Shaping a better tomorrow with the metaverse

Andrew Maynard, associate dean in the College of Global Futures and professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, is a scientist, an author, a communicator and a widely recognized thoughtleader in emerging technologies and their socially responsible and ethical development and use. He is also the director of the ASU Risk Innovation Lab. Maynard is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Diana Ayton-Shenker is the CEO of Leonardo/ISAST (International Society of Arts, Sciences, and Technology), an award-winning social entrepreneur and author of four books, including "A New Global Agenda." She serves as the executive director of Leonardo's partnership with ASU, where she is a professor of practice in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts' School for Arts, Media and Engineering.

Rizwan "Riz" Virk is the author of the bestseller, "The Simulation Hypothesis," as well as an entrepreneur, investor, video game pioneer and indie film producer. Virk is the founder of Play Labs @ MIT and a venture partner at Griffin Gaming Partners, a Silicon Valley investment fund. He is currently working toward a PhD at Arizona State University, conducting research on the impact of virtual environments, metaverse, simulation theory, blockchain and artificial intelligence on society.

Understanding the metaverse — or as one of our experts puts it, the “multiverse of metaverses” — is fundamental to how we use this emerging environment to think through and develop scenarios for more positive and equitable futures. In this conversation, Andrew Maynard, associate dean of curricula and student success in the College of Global Futures, is joined by subject matter experts Diana Ayton-Shenker and Riz Virk to explore the metaverse and what it means now and in the next decade for identity, commerce, art and innovation.

Maynard: Let’s start off by asking, what is the metaverse?

Virk: The metaverse, depending on who you ask, is many different things. I like to define it as an interconnected set of virtual worlds. The term metaverse was coined by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel, “Snow Crash.” You can think of the metaverse as a science fiction concept that is slowly becoming reality. It usually involves exploring these virtual worlds with an avatar in some embodied form.

Maynard: So this is a completely virtual world that we’re building outside of the physical world, or does it encroach on the physical world?

Virk: The edges of the metaverse encroach pretty much everywhere on the internet today. The metaverse touches the real world in a few different ways. With augmented reality, you can put objects from the metaverse into the physical world. Additionally, your avatar is a hybrid identity between you in the physical world and you in the virtual world. Then there are digital twins, which are metaverse versions of objects and systems that have been built to simulate the physics of the real world exactly.

Ayton-Shenker: The idea of approaching the edges that Riz spoke of is where I find the most intrigue and the most relevance for what the metaverse is, what it is becoming and how we understand it. I see the metaverse as an interconnected virtual reality (VR), or augmented reality, that is moving toward hybrid experience. The metaverse is a hybrid experience where we're not just seeing the edges, we’re bridging them — we’re starting to experience virtual and augmented dimensions integrated into our real life.

Maynard: What are people doing in the metaverse now? In some ways, this seems like a new concept that came about after Facebook named their parent company Meta, and so now everybody’s talking about Meta and the metaverse. Yet, as you mentioned, Riz, the idea has been around for a while. As the metaverse grows, what are people doing in it?

Virk: I view this wave as Metaverse 2.0. Metaverse 1.0 was in the mid 2000s, where you had proto metaverses like Second Life, and they were called virtual worlds. The term “metaverse” wasn’t used, but if you listen to the founders of those companies, their inspiration was from the same science fiction novel that the metaverse term came from. Today, we’ve got a lot of different things happening in the metaverse. For example, meetings are starting to be conducted with avatars rather than video conferencing. There’s also a lot of digital fashion going on in the metaverse. At the end of March there was a digital Fashion Week in a metaverse called Decentraland, where they were showing off virtual outfits on virtual avatars. The possibilities are pretty endless, both in terms of the design of these outfits and also economics. Monetization within the metaverse comes from selling virtual goods. Fashion items, it turns out, are among the most popular types of virtual goods.

Maynard: So there is commerce in the metaverse already?

