Experience Design in the Metaverse and Cyberspace Typologies

This article is the third in a series focusing on the Architecture of the Metaverse. ArchDaily has collaborated with John Marx, AIA, the founding design principal and Chief Artistic Officer of Form4 Architecture, to bring you monthly articles that seek to define the Metaverse, convey the potential of this new realm as well as understand its constraints.

« I had lunch on the moon, took a swim in a shadowy lake on Mars, played croquet with the clouds, and chased rainbows under the sea, all in one glorious afternoon » … how real and meaningful these experiences felt will be greatly influenced by how and where you interact with a Metaverse opening near you soon. While in a fundamental sense, the Metaverse can be seen as a series of overlapping economic intentions, there is a unique and important opportunity for architects and designers of space and place to influence the outcome of these efforts and to create a more humane and vibrant future.

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One of the most powerful tools the Metaverse offers is experience design. Where the quality of experiencing the space is more important than the space itself.  As the technology of the Metaverse evolves, the ability to craft profoundly meaningful and intensely interactive space will surpass, on many levels, what we have traditionally been able to provide in physical space.  This aspect of the Metaverse will be very compelling as world culture continues to shift online.

As we discussed in prior installments, creating a sense of place is vital to this effort, and one of the core skills architects and designers can offer in crafting the future of humanity online. This opportunity generates several questions. What can be gained by adopting place-making principles for the design of the Metaverse? What is the inherent advantage of Cyber-places, vs. Cyber-spaces? The underlying rationale for making Cyber-places is that in addition to the form, the ‘borrowing’ process also brings along behavioral aspects. We can carry over patterns of behavior learned in physical space to virtual environments by designing them to have the same affordances for action and interaction that the physical world exhibits. Since much of this learned behavior is organized, for obvious reasons, around the spatial elements of the physical world, it will help us make better use of Cyberspace if it was similarly organized.

Four typological categories of Cyberspace

When looking at the opportunities for the dynamic between place and behavior, we should look at the types of space that can be created in the Metaverse. We have identified four categories of environmental ‘shells’ for developing place-like environments in Cyberspace worth discussing. These four types represent a wide spectrum of qualitative outcomes, each with its own special charm. They are (1) Hyper-reality Cyberspaces; (2) Abstracted reality Cyberspaces; (3) Hybrid Cyberspaces; (4) Hyper-Virtuality.

As they develop, the attraction and popularity of each type may change, but it is likely that the Metaverse will be culturally broad enough to embrace versions of all four types.

While the technology that supports these types of experiences is rapidly developing, there is still much work to be done in order to fully realize the potential of the Metaverse.  This is in terms of hardware, processing power, memory, bandwidth, and how new interfaces will enable innovation in cultural norms.

Hyper Reality

Hyper Reality attempts to mimic the physical world in great detail. The level of quality required to be believable is quite high, and not easily achieved. The test is the inability of the viewer to find ‘telltale flaws,’ much like analyzing the differences between a photo-realistic painting and a photograph. Technologically, this has been readily achieved using Radiosity and other algorithms, and computer-intensive animation of the kind seen in special effects movies. These have become quite common.  

Hyper Reality is defined as much by the completeness of the imagery as by its attention to solving constraints that revolve around the concept of ‘the Laws of Nature’: gravity, wind, weather, sunlight, natural materials, touch, smell, dust, dirt, and the aging of materials and surfaces.

Hyper Reality environments can be used to re-create historical places that no longer, or have never existed (e.g. Kent Larson’s Hurva Synagogue, and Takehiko Nagakura’s Danteum or Place of the Soviets), or places that do not yet exist (e.g., the Virtual Museum of Arts Al Pais). As well as offer access to the world’s existing environments in virtual form.

Hyper Reality has several advantages in terms of place-making, such as richness of experience, familiarity, and comfort. The environment is easy for people to understand and relate to since it contains such familiar implements as walls, ceilings, stairs, lights, doors, and simulated materials.  This familiarity can make it easier for users to « suspend disbelief » and immerse themselves in virtual environments.

But it never rains in Cyberspace, therefore 3D ‘worlds’ have no use for roofs (although ceilings might help provide an enclosure for the space). There is no gravity, hence no weight in Cyberspace, and therefore no need for columns and beams. Even windows lose their role as sources of air and light and function only as portals. Distances are elastic to the extreme: one can hyper-jump from place to place without having to visit points in between. Hence roads, walkways, and elevators are superficial constructs unless they assume their alternative meaning as transitional places that afford serendipitous encounters, views, and mid-journey changes of destination.

