“Architects can have a very important role in designing the metaverse,” Kapoor says. “Architectural design is user-centric, aesthetically pleasing, intuitive and sustainable. These design principals and lessons learned in designing the physical world could be applied in the co-creation of these immersive spaces in the metaverse.”
“Over the next 10 years, we’ll see important evolutions in how we think about design for integration of physical and digital spaces,” Lane predicts. “This will mean more firms looking to bridge the divide with ‘phygital’ [physical-digital] approaches, firms using 3D spatial environments to help with the planning and procurement processes, data collection and more. The opportunities are only beginning to make themselves apparent. Along the way, the current limitations of seamless access—goggles as we know will improve and even disappear—and computing power will be solved and open the door to a truly seamless human experience that effortlessly blends the physical and the digital.”
Many also believe the metaverse can be a testing ground for different designs. The concept of a digital twin is creation of a virtual model of a physical object that allows for trying things out and testing in safe virtual space.
“The metaverse could be used for experimentation and testing, where we could have clients walk through the digital twin of a building in a virtual environment,” Kapoor explains. “You could see how users might respond before building a billion-dollar airport.”
Future Experience
Most would acknowledge at this point our technology is sophisticated enough to give a tantalizing picture of what the metaverse can be, but there still are limitations related to bandwidth and computing power. Still, there are real-life applications now and most of us have at least dipped our toes into the metaverse in some way.
“These are environments that can be created, curated and simulated, which is really like Google Maps. That is a metaverse. On a global scale, that is a simulation of reality,” Hollwich explains. “But it can become more fantastical—like in the gaming world or areas where you can enhance reality and get creative. There is incredible potential for not being limited as a designer to see how far we can push things without, of course, losing people’s sense of reality.”
“One advantage of the metaverse is it can give you the opportunity to customize your environment,” Kapoor says. “This can be very helpful to neurodiverse individuals or people with special needs. They can customize their environment based on their needs even in a chaotic public space. Physical realm and immersive virtual worlds have this potential to support and complement each other as we build toward more equitable, inclusive, open and secure environments.”
“This is an opportunity to design an entirely new form of human experience,” Lane says. “Whether that’s how the future of hybrid work will evolve to the way that homes and social, hospitality or public-event spaces of the future will evolve, the slate is currently blank. Architects already are versed in the world of 3D and many we speak to are reimagining the ways in which their clients and partners are thinking about physical and digital interactions. The opportunity to create and unlock new kinds of utility for humanity and to design the future of how we’ll interact with one another is limitless and exciting.”
Few would disagree that even though the metaverse as a concept has been around for a while, we are truly only at the earliest stages.
“If we compare a fully realized metaverse to Hollywood, we might be in the silent movie era,” Lane continues. “While we already have a real product people can derive value from, we’re only at the beginning of the journey.”
