[27] Connecting in the Metaverse
Dear Readers,
Hope you had a wonderful weekend! We are almost in August!
We’ve been exploring NFTs a lot. One of the things we’re excited by is that with NFTs, communities are forming, and we’re connecting in new ways online. These are powerful building blocks and behaviors toward enabling the Metaverse. Today we want to explore what relationships and connectivity look like in the Metaverse. Here is a good pre-read we wrote months ago.
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Imagine you slip on your VR headset and immediately enter the metaverse.
Your metaverse avatar is a bird, and you enter a virtual world where you’re able to fly.
You literally feel it in real life (IRL), your stomach dropping, the wind in your hair, the sun shining on your face as you fly across the screen.
🦅
That immersive experience is coming, and in some ways, parts of it are already here. Everything from hardware enabling an immersive digital world to Web 3 technology like NFTs and digital assets powering online identities. Each building block on its own is interesting, but together they start to bridge the gap from the physical world to the metaverse.
And that’s where it gets really interesting.
We’ve written a lot about NFTs recently: they can convey our online identity and act as collectors’ items that confer ownership.
We’ve also explored digital avatars: they’re your online persona that can be fluid and very personalized (hello Bored Ape).
This is all cool stuff, but on their own, they’re both still sort of….static. You’re experiencing them passively through a computer screen. Even on social media, where we post and “like” pictures, leave comments — our social interactions feel very 2D.
What would it look like if you became your NFT / avatar identity that you have in Web 3, throw in augmented and virtual reality, and go from this static image of, say, a bird to yourself as a bird avatar that can fly?
Enter the metaverse.
🦄
Albeit still early, we’ll get to the point where our online interactions will become more lively than just the static images and early metaverse worlds we have today.
In the future, the metaverse will feel real. It will mirror a lot of our interactions in the physical world, but with the added touch of endless imagination in the metaverse.
And it’s not too hard to imagine doing this at scale because we’ve all adopted Zoom at scale pretty quickly and continue to increase our time spent online.
So once metaverse technology matures and adoption grows, this virtual world will readily become (a big part of) our reality.
This has huge implications for our social interactions.
What does it look like to go from the online 2D world we have today to a fully immersive online 3D world?
In the metaverse, how will connectivity and making friends change?
And in an immersive virtual world that feels real, what can the future of meeting others and building relationships online look like?
Let’s dive in.
🤿
What does it mean to connect? 💻
When we think about connectivity in Web 2, social media has enabled ease and quantity: ease in being able to keep tabs on old friends, quantity in the sheer volume of people you otherwise would’ve lost touch with.
But quantity ≠ quality. ❌
By sending the occasional “like” or annual birthday wish, is it better to have that incidental / transactional interaction than none at all?
Some would argue social media hasn’t enabled deep friendships — rather its disabled them. We can really only manage so many relationships at once with decent attention span. Regardless of where you stand on this, it seems connecting on the internet in Web 2 is hit or miss. It doesn’t help that as adults, making new friends in the real world is hard.
Once you’re past the bubbles of built-in social circles — college campus, sports team, etc. — it can be a struggle to meet and connect with new people.
This is partly because “built-in social circles” automatically unite like-minded people who have something in common. What underpins most relationships is a shared sense of camaraderie.
But when you log onto Instagram, that particular platform (in its present form) isn’t enabling activities / experiences to build a shared sense of camaraderie. You’re a bystander to the exchanges taking place on a screen. And even if you’re playing an active role, the user experience is 2D (static, asynchronously, doesn’t mirror connecting live, IRL).
Many things in Web 3, particularly NFTs, are by default “built-in social circles.” Today we're (kind of) connecting if we're in the same community online, through things like DAOs or holding the same assets (Cryptopunks, BAYC, and really any other NFT).
But we are only still scratching the surface, i.e. it’s 2D… this engagement is still taking place in a very disconnected way from your physical self. This is the primary reason why WFH detractors push back… they claim the “in-person” experience can’t be replicated online behind a screen. Most of us recognize humans can’t escape the need to physically interact with one another.