Abstracted Reality

Abstracted reality obeys enough laws of nature to engender believability but does not attempt to create a ‘true-to-life’ reality. Objects and textures are abstracted, not perfectly rendered, but there is an attempt to avoid disorientation or the unfamiliar. For example, one could not walk through walls, and one needs to ‘ride’ an ‘elevator’ or ascend a flight of stairs to go from floor to floor. Stylistically, the imagery might be ‘cartoon-like.’ Alt-Space, Second Life, and Minecraft are examples of digital Abstracted Realities. In Alt-Space the avatars have heads, hands, and torsos, but no arms or legs. Most often there is quite a bit more artistic freedom in Abstracted Reality than in Hyper Reality, which allows for stretching, or accentuating, place-making qualities such as scale and time.

There are several advantages to Abstracted Reality in simple texture mapping and lighting requirements since photorealism is not the goal. Abstracted Reality can be used to create places that are too expensive to construct in the physical world, but buildable in a virtual one. Most Cyber environments fall into this category by default. 3D-MUDs (Multi-User Domains) are probably the best example of Abstracted Reality Cyber-places. They employ a strong spatial analogy, with the explicit intent to facilitate multi-user (i.e., social) interaction.

Hybrid Cyberspace

Hybrid Cyberspace freely mixes ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ experiences. It does not need to obey the Laws of Nature. The range of artistic expression is quite limitless and could easily become surreal. One could assume, for example, the form of a blue caterpillar and sit on top of a mushroom the size of a person, smoking a long hookah. Fellow participants could appear in the form of realistic or unrealistic avatars, even in symbolic representation, such as talking chess pieces or playing cards. Objects could behave in unusual ways, changing size, texture, and form over time. They can move with the slightest touch, counter to their apparent materiality. There can be significant mismatches of form and material, such as a glass fish, that swims, smiles, and speaks. The concept of objects having magical powers is quite prevalent in Hybrid Cyberspace.

The challenge for the designer is to strike the right balance between the real and the unreal, wherein the experience is aesthetically rich, yet not so disorienting or sterile as to destroy the sense of place. Movement through this type of environment could be very direct, instead of ‘natural,’ allowing instantaneous changes of venue or time, for example, avatars can move by flying or teleporting. One can change the size to enter a small portal, only to find an enormous world inside.

Hyper Virtuality

Hyper Virtuality drops all relationships to the physical world and the Laws of Nature. It generally avoids the familiar. In fact, the uniqueness and innovativeness of the experience, to the intentional exclusion of the familiar, is of primary importance. Each site creates its own set of virtual rules, which could challenge our sense of reality, materiality, time, and enclosure of space. Common building elements such as walls, doors, windows, or floors have no meaning here, and would feel « out of place ». An example would be the space travel sequence towards the end of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Char Davies’ Éphémère.

Of the four types of Cyberspace, Hyper Virtuality seems the most fertile relative to opportunities offered by the digital medium. There is the potential to expand the realm of sensory experiences by taking advantage of the computer’s ability to organize time, data, and space, completely unbounded by the Laws of Nature. Instead of an object-based avatar, one might take the form of a point of light, a liquid, or an expansive gas.

However, by completely discarding the physical spatial metaphor, Hyper Virtuality also loses any sense of familiarity, along with the social cues that derive from it. The unlimited freedom offered by Hyper Virtuality, along with its complete rejection of normative place-making principles, makes this type of Cyberspace challenging to create a sense of comfort and activation, but it also presents a very compelling opportunity to explore human potential and interaction in ways we can barely imagine right now.

It will be interesting to see the pros and cons of these different environments and how visitors to the Metaverse will select their preferred Cyberspace typology. The level of potential disorientation will no doubt play a part in this, but there are likely to be generational differences in how much familiarity users want to experience. Within each of these four typologies, there is the potential to provide rich and compelling experiences. Only as the quality and immersiveness of the Metaverse improve will we be able to gauge their respective effectiveness. Ultimately time and the consumer market will tell which typologies will thrive and how the Metaverse will evolve to support humanity.

This article is based on a paper that John Marx co-authored with Yehuda E. Kalay, Ph.D.: Architecture and the Internet: Designing Places in Cyberspace, available here.

“Experience Design in the Metaverse” is written by architect John Marx, AIA, the founding design principal and Chief Artistic Officer of Form4 Architecture, an award-winning San Francisco – based firm that designs prominent buildings, campuses, and interiors for Bay Area tech companies such as Google and Facebook, laboratories for life-science clients, and workplaces for numerous other companies. In 2000-2007, Marx taught a course on the topic of placemaking in cyberspace at the University of California, Berkley, and in 2020 he designed his first project in the Metaverse for Burning Man: The Museum of No Spectators. The following year, John Marx led a design team charged with creating a $500B portal to the Metaverse.