I live in a proto-metaverse already
I’m going to try to ponder the metaverse through a series of quick-fire essays over the coming days and weeks. I believe the overhyped concept is not something of the future but reflects a current transition. For, in reality, I already live in a proto-metaverse.
The Metaverse will require countless new technologies, protocols, companies, innovations, and discoveries to work. And it won’t directly come into existence; there will be no clean “Before Metaverse” and “After Metaverse”. Instead, it will slowly emerge over time as different products, services, and capabilities integrate and meld together.
(Ball, 2021)
I wake up every day and go to the office. When I appear in the office, I often bump into a team member and have a random chat. Then I go to my desk in the office and start working. I go through tasks, emails, and messages before gather-in’s daily co-founders meeting at 10.00. I am one of the co-founders of gather-in, an entertainer-led online platform for social gatherings. I am also the Creative Director of bak, a creative campaigns agency. The two companies share the same office. Before the meeting at 10.00, bak’s Creative Producer Dave would probably come to my desk for a quick catch-up. After the daily co-founder’s meeting, I prepare myself breakfast. I have my breakfast in the kitchen. I usually drink 3 cups of coffee every morning, 1 with breakfast, 2 at my desk. I go to my desk with my cup. There would probably be a meeting in the office either with an agency client or with a potential angel investor for gather-in’s seed funding round. I will randomly pop in at the design lab to give revisions to our designers Ecem and Melda or our video guy Çınar (he calls me a revision machine). If it is a Thursday, I finish around 17.00 to prepare for the night. Because I have been running a meyhane (a Turkish tavern where people come together to chat and have drinks accompanied by small plates) every Thursday for the last 15 months. The name of the place is Meyhane Elsewhere. Tan and I open the place around 18.30. Regulars start to come at 19.00. I go to every table and check if everything is alright, explain to the guests what the plan for the night is. Around 19.30 Tan and I will make an announcement to the whole place, talk about the Meyhane culture or something that is relevant. We will then visit every table, make a couple of more announcements and about 22.30, we will call it a night. We would remind the guests to leave tips if they want to and leave the space with a lot of new anecdotes.
I would probably watch something on Netflix just to wash the day off and then go to bed.
Our office is on spatial.chat and the Meyhane is on gather-in. When I think about an ordinary day as I explained above, my mind does not always differentiate between the real and the virtual. When I say “Dave came to my desk”, in my mind I really perceive it as him coming to my desk although it is only a moving circle on my screen. I have observed this at gather-in the most. After a night at gather-in, people say “oh, we were with so and so at our table and then this guy came and invited us to their table, we had so much fun at their table” or “you won’t believe but this famous actor came to our table last night and we had a great chat, I saw him visiting other tables too.” gather-in is still a very much 2D environment, there are no 3D tables, no one is “actually” changing tables, they are only moving between virtual tables on a screen while sitting at their chairs the whole night. However, in their minds, the anecdote is created as they have “actually” moved between tables. My mind is filled with 3D memories and anecdotes like these from the past 15 months, all taking place in a 2D environment.
Pandemic has shown us that we can create memories through lived online experiences. We had been having them for a while but they were never as memorable and continuous as the ones we had during the pandemic. People who were used to remote working or had closed ones living abroad had those kinds of experiences, but only during the pandemic did we develop the most vibrant ones. Because we celebrated, grieved, commemorated and commiserated online. In that sense we lived in a proto-metaverse during the pandemic, perhaps that’s one of the main reasons why the metaverse is rapidly becoming more than a concept.
Yes, creating the 3D effect for a metaverse is necessary, but it is not sufficient. I live in a proto-metaverse of which half of it is in a 2D environment yet most of my memories from the past 15 months are 3D. It is about creating those real memories as much as it is about developing incredible gadgets for the metaverse. And that’s what we work for every day at gather-in with a team most of which I never met in person.
REFERENCES
Ball, M., 2021. The Metaverse: What It Is, Where to Find it, and Who Will Build It — MatthewBall.vc. [online] MatthewBall.vc. Available at: <https://www.matthewball.vc/all/themetaverse> [Accessed 9 November 2021].
Radoff, J., 2021. Metaverse Technology: Unpacking the Hype. [online] Medium. Available at: <https://medium.com/building-the-metaverse/metaverse-technology-unpacking-the-hype-af9a33740f74> [Accessed 10 November 2021].
The Verge. 2021. Mark Zuckerberg is betting Facebook’s future on the metaverse. [online] Available at: <https://www.theverge.com/22588022/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-ceo-metaverse-interview> [Accessed 9 November 2021].
Venema, J., 2021. Facebook’s vision of the metaverse has a critical flaw. [online] VentureBeat. Available at: <https://venturebeat.com/2021/09/12/facebooks-vision-of-the-metaverse-has-a-critical-flaw/> [Accessed 10 November 2021].
