11 minute read
How could the Metaverse change our lives?
The Metaverse is a concept, born from science fiction, of connected environments based within virtual reality. The fact that the Metaverse is in development and pitched as the next major social network, means we need to look at the big questions around what impacts it will have on the way we interact, behave and how we choose to use it as a tool.
By Richard Forsyth
When the Founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, renamed his near trillion-dollar company, Meta, it was evident that he was taking his Metaverse project very seriously and in 2021 Zuckerberg explained exactly why.
“We believe the Metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet,” he declared. “We’ll be able to feel present, right there with people no matter how far apart we are… Because screens can’t convey the full nature of human expression and connection.”
With a 10 billion dollar investment and an army of engineers, he’s already built the foundations of his virtually based ‘utopian’ vision, with the intention to make it a shared global space to live and work in. Anyone who has seen the Hollywood movie Ready Player One will understand how an advanced, immersive Metaverse could look and feel. In the film, set in 2045, whilst the planet is in social decline, people find happiness and escape in a virtual reality universe called OASIS. Players live alternate realities as invented characters in beautifully rendered virtual worlds.
The promise of the connected, social parallel universe that is the Metaverse, has been bubbling in media speculation for a while and whilst it has now been created, it’s still got some growing to do. We must ask, can it and will it truly transform how we live our lives?
Gamers are ready
For children and many adults around the world, the fundamentals of the Metaverse are already second nature. Playing a networked game such as Fortnite, which 350 million people do, means assuming digital avatars with the option of in-game purchases, interaction over shared rendered environments and working together toward goals with strangers from around the world – all key component parts of life in the Metaverse. Indeed, the CEO of Epic Games that made Fortnite, Tim Sweeny, is one of the Metaverse’s biggest ‘cheerleaders’ although he’s emphasised that a Metaverse needs to be open access to everyone in a way that creators on the Metaverse own their own creations, and as he says it, are ‘not forced to adopt other things’, under the control and for the profit of one company or entity.
The biggest obvious difference to platforms like Fortnite is that in its true form, the Metaverse is supposed to be accessed with virtual reality headsets, in Meta’s case, Oculus virtual reality headsets, so users will perceive fully 3D environments. Virtual reality headsets, in their various guises, have often presented a problem with adoption from the public, as they are cumbersome, expensive and even make people feel dizzy or sick. With this in mind, it is curious that Facebook announced the launch of Ray-Ban Stories – lightweight digital eye gear based on sunglasses, equipped with cameras, microphones and speakers. If a fully immersive Metaverse is to be widely adopted, it will likely benefit from less intrusive headwear down the line, more like glasses, than a box over your head.
Zuckerberg’s vision is that we will create all kinds of environments, assume avatar identities and interact more closely in a series of connected, shared and digitally rendered spaces, for both work and recreation.
Complete convergence
Like the internet before it, the goal is complete digital convergence, where everything you do in real life like shopping, working, watching movies, socialising with friends and even dating, is accessible through the platform.
Currently, Meta is still working on its new platform. So far it has created Horizon Home, literally a virtual home from home with furniture and comfortable living space, Horizon Worlds – where you can create custom virtual environments and Horizon Workrooms, for collaboration.
Meta opened up access to Horizon Worlds to people in the US and Canada, aged 18 and over. It was fairly basic graphically, with an environment like the game Roblox. It let you meet with up to 20 people at a time in a virtual space. Thousands of beta testers held regular meetings, including movie nights and meditation sessions. You would initially enter a plaza – a gathering place – where you then jump off to games and worlds.
It’s possible to create your own worlds with a code Meta refers to as script blocks, which lets you create rules for your worlds by attaching behaviours to objects.
A customer’s paradise?
With Zuckerberg betting his company’s future on it, some businesses and investors see investing in the Metaverse, as a huge opportunity. One goal of Zuckerberg’s is to create an enterprise Metaverse, making environments for business accessible and safe.
Imagine the new online retail possibilities alone. You could have a high street where you try out virtual versions of real products, or just virtual products for the Metaverse, with massive online shops to browse within as opposed to just a screen of images of products with a search field. The ability to create any world environment, real or imagined would make venues for socialising and exploring an attractive way to spend leisure time. Take it further still, imagine exploring the inside of someone’s body after a medical scan, walking on accurately rendered landscapes of Mars or moons in our solar system, or floating around a foreign city you’ve never been to, not on a screen but there, in true 3D. The possibilities are only limited by imagination.
New realities, same problems
As interesting and exciting as this new platform sounds, there are also big question marks and fears about its creation. When the internet became mature, it revealed a dark side, in the way it has been used for abuse, the way it is addictive and the way it can change our perceptions and interactions around others, often negatively. It exposed people’s cruelty and gave a channel for expressing hate without consequence or spreading malicious or damaging lies. Whilst Meta is adamant that they are looking at this, we already know the dangers of users’ behaviours from experience and the difficulties in eradicating bullying, lies and toxic interaction. People don’t hide their darker sides in virtual space, if anything, such platforms make it easier to unleash them, and easier to fall foul to them.