Virk: There is starting to be. But we don’t have a metaverse so much as we have a multiverse of metaverses. We’ve got Fortnite and Roblox, which are gaming metaverses. We have Meta with its VR headsets and VRChat. But then you’ve also got decentralized metaverses like Sandbox and Decentraland, which are less about putting on a VR headset — you just explore in your browser — and more about virtual goods and the property. You already have virtual land sales going on in the metaverse. I think the most someone has ever paid for a parcel of land was $1.7 million. There is serious money going into the metaverse and being invested into the metaverse because it’s projected to be a very big business opportunity. And we have the whole area of non-fungible tokens or NFTs, which is the ownership ledger that tells you who owns what digital item in the metaverse.

Ayton-Shenker: What I see happening is this continuum from what we are thinking of as what’s “new” — that isn’t really new but has been evolving — to what’s now to what’s next. And how I see that continuum from new-ish to now and to next is as an arena for creative experimentation. We’re seeing artists and hybrid creatives at the forefront of the edges between what is virtual and physical reality. NFTs and the imagining of new ways to create value, digital currency and virtual structures got a lot of attention with extremely large valuations for digital, net-first, net-forward art. Artists are experimenting in this arena with how one can, in theory, not only receive remuneration for creative work, but preserve and protect the value share over time with ownership transfers and future sales that return a percentage of payment to artists through smart contracts. In the “matter verse” — actual matter that actually matters — when you sell a painting or work of art, then it’s done. With NFTs you can build into the agreement that money keeps coming back to the artist, so in theory, it’s protecting the creatives in this space. However, in practice, there’s a real question about gatekeeping and who gets to decide how work is moved through the metaverse and NFTs. Whatever the experimentation is in what’s new and next in the metaverse, it’s the creatives and hybrid artists who are on the frontier as pioneers.

Maynard: This idea that we’ve created a whole new domain to work in seems really important. This is something different from the physical and biological world that we've evolved within; we’ve actually created something brand new. We’re learning how to work, play and do other things within this area. It’s a unique opportunity for creatives and technologists and scientists and business people and others to begin to co-create something that has never existed before, which seems to be both exciting and challenging. Can you cast your speculative eyes 10 years into the future, and think about what the metaverse might look like in 2032? What might people be doing there? What might be the really exciting things we’ll be seeing, and what might be the challenging things we’re grappling with?

Ayton-Shenker: In my mind, what’s brand new about the metaverse is simply context. We had marketplaces for centuries, millennia, and then we created malls as this brand-new space. But really, it was just another version of how we exchange goods and services. Similarly, the metaverse is a reflection of the actual or matter verse, in the sense of the physical material and the significance, i.e., what matters. The metaverse forecast, 10 years from now, I imagine will directly correspond to what happens in the matter verse and how we’re going to evolve as a species and as a society. Over these 10 years, in terms of the technical experience and novel innovation that continues to increase exponentially in sophistication, I think we can expect differences in time, space and interface. In terms of time, the speed will be increasingly like actual time or close to it. In terms of space, it will feel like there’s less of a barrier. For example, maybe we won’t need clunky accessories to wear in order to experience the metaverse. Also, there’s greater potential for intimacy and influence, which is the interface. Right now our experience of the metaverse is primarily visual and auditory, and perhaps social and neural in ways that we may not have fully understood. But in the future, I can imagine even in 10 years, we’ll bring in more chemical and sensual and emotional and spiritual exchange. We can’t even imagine that yet, but if we could bring in smell and taste and touch, that’s a whole different level of interface.

Virk: My roadmap of where the metaverse goes looks a lot like my roadmap to what I call the simulation point, which is the point at which we can create fully immersive virtual realities that are indistinguishable from physical reality. That involves brain-computer interfaces, à la “The Matrix,” although that was a dystopian vision of the future. I can envision a less dystopian, more utopian version where you can use the metaverse for education or travel, especially for disabled people who are unable to travel. Social applications will also be a key part of the future of the metaverse. Imagine if we went back to the 1990s, and said, “Where will the internet be? What will we be doing in cyberspace?” Cyberspace is another term that was defined in a cyberpunk novel, but cyberspace evolved differently from how author William Gibson originally envisioned it. We use it as a catch — all term for things that exist only on the internet. Similarly, the metaverse will become this general catch-all term for things that we do inside these virtual worlds using what I like to call identimorphic avatars. An anthropomorphic avatar is an avatar that looks human. Of course, you can have an avatar that looks like a kitten or a robot. But identimorphic means an avatar that looks like you. And so this gets back to that issue of what is your identity in the metaverse? Should it look like you do outside the metaverse? Are there rules or social standards or taboos that say, you know, you are not allowed to co-opt appearances of a Chinese person or an African American? We’ll start to see these social standards emerge in virtual spaces.

