12 THESES on the METAVERSE

Theses on the advent of the metaverse:

Thesis 1: Total Transformation

The metaverse  will deliver vivid tele-presence, co-location synergies, explorative browsing, immersiveness, collective experiences etc.. The uptake of this opportunity will be universal.

All websites will spatialise, all organisations will move into the metaverse, all physical venues will be augmented or substituted by functionally equivalent virtual venues.

Thesis 2: A Single Reality

The metaverse is neither a game, nor fiction. Virtual reality in the metaverse will be no less real than the physical reality in our cities. Physically and virtually mediated social communicative interactions are equally significant and together form an undivided continuous social reality. There will be both competition and cooperation within and across these realms.

Thesis 3: Cyber-urban Fusion

Cyberspace will fuse with urban space implying a radical transformation of built architecture and urban life. Urban and architectural spaces become interfaces and windows into the virtual world. Mixed reality  - mixing physical and virtual co-presence  -will be pervasive.

Thesis 4: Global Meta-metropolis

There will be many metaverses but the factors that promote big world cities  - agglomeration economies (service efficiencies & servicing long tails) & co-location synergies in terms of collaborative networks  – will also drive concentration in large metaverse platforms.

Thesis 5: Distributed Ownership

Like a city, a metaverse is a shared platform. It will flourish when it is globally accessible, open source, permissionless. This implies a continuously evolving diverse self-organising community of interest, or community of the invested.  This is more compatible with the decentralised forms of governance explored within the crypto ecosystem than with corporate proprietorship.

Thesis 6: Metaverse Urban Planning

The strategic meta-policy: Start with a simultaneous plurality of approaches, i.e. to work with several (district-based) planning regimes rather than with a single blanket regime, thereby initiating a comparative experiment and discovery process. The initial market feedback investors, and later the end-user market success of the built results, will guide the selection and differential expansion/contraction process with respect to urban development regimes.

Thesis 7: The Architect’s Take-over

In the coming age of VR empowered cyberspace  it will be architects and no longer graphic designers who will design the coming 3D immersive internet: the metaverse.

Thesis 8: Architecture’s Essence Distilled

This expansion of architecture’s remit will further distil the discipline’s essence and core competency, namely the spatio-visual ordering of communicative interaction, upgraded via investment into the subdisciplines of spatiology, phenomenology, semiology and dramaturgy.

Thesis 9: Switching Technological Constraints

While the expansion of the architectural discipline into the virtual realm is seamless and leaves its essential expertise and values untouched, no of the supporting/constraining engineering disciplines is joining this expansion. There is a total substitution of the engineering stack. New collaborators are now imposing new constraints: polygon budgets and transmission bandwidth etc.

Thesis 10: Imperative Realism

The metaverse exploits the analogy of the city, utilising our ability of navigating urban and architectural spaces as well as our ability to recognize places and social situations. This requires a high degree of realism in terms of plausible design and photo-realistic rendering because the semantics attaches to atmospheric values that might not survive abstraction.

Thesis 11: Evolving Beyond Realism

While a close adherence to the analogy with urban architecture is important to begin with, we can expect a gradual emancipation and evolution of metaverse native forms of semiological articulation, navigation and interaction, exploiting the inherently different freedoms and constraints of the medium. However, the expected cyber-urban fusion will always insure a tie back to the physically instantiated urban and architectural semiology.

Thesis 12: Congenial Parametricism

As native digital style Parametricism is congenial with the ambitions of the metaverse and will become the preferred style here. This will feed back into architecture at large and accelerate the dissemination of parametricism. The advantages of a high density, complex, variegated, legible spatio-morphological order and the requirement for continuous adaptation to changing contexts and interaction scenarios, persist in the metaverse and can only be delivered by parametricism.