demand is simply not for everyone.
Now, with the basic knowledge of how the concept of a virtual world evolves, this casts huge doubt for me. Can we really translate these needs into a futuristic digital VR/AR platform for all? Why all of a sudden, does it seem to be okay to turn a unique demand we can only find with gamers into a gigantic digital platform? Can the VR/AR technology really bridge this gap between a gamer’s fantasy and a demand for a futuristic all-inclusive digital platform that hasn’t been validated since it’s all just hypothetical at the moment?
There are many questions to answer. For now, it is not realistic to say that the majority of the internet audience would grow accustomed to the idea of building a virtual identity all of a sudden. One can only suspect that big companies like Facebook (Meta) has already put billions into research that backs their decision.
Metaverse sounds like a good business plan for the existing platforms. But here is the catch: Good business values don’t always mean that people’s interest is put at the centre of its realisation.
The user’s needs are important, and the process needs to be smooth. This is often where designers could jump in and make a difference. Designers can turn those unique user needs into tangible services and products, mitigate the risk of making Metaverse something people don’t want. To bridge the gap between the user need and the Metaverse ecosystem, we need to make features that make sense to both sides. This is one of the unique values of design: making technologies better for human use.
The risk doesn’t only exist in the platform itself. If Metaverse turns out to be a hit, businesses would not be able to afford to not be on the platform as they run the risk of having their competitors taking all of their customers without a fight. In that case, those businesses need to find out what their customers want with their services on the Metaverse platform. This is another typical job for designers.
Designers can make it happen fast as their arsenal is full of tools to do user research. It could be extremely helpful to navigate through the amount of uncertainty the new platform brings.
The potential negative impact of Metaverse
Oh my, where do I start?
Metaverse will be the best, if not the most complicated digital platform humans have ever built. The concept of a virtual world is amazing, but what Ready Player One hasn’t mentioned is GDPR, consent for tracking cookies and long pages of terms and conditions that no one would have ever bothered to read. It would be a bit anticlimactic for any fantasy novel to use an entire chapter to explain how the virtual world experience abides by GDPR regulations. It is not going to be hard to imagine what kind of nightmare it is going to be to build the experience architecture for such a platform.
Those rules and laws might make sense to the companies, but it might not be the case for individual users. Nowadays, a misclick is all you need to give pieces of sensitive records for companies to do marketing and advertising in the form of endless promotion emails and ad banners. Imagine that in the futuristic Metaverse, every move you make would eventually become a marketing tool. The insights that come from those data would only be even more powerful.
Facebook does have a bad reputation for not looking into these problems in a careful manner; Cambridge Analytica may have changed the result of a US presidential election. Let’s take Facebook’s marketplace as another example. It has enjoyed huge success since it is very accessible thanks to Facebook’s huge user base. Everyone can put up a quick advert for their used goods on it. On the dark side, the marketplace has become a good place for scams and stolen goods. A huge service like that is often a double-edged sword with good intentions and occasionally bad results.
Facebook is well known for its sometimes unsettling amount of data collection. Some opinions stated that Metaverse is a notion for Facebook to use superior user experience to compensate for their bad data policy. Though it is a very subjective opinion, it is still true that it would only make sense to those businesses to make the platform more addictive, more fun and accessible, just as any other digital entertainment service does. Deep down, it is the same logic of how many digital services work.
The path tech giants have taken in the last ten years leads to this moment where the competition between ecosystems is so ferocious it prompts them to the idea of Metaverse.
Life during the pandemic lockdown is similar to a Metaverse experience, if we take away the VR/AR aspect of it. Since then, more jobs have become fully remote as the 9 to 5 work style becomes less desirable. Now, the stage is set as everyone has had a taste of the digital lifestyle. The obvious next step for tech giants is to make the existing ecosystem bigger as the opportunity is presented to them.
Metaverse would also cause disruption in the real world. The biggest difference between online games that promote a virtual world experience and the Metaverse would be the ability to affect the real world on a larger scale. Metaverse would resemble the real world, and it means that Metaverse could actually deliver some of the services the real world has in a digital version. This is essentially the digital transformation we are experiencing in this digital era, and it has already brought big changes, just as online banking makes banks close down their branches.
In the universe of Ready Player One, the Metaverse is not only a place for gaming but also a place for education, finance and many, many more. This digital world should allow you to find most of the services you can find in the real world, with a few improvements, hopefully.
This means that some of our real-world services could be facing elimination if they don’t adapt. It could be another digital onslaught all over again, except this time, even some of the digital services would be the victim too.
It is really easy to speculate what could go wrong. These are all examples of what we are going through now. Luckily, there are people who are working on fixing these problems already.
Metaverse needs a different kind of designer.
Metaverse is a platform that needs good design to make it do good instead of harm.
As a designer with experience in service design, the problem the Metaverse would need to address sounds too familiar to not relate it to the profession. Metaverse is a behemoth digital platform. It is the ultimate form of an all-inclusive digital experience.
Building a successful platform is one of the core outputs of service designers, virtual or not. Service designers can sit down with their clients, talk about how a carefully built platform can often be the best solution to their business.