Ayton-Shenker: That’s such an important point to consider the social and ethical standardization, and how we can conceive and harness this expression of our humanity in a way that’s humanizing. If we look at this as an expression of the species, and how we organize ourselves in relation to each other, then there’s a real question of purpose and functionality. It’s not just what we could do that’s so cool and fancy and sophisticated, but also getting into the why we should do any of it. We might explore how this can accelerate healing, accelerate the spread of generosity, altruism, collaboration, creativity and a sense of hope. Those are the things that we need humans for and that humanize us. This could be a great accelerator.

Maynard: How do we bring that about, specifically in the context of global futures? At the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, we’re spearheading how we think about, how we act on and how we build vibrant, just and equitable global futures. What is the role of the metaverse in that mission? How should we be thinking about both understanding and steering the development of the metaverse so it gets us to a better place?

Ayton-Shenker: We should be experimenting, exploring and investigating what works that uplifts us in the metaverse, identifying what experiences or interfaces are actually healing and hopeful.

Maynard: How do we get there? This is a really intriguing idea that we’re creating a brand-new environment that could transform, in positive ways, how we live our lives and how we find meaning. At the same time, there are massive commercial forces here. How do we make sure that we see a future that is really beneficial to humanity, rather than just dictated by market forces?

Ayton-Shenker: You know, there’s an assumption in that question that the corporate market forces are opposite of the good stuff we want to do. If we draw from and apply lessons from impact investment, or social entrepreneurship, or beneficial corporations, I think there’s a convergence of capital as a potentially positive force. It’s simply a fuel and a resource. We can harness these for good outcomes, but there does need to be a harnessing.

Virk: With all of these technologies, there’s always the fear of unintended consequences. That’s an area that we study in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society. If you look at Facebook, there has been a lot said about the negative consequences of social networks, but there were also a lot of positive initial benefits. There are people that I haven’t communicated with in years that I’m able to connect with on Facebook and keep up with. I think you have to look at balancing the two. The trick, though, is in designing a metaverse that is more flexible and is less coupled together. One of the obstacles to getting there is the lack of standards for what can be in the metaverse, so what we have ended up with is a particular corporate entity that controls a specific metaverse. One of the competing visions of the metaverse right now is cryptocurrency — a decentralized version of the metaverse vs. a more centralized version. In the decentralized version, you have no one group controlling everything, and ownership of virtual land and virtual goods rests with individuals, not with the corporation itself. This has been prototyped in certain games and online environments where you actually own the thing that you created, for example, in Second Life. But I think having standards and interoperability across metaverses will be something that allows people to move and provides more flexibility and innovation so that if there are negative consequences within one area, people can easily move their avatar and their belongings into a different metaverse.

Maynard: From listening to both of you, it sounds like there are opportunities to completely disrupt established economic and social systems in positive ways, if we get it right. What should academics’ roles be in helping societies steer toward a metaverse future that is a better future than the one we’re in at the moment?

Virk: As academics, we can spend time studying the effects of the metaverse sooner rather than later. Additionally, advocating a more open, standards-based metaverse is something that we can play a role in establishing, rather than having companies like Facebook/Meta define those standards. So, academics have a role to play in imagining visions of what the metaverse future could be — or positive imaginaries — and helping to advance those within industry.

Ayton-Shenker: What I love about Riz’s response is that it calls for two directions as an academic institution, to think up and down. We’re called on to imagine and think up — as faculty, as staff, as students, as thinkers — what the metaverse future could be and how we should be applying standards and learnings from other arenas to design the metaverse. Then, to analyze — drill down — what’s working, what’s not working, where there are effects or could be effects that have positive outcomes.

Maynard: What is both exciting and very disturbing is we are creating something that we have never previously experienced as a species. That opens up incredible possibilities to do things differently. But it also creates substantial possibilities of doing things badly. I think it is important to consider our role as an academic institution, which has a mission to serve society, to help craft the narrative around the metaverse and support the development around it in ways that are truly going to lead to a better future.