The Future of Social is 3D
In case you missed it, a few weeks ago our cofounder and CEO, Tim Ricker, wrote a brief introduction to Stageverse where he discussed our multi-year journey towards the Metaverse, and our vision for the future. Check it out if you haven’t!
In today’s post, we look to cut through the noise surrounding “The Metaverse” as a concept in today’s tech zeitgeist and elaborate our view on its core promise — a revolution in how we connect with one another online.
Reality is 3D
Reality is three dimensional and liquid — it envelops us and gushes into our perception like ocean water into the hull of a sinking ship. We can’t stop it. Take a walk outside in Los Angeles on a glistening summer day and feel the warm sun-baked glow of concrete; the cool tickle of the pacific breeze. Hear the sparkling chorus of birdsong percolating through the air. Notice the saturated, waxy green leaves of landscaped gardens lining the sidewalk; the coming-and-going tck-tck-tck rhythm of a passing bicycle’s spokes; the soft chord-strikes of human laughter in the distance.
We have experiences like these constantly. Existing in physical space is so natural we barely even notice the minutiae anymore. 3D existence is all we know. Yet for most of us, our lives have become increasingly mediated and anesthetized by the internet and its thin surface of sterile 2D experiences.
The Internet’s Status Quo
At the most basic level, the internet is about connecting people together through space and time, setting us free from the limits of physical distance and proximity. While this has been mostly a great thing for society, we’ve made a bit of a deal with the devil. Today, an increasingly large portion of our social interactions are mediated through our most trusted advisor — the 2D screen.
Inside the world of our screens we lead largely detached existences, silently orbiting one another’s lives across the great expanse of The Social Feed. We huddle in the crevices of various chat windows, dispensing LOL’s and hahaha’s, 😏s and 🥴s. We stare blankly at The Brady Bunch on Zoom, doling out doses of Likes and rations of Replies on choose-your-favorite social network. We don’t connect directly with one another, as we do IRL, rather our interactions primarily take place impersonally and asynchronously, like a distant game of social tag.
While it has come at a price, there’s a lot to love about the interconnectedness the internet has bestowed. We can now WFH! We can connect with loved ones across harrowing distances. We can keep tabs on friends as their lives’ wildly corkscrew in various directions. We can browse markets for dating and takeout from the comfort of our cozy apartments. Most importantly, we can traverse the infinite expanse of human knowledge and creativity with nothing more than a few flicks and taps of our increasingly dexterous fingers.
But we’re missing something.
The Promise of The Metaverse
We’re missing the feeling of actually being together — physical presence. Sharing the same context. High-bandwidth communication; not only verbal — but visual, physical, emotional communication. The ability to interact in meaningful ways, here and now. To feel the other person not as an image, tweet, or text, but as a complex human being. Nuance. Real empathy. The ability to experience, explore, and create together.
In essence, we’re missing everything that allows us to form and foster deep, meaningful connections; all this has been lost as our social lives have moved increasingly “online”.
The first age of social products, characterized by 2D content-mediated platforms, was about breadth of connection; wiring up the world into dense networks of friends and followers; broadcasting content into the faceless ether; performance; fleeting darts of asynchronous human feedback; a mostly ‘single player’ experience mediated by the fragments of 2D media — text, images, videos — that we scatter across the web.
The next age of social products, on the other hand, will be about depth of connection. Meaningful conversation, interaction, and participation in shared social experiences; truly ‘multiplayer’. Live experience, together. Much of this will be enabled by immersive 3D environments, expressive avatars, and tools for 3D creativity and communication. This is the promise the “Metaverse” represents, and this is the vision we are building towards at Stageverse.
As an aside, it’s an important distinction to make that the Metaverse is not about disconnecting people from physical reality, as is often alluded to in the media with a tinge of sci-fi dystopia; rather the Metaverse is about transforming the time we do spend online so that it’s more meaningful, more connected, and more human.
We believe strongly in the future the Metaverse represents, and at the same time we know the 2D internet is not going away. We’re focused on building tools that enable anyone to create immersive, 3D, shared social experiences that augment our existing online lives, bring us closer together, and open new possibilities for expressing ourselves and experiencing together online.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing more detail on what we’ve been working on and where we’re headed as we lay foundations for the next evolution of online social experience.
Until then — stay tuned and thanks for following along!