The trending business modules nowadays don’t provide the services themselves. Services such as Uber and Deliveroo are platforms for people to join and provide the actual service. Their product is the platform itself, not the delivery service or the taxi service. This module is much simpler and easier to scale up. Things are less regulated and allow even more creative ideas to be pushed onto those platforms. Metaverse would be the same, except the scale is at an entirely different level.
Platform as a service module is amazing! The platform is a package for collaboration, self-service and transparency. A good platform as a solution drives creativity and makes the operation agile as you don’t have to be too bothered to build all different parts of the service. As your users get even more involved with your service, you wouldn’t have to pay a penny for a customer retention campaign.
I have talked with people not just building digital platforms but also sales platforms, entertainment platforms, and even fitness platforms. The increased amount of platforms allowing individual influencers, early adaptors and module users to participate makes the platform better with more content. However, when we are talking about Metaverse, the ecosystem needs to be able to allow all kinds of participation to settle in. It needs to allow users to discover and define how they would want to use the platform in their own way. The way I see it, the real challenge to the Metaverse would not be the VR technology that has been around for quite a while now. It would be creating this very specific platform that covers every aspect in one universal standard, abiding by all the regulations and user demands while allowing its user to be creative when they are using it.
A metaverse platform, same as other digital services, would need to connect the complicated user demands and functions closely so that the experience presented to the customers is clean and smooth. For the platform to be successful, it is essential to attune the entire organisation to adopt a new digital reality, and during the process, it has to put humans at the centre of it. This could effectively mitigate the niche demand of the online identity in a digital reality into something the future population likes.
Social platforms have already changed our lives massively. What are the impacts and challenges the Metaverse is going to bring to the real world, and should we mitigate these problems? This is the sort of question I would imagine all designers would love to dive into and solve.
To put the relationship between design and Metaverse in the future in a simple term, I would say that designers should be tasked to find the blind spots in this most complicated online platform we now set foot to create. Those spots will be where parts of this platform are designed in a way that makes no sense to people with hidden problems that are hard to foresee.
The positive change Metaverse brings
It is unfair not to mention some of the positive changes that we are pretty certain the Metaverse can bring. One of the biggest arguments is that Metaverse could improve productivity as a truly seamless online collaboration experience would be possible with the new technologies.
WFH has somehow proven to be improving people’s productivity now that more and more people are used to it. Yet, it does have a few downsides. Being a bit more difficult to sense your colleagues in an emotional way is one. Reducing your work relations to a few screens is another.
A carefully built virtual office environment especially built for WFH people that caters to everyone’s needs would be possible as the setup of the virtual office is easily customisable. Companies wouldn’t need to worry about square feet of the office space anymore, and the employees can be creative in terms of how they want their space to be.
A VR environment and a reliable online identity might be able to solve this, although it is not quite exactly what the Metaverse is. To start seeing the office space as a platform for employees to get their needed support and resources while supervisors manage the operation in a more humanely way would be how the future of work evolves, in my opinion.
With the limits of the physical space eliminated, people can collaborate online, with many talents from all over the world around you and good tools that can help you to build something better. The environment would be more controllable in the hands of people.
Though it is worth taking note that VR headsets can cause nausea, headaches or fatigue as the brain struggles to interpret the virtual world. Should the future world come up with better and cheaper equipment, this could really be a thing.
These features sound great on the paper. In a designer’s opinion, the principles of design should still apply here. Don’t make users fit into those features the Metaverse could bring, but instead, build desirable services that people can use with the tools. Forcing people who are against the Metaverse to use online VR office tools would be one. Investigating and mitigating those risks of the unaligned user interests to build a more inclusive experience would sound about right.
Another huge barrier to the success of the Metaverse would be how laws prohibit the free exchange of talents and services.
Should the boundaries be broken or not is another topic, but undeniably, there will be people trying to battle the influence of the government on Metaverse. It is also true that a decentralised internet of the future can do even more with the Metaverse. With cryptocurrencies and blockchain in the game, Metaverse can push back the laws that set the man-made boundaries.
Play to earn games and online spaces has seen a huge amount of growth recently, with online items worth millions sold on Axie Infinity because of their link to virtual currencies. A high quantity of traffic is also bringing the virtual lands’ values up in Decentraland. Unarguably these blockchain technologies will be a huge part of the future of the internet. The best part? Most of these concepts come from the less privileged part of the world instead of the traditional geopolitical powerhouse with huge capital and a highly educated population.
Some will take it as uncontrolled growth that means too many risks. On the flip side, it also means that we have new spaces where new business can happen. There would be less demand on the expensive shop slots on high streets. New values are created here and there, and they might be distributed equally across the globe this time. It is not hard to get excited to see these new opportunities presented to our world.
The good side of the Metaverse is really not hard to speculate as it is really not speculation but an observation of an ongoing process. The success of the metaverse, is not really about the technology, but about how many people buy the idea and participate those already existing Metaverse concepts.
When there is a winner, there is always a loser. Design thinking is to put people at the centre and help them make sense of all these while not leaving them behind in this new world ahead of us.
Designing the Metaverse means that a designer needs to learn about this world, try to adapt to it first and share its power with the people.
