Which Problem is the Metaverse trying to solve? Really?

This question puzzles a lot of people right now. And often their answer is: there is none! They are sure that the Metaverse does nothing for anybody. At least not in the short term. For them, the whole thing is all hype, no substance. 

Of course, there is indeed a lot of hype. Often a very unhealthy kind of hype  (NFTs, I am looking at you! 😉 )

But does this mean that there is no substance? 

To answer this question, we founded the XRLab-MCM at the University of Münster over one year ago. This semester we did a whole seminar on the Metaverse using today’s SocialVR technology for collaborating and teaching to see how it goes. Sure, there were issues as there are in any Teams or Zoom session. But it was way more fun, way more social and we got a lot of work done. In VR. With those strange-looking goggles.

The whole experience showed me that the Metaverse might solve a problem of our Internet that we in the West have overlooked for a long time: it is still a rather lonely place!

Take online shopping, for example. The user experience of Amazon & Co. hasn’t changed much over the last 20 years. It was always optimized for efficiency: find your product, gather the necessary info for a purchase decision and then have a smooth check-out process —done.

But how do you buy something together with friends on Amazon? Is this a use case Amazon has even ever considered? 

Probably not, because online shopping has never been a social experience, especially when you compare it to shopping in real life, which can be very social if you want it to be.

This is different in China, where socializing and shopping can hardly be separated: e-commerce is tightly integrated into every social media service. Live shopping is all about shared experiences with others. Group-buying services like Pinduoduo are wildly successful. No e-commerce shop there would be able to operate without channels for instant dialog and interaction. E-Commerce in China is all about entertainment & social experience.

Would those concepts work here in the West? We don’t know because no one has really tried yet. But this all points in a direction our Internet might soon take — courtesy of the Metaverse.

The Metaverse is not about VR headsets or turning 2D into 3D. Instead, it turns being online from a lonely experience into a social one.

Suddenly you will be able to buy stuff online together with others. Or you will watch Netflix together with friends sitting next to you — even when they are on another continent. Or you will follow a presentation in a virtual auditorium and ask the stranger in the seat next to you what the last slide was about (spoiler: all this is already possible today!).

The Metaverse adds a feeling of social presence to being online that services like Teams or Zoom can’t provide. A feeling we all started to miss during pandemic times. Talking to a gallery of silent stamp-sized images of people is hardly a social experience while being together in a virtual world actually is. If you doubt that, you have never experienced it yourself. 

And of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t be alone anymore on the Internet, but you no longer have to. 

If you want to learn more about building a really social and sustainable Metaverse, I recommend reading the recent WIRED-Interview with Second Life creator Philip Rosedale, which has lots of interesting thoughts also on digital goods, NFTs and crypto-currencies. 

Second Life never was the colossal failure everybody thinks it was. It was a victim of unrealistic expectations from the outside. But it is still around — as a healthy, striving community of over 1 million active users making its parent company — according to Rosedale — more money per user & year than YouTube or Facebook. 

So there is probably a lesson or two to be learned from 20+ years of Second Life for building the Metaverse of the next 20 years.

But if you are still skeptical of the Metaverse as a concept, try this: think about any activity in real life that you enjoy more in a lively group of fellow human beings than alone and then ask yourself, how can we bring this online?

That’s the problem the Metaverse will solve in the future. As a matter of fact, some SocialVR apps and online communities already have solved it today. 

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What do you think about this approach? Does it make sense? Or do you still think the Metaverse is a fad? Let me know in the comments…

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