With flimsy regulation early on – criminality and abuse can flourish. Despite being in its digital infancy, the Metaverse is already causing users and pundits to raise red flags.
Samsung created My Home to explore new home technology.
Meta is well aware that terrifying abuse has already taken place during beta sessions. For example, in one of the sessions where Meta allowed access for 20 avatars to explore in a beta test for Horizon Worlds, one female user in the space reported she was pursued and groped by a stranger.
Whilst there is functionality to create what Meta called a Safe Zone that shuts down interactions, the woman was unaware of this and her experience is a disturbing example of how people can become victimised and even assaulted in this kind of fully immersive environment, which is especially concerning if there were ever vulnerable people able to access the Metaverse, such as children. The victim, in this case, posted that her experience felt as psychologically shocking as a physical attack. She wrote: “Sexual harassment is no joke on the regular internet but being in VR adds another layer that makes the event more intense. Not only was I groped last night, but there were other people there who supported this behaviour which made me feel isolated…”
This was not the only incident reported of this nature. Another woman joined the Metaverse and immediately became the victim of a nightmarish assault in the virtual plaza where people initially gathered. She said: “Within sixty seconds of joining, I was verbally and sexually harassed by three to four male avatars, with male voices, who essentially, but virtually, gang-raped my avatar and took photos.”
There are pressing issues around dealing adequately with privacy, content moderation and political extremism. When socially based technologies bloom quickly to reach global audiences – monitoring, regulating and policing becomes extremely challenging. Can we expect the Metaverse to become a new breeding ground for misinformation, hate in all its guises and ugly political movements? Facebook’s initial motto was ‘move fast and break things’, which could be interpreted as recklessness, with regard to consequences.
With this in mind, a disturbing account of the company came from a whistle-blower, Frances Haugen, who had worked for the social network. She leaked internal documents to give an insider’s view of the company’s motives and workings. She inferred the company deliberately kept children drawn to the platforms, and that they hid research around how teenagers felt worse about themselves after using its products. She indicated the firm was willing to use hate content on its site to keep users engaged and returning.
In conjunction with this, independent research has revealed that social media platforms can be the source of depression and even suicidal feelings for teens. If safeguards are not only poor but they appeared an unwanted obstruction to profits in a company, should we be more careful about engagement or avoid it altogether? One thing that has already proven to be true is that in a very personal environment like the Metaverse, abuses and crimes would feel very real and be hugely impacting.
Mirroring real life, the Metaverse will also create a new virtual economy and for the cynical, there is the very real fear that this will become just another way to take people’s money, a shiny new eCommerce where we buy things we don’t need, like memberships and digital apparel, all looped back into data capture of our habits for the host or third parties to further exploit. As platforms become more immersive, our digital profiles become more detailed, capturing every aspect about us, potentially how we move, where we look, what our avatars say about us, what we say to and about people. The user always becomes the product in these kinds of environments. To an extent, Zuckerberg may be counting on this. He said, “I think the digital goods and creators are just going to be huge.”
For Meta to sell virtual goods, this will entail harvesting personal data from all users as is the norm. It’s hardly shocking anymore but in the context of the Metaverse, something worth understanding and re-imagining.
It’s also been suggested that it’s possible there could be issues with anti-trust, as if a company controls all the data in a new space like this, it could in turn control the markets. Denying the data to others means a very significant competitive advantage and control. In fairness, as already stated, these issues are not new, it’s simply a new era, with new technology. When you are pioneering a new kind of technology that millions of people use and submit their data to, it may take ill-informed or slow-moving legal entities to try and catch up with the implications and create the necessary laws around them.
There are plenty of big question marks over the Metaverse but the biggest is surly, ‘will people use it?’ Not everyone thinks so. This may well be reflected in Meta’s share price which slumped significantly after the company invested heavily in the Metaverse project.
Some experts believe that the transition to the fully realised Metaverse could take up to 15 years for its widescale adoption so instead of this being a non-starter, it may be a ‘long-game’. At present, the Metaverse is finding its feet. It’s also true that whilst Meta is the giant, aiming to develop the ultimate kind of Metaverse, it’s by no means the only company working on bringing the concept to market.
For instance, there is Asia’s Zepeto Metaverse platform, one accessible via personal devices, which already has amassed around a quarter of a million users. Samsung created their popular My House Metaverse on this, showcasing future home technology you could use in the virtual space. Zepeto also hosted the Unite Seoul 2020 conference, for Unity Korea in their version of the Metaverse. Users could take in exhibit spaces, purchase items for their avatars to wear, take pictures and watch sessions.
Whilst these kinds of alternate virtual environments are around today, perhaps just showing us a glimpse of the full potential, what’s important is how we choose to use them and safeguard users in them in the future. If we’re going to escape into virtual lifestyles, we need to truly understand that it’s still real people with their own agendas and behaviours in a Metaverse, as well as profiting from the Metaverse. Whilst it may become a stunning new habitat to explore, we should also be aware of the dangers that we know can exist in uncharted and lawless places.
