![]() ![]() People have talked about the concept of “digital real estate” for decades. Nevertheless, it’s still possible to reason about what might drive value for users in our ever-expanding digital space. Meanwhile, the metaverse will always be the go-to when it affords experiences that are not available in the physical world – like swashbuckling or exploring distant galaxies.Īll of this is still in its early stages, making it difficult to predict precisely what will create the greatest and most lasting value. And while many people will soon be having meetings in virtual conference room spaces, nobody is going to want to take long, boring “commutes” in the metaverse when they could just “teleport,” moving between digital locations instantly. Likewise, one is more likely to go to a metaverse concert with friends when either the friends or the musical artists (or both) are difficult to see in-person. This means that the value of those spaces is determined by the activities people want to engage in there, and how the affordances of digital space support those activities.Īgain, in the case of Zoom: you’re much more likely to organize a group video call for far-flung friends and relatives than for a chat with a neighbor (at least in non-pandemic times). How should we think about what to build for the metaverse? The framework is so simple as to be almost tautological: People use digital spaces when they create opportunities not available in the “outside option” of the physical world. (I’ve attended several conferences hosted on the Gather.town platform, for example, in which the Zoom rooms used for presentation sessions are connected by an eight-bit digital landscape, where participants can quite literally run into each other.) People quickly started making these spaces their own – personalizing them with a variety backgrounds of everything from Serengeti vistas to Studio Ghibli films.Īnd now metaverse platforms can give our digital spaces a sense of physical structure and geography, creating new ways to explore and interact within them. That effectively gave us the power to create private digital spaces. But these days, the digital world is taking on a growing share of our activities and time – and it’s becoming more physical than ever before.Ī powerful recent example is the Zoom background, which made it possible to separate speakers in a video call from the physical rooms surrounding them. ![]() People have been hanging out in digital spaces since the chat rooms and gaming MUDs (“multi-user dungeons”) of the early Internet. ![]()
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