Alternate Reality Living

The unreal will be our new reality

In 2051, the metaverse will be part of the minutiae of our daily lives. More than a quarter of the human population will derive income from these universes since the real economy has become heavily robotised. The massification of the virtual economy means that the production of real goods is dwindling, while trading in their virtual counterparts is skyrocketing. It’s a world where it’s much more difficult to distinguish between the haves and the have-nots. Someone might be living in a flooded slum in Ho Chi Minh City, but be a wealthy crypto trader. Or they might live in a real-life palace in Geneva and see their fortunes wiped out by factory closings and natural disasters.

What is the metaverse? An immersive, three-dimensional universe made up of thousands of virtual and augmented reality galaxies. Bigger than the web, it’s the ‘worldisation’ of the internet, where physical and digital worlds have converged for good. Right now, we experience the internet when we go to it. Imagine if it’s knitted into our daily lives, as inconspicuous as a squirrel in a tree. Fun, beautiful, entertaining, informative, useful – everything a great user experience should be.

Meandering between virtual and augmented reality will be as simple as switching a light on and off. By slipping on a pair of glasses or popping on some contact lenses, users can completely escape into a magical, shared virtual reality (VR) world. Here, your avatar can “do anything and be anyone, without going anywhere at all”, as Ready Player One so aptly puts it. In the virtual world, life moves fast and changes constantly, sweeping you up with the excitement of possibility as you bend reality in a game-like world. Your digital twin can have its own life or mirror yours. It can trial many things on your behalf, while it communicates with the IoT and wearables in your life. Want to see how you’ll look after a two-week diet of grapes and herbal tea? Put your avatar on that regime and get realistic feedback.

Or you’ll go through life in augmented reality, where every single thing in your peripheral vision comes alive with meaning. It’s the real world as you see it – only better. Every object will have its digital mirror, whether it’s a skin or interface. Everything is personalised and contextualised for ease of use – proactive rather than reactive. Even your oven might ask this: “I see you have a cheese sandwich in your hand, can I switch on the grill for you?”

Some will leave the real world behind for good and live out their lives in a fantasy world of their choosing. Run an exclusive Earth 2 treehouse hotel deep in the former Namib Desert? Sure. Act out some politically incorrect fantasies in a Westworld type setting? Probably. Life as a cross-dressing mermaid? Whatever floats your virtual boat.

Others may well shun this cacophony of noise and visual overload and only immerse themselves in this world sparingly. You can’t blame them, if you take Keiichi Matsuda’s short film Hyper-Reality as an example. This is a world in which business and technology dominate – a bit like trying to find anything on an ad-peppered news site. Of course, the more you pay, the better the user experience will be. Users will choose from freemium packages, or wait to be invited to exclusive clubs. You will choose to live inside Apple’s super-minimalist interface, Adobe or Snapchat’s quirky and vibrant art-filled world or Google’s street map-esque environment – filled with useful user-generated content.

To each their own (world)

Could all this cause headaches? Definitely. Can’t live without it? One thousand percent. A permanent meta-environment is coming and it’s going to be huge. It goes by many names – the AR cloud, Azure, the mirror world, the Magicverse, the Spatial Internet, or Live Maps. It’s going to be the new normal for how we work, play and socialise. “Shall we eat in or eat out?” will become “Shall we dine in real life or meet in Animal Crossing?” Your daily dog walk will become a treasure hunt through an enchanted forest. (A VR headset for your Labrador? Why not?)

Firstly, let’s take the wearables. VR headsets have long graduated from gaming to enterprise applications (even warfare). The lineage of Microsoft’s HoloLens can be traced back to an add-on for an Xbox game console. Today, these mixed reality smart glasses are used for everything from manufacturing and training to remote conferencing and surgeries. And let’s not forget Google’s Glass, which gives workers a huge boost in productivity by going hands-free.

Those are the glasses you wear at work ­– but what about the glasses you wear all the time? The ones where people can still see you wink and roll your eyes? Take your pick. The prescription specs Focals from Canadian start-up North, acquired by Google, look remarkably like the real deal. Facebook bought out microLED specialist Plessey to launch its version of everyday smart glasses. Designed by Ray-Ban manufacturer Luxottica, these are bound to look fabulous.

Meanwhile, Nreal has already struck a deal with Vodafone, giving European customers their first taste of a mixed reality future – right now. Users can shop, watch sport, enjoy AAA gaming experiences and more in augmented reality on a large ‘virtual’ screen in front of them. But the prize for the best-looking glasses must go to Snapchat. The company collaborated with none other than Gucci for its Spectacles 3 release. Featuring two cameras, it lets you create 3D content and embed AR lenses into your environment – as if they were always there.

With the wearables in place, the next bridge to overcome in completing the metaverse experience is mapping the world around us. Earth 2 is a virtual 1:1 scale version of our planet, in which real-world geolocations on a sectioned map correspond to user-generated digital virtual environments. These tiles can be owned, bought and sold. Very soon, these properties will also be customised in as much detail as you do your real-world environment.

Back in the real world, Big Tech is hard at work to bring users persistent shared AR experiences. Google and Apple’s location anchors act as ‘save buttons’ for AR, enabling users to store the locations of their creations indefinitely. Microsoft does something similar in Azure Spatial Anchors, while Snapchat’s Landmark AR uses location plus visual positioning to anchor AR content to buildings and monuments. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was one of the first to collaborate with Snapchat, using augmented reality to create virtual monuments that explore the histories of LA communities.

Still think the metaverse is only for gamers? A bit gimmicky? Every day, our world is edging closer to permanently living in an alternate reality. Take South Korea. It’s one of the first countries to prepare a blueprint for a digital world. The nation’s ICT ministry has launched an industry alliance to bolster the development of metaverse technology and ecosystems, with partners like SK Telecom and Hyundai. Samsung Asset Management, the country’s biggest asset manager, has launched a fund tied to the metaverse.

Some people have wondered what on earth a car manufacturer is doing in the metaverse. If it’s anything like BMW, it’s already creating a digital twin of its factories and warehouses to use for product development. BMW harnesses Nvidia’s metaverse platform Omniverse to create a digital representation of a physical asset, system or process. This way, the carmaker can virtually assess changes to its production lines before investing in the real deal.

We can only hope that, like Blockchain, the metaverse will be a true technological democracy, with equality between all human and artificial beings. It’s already providing a much-needed source of income in some of the poorest countries on earth. Take Venezuela, where the paper currency is worthless, but people survive by gold farming in RuneScape, exchanging coins for Bitcoin. In the Philippines, the play-to-earn model has been a lifeline for many who were hit hard by the pandemic. Axie Infinity players can earn yield in the form of tokens or other rewards, with many players earning three times the minimum wage. Such is the popularity of the earning model that there are now scholarships where Axie owners rent their NFTs to new players to learn the game and earn SLP (the in-game reward token) without having to invest any money upfront.

The bottom line – these fascinating case studies are already showing the world what can be achieved in a virtual world that isn’t tied to currencies and real-world assets. The second world will make its own rules – where anyone can be a winner.