The metaverse as opportunity for architecture and society: design drivers, core competencies

Abstract

The thesis is that the metaverse will become a pervasive part of the future internet and will thus become a key arena within which the life of society unfolds. As three-dimensional, immersive virtual world, the metaverse will be designed by architects rather than graphic designers. After 30 years of theoretical speculation and technological advances the internet is finally on the way to transforming in ways envisioned with the concept of ‘cyberspace’. The key analogy is no longer the magazine with separate pages but the city and its seamless web of spaces. The paper argues that this immersive internet delivers a superior, more productive platform for social exchange and communication. Co-location synergies will unfold and order the distribution of sites and enable an intuitive browsing navigation full of discoveries and serendipitous encounters, as well as creating sites for vivid crowd interactions. It is this superiority that will lead to architects taking over from graphic designers as profession owning the design of all online interaction frames. This paper explores the plausibility of this takeover and the attendant expansion of architecture’s competency.