But what would a world look like where the “in-person” experience CAN be replicated online?
Imagine a world where you feel the physicality of connecting in person, but virtually... humans have never had this kind of social interaction before, at scale with such flexibility and personalization.
It’ll be powered by things like haptics technology (think back to playing tennis with the Wii remote, where you felt the feedback of hitting the ball), where you can feel the sense of touch in the metaverse. Many companies, like Meta, are already working to develop this today.
And this is just the first step… what this enables is a virtual parallel version of real life, but from the comforts of your home/couch. Hear the sounds of a concert, the sights, the smells, the sensation of being in person with your friends (who also attend virtually), but feeling them beside you as if you were in person.
Right now, maybe you can only see your relatives overseas once a year. But slip into the metaverse, and you can be sitting right alongside them in the virtual world. The need to be “physically” in the same room disappears and that’s no longer the primary way humans connect.
The metaverse will redefine what “connecting” means for all of us, where in the optimistic case it breaks down a lot of the barriers society has to truly connect with each other in today’s day and age.
From metaverse to real-verse 🤝
Most of us grew up in a world that was physical / IRL first, then moved into digital (i.e. meet someone in real life, then ask them to connect digitally). In some cases, this model is starting to flip, such as on dating apps (but this can still be taboo).
In a metaverse world, your interactions are virtual first ➡️ real world second. We see this today with some NFT communities… own this NFT first ➡️ engage in the online community ➡️ then show up in real life to this party.
That’s assuming the connection that starts in the metaverse even moves to the real world…
If the metaverse is truly immersive and can re-create the physicality of real life experiences… then the ultimate question is… is there a need to be physically next to each other in real life, say at an event like a concert?
This also begs the question, are we comfortable if all we ever know about the people we’re connecting with is their avatars and behaviors in the metaverse? We might never get to know the real them. (But what even is the “real” them?… okay… let’s avoid this rabbit hole for now) 🐇
What’s interesting is that this could become an irrelevant question. Because the metaverse unlocks new ways of connecting, the ways in which we “judge” the quality of our friendships tomorrow might be very different than today. If the physicality of being “in person” is less important tomorrow, then we may not necessarily care what we look like or how we act in “real” life. Your physical self doesn’t define you anymore… we care more about who we are in the metaverse. (Ready Player One, anyone?)
Snap back to reality 🙏
You might be reading this and feeling skeptical. Nothing beats the in-person experience, right?
And to be clear, we are not proposing the metaverse will necessarily drive us to the extreme presented above… but like most topics we cover at Life in Color, we want to understand the bounds.
Maybe not every interaction will move to the metaverse.
Maybe not every relationship will be built in the metaverse.
Maybe not every event will be held in the metaverse.
Many of us agree real life interactions are and will continue to be important.
But real life interactions will have to evolve once the metaverse really comes online.
Because the metaverse will be too big to ignore.
So maybe the ultimate-ultimate question is, how will real life interactions exist in a world where we have the choice to interact in a fully immersive metaverse instead?
Often times, adopting a new game-changing technology hinges on wide-scale human behavioral change. The metaverse depends on people moving more of their lives online and being willing to engage online.
Well… this behavior already exists and has accelerated since the pandemic.
We are meeting more people online, and we are moving more of our lives online. We are already hanging out online (See our piece on hanging out in the metaverse).
This is why the metaverse is relevant and important.
We like to think it can and will be a game-changer. The metaverse is infinite. We can be anything we want to be, for better or worse. For some of us, the virtual world may feel as real as, well, real life — no limits.
Of course there will be a lot we need to figure out. Of course there are many ways this can go wrong. Of course it may not be as good as we’re optimistically thinking about it.
But it’s happening either way, and that’s why it’s worth exploring.
In the metaverse, the possibilities are endless.
In the metaverse, you can be as “free as a bird.”