The Real Metaverse Will Be One That We Can Touch And Feel

Around 18 months ago, Facebook transformed into Meta and unveiled its vision of a future that lives in the “metaverse”, a new and immersive virtual world in which people will be able to live, work and play. 

Ever since Mark Zuckerberg announced his grand vision, the metaverse and related technologies such as Web3 have been talked up as key elements of what many see as the next evolution of the internet. No longer will we just look at the internet on our computers and mobile devices, instead we’ll completely immerse ourselves in a new, virtual world that we can touch, feel and perhaps even taste. 

But the initial conversation over the metaverse has quickly swung from a feeling of curiosity to confusion, alarm and, increasingly often, outright cynicism. The idea of a virtual world in which people experience through avatars is suddenly being dismissed as the dystopian dream of a tech billionaire with nothing better to do, with many questioning why we’d even want to give up our existing lives in an already immersive world, for one that has fewer experiences and clunkier graphics. 

Criticism is normal. As with any big change, questions are always raised. With Web3 and the metaverse, there are lots of reasons to be skeptical, from the substandard graphics to the fears around data security and the potential psychological impact of living virtually instead of physically. 

Perhaps the world is not yet ready for a fully virtual world. After all, virtual reality technology is still really in its infancy, dominated by clunky headsets and weird arm controls that are anything but instinctive. VR has been labeled as the next big thing for years, but there are so many people who beg to differ. Once you’re inside a virtual world, there isn’t a whole lot to do within it, some people even suffer from motion sickness. Then there’s the inescapable feeling from many that the whole thing just seems, well, a bit naff. 

The truth is that VR technology is unlikely to take off until it becomes a great deal more user friendly, with more realistic graphics and less intrusive headsets. If someone was able to build something more akin to Star Trek’s “holodeck”, then for sure people are going to go for it. But such an experience is still likely to be several decades away, if it’s even possible. So if VR still isn’t going to become the next big thing for a while, where does that leave the metaverse? 

A Metaverse Based In Reality

The answer is that its immediate prospects may not lay in virtual reality, but in augmented reality, which provides the benefits of both the physical and the digital worlds by merging them into one. Why try to build an entirely new, virtual world when we already have an incredibly immersive physical world that can be integrated into the metaverse instead? 

An augmented reality metaverse will be quite unlike a VR-based metaverse. As opposed to staying at home, suffering from neck strain with some ill-fitting headgear, immersed in cheap graphics, the AR metaverse would instead encourage people to step outside their homes. It will be a world we can explore on our feet, armed with a smartphone, smart watch or AR glasses, interacting with digital content posted in real-world locations by our friends, businesses and creators. 

It’s easy to imagine how this might work. Let’s say you’re out and about in the real world, and you’re hungry for some Mexican food. You pull out your smartphone, or you put on a pair of AR glasses, and use your voice to ask where the nearest Mexican food place is. Immediately, an overlay pops up onto your phone that shows the real world where you are now (think Google Street view, side-by-side with a map view), showing you directions on foot to your destination. It guides you to Cafe Habana, a couple of blocks away, and the overlay shows you what’s on the menu and that it is also recommended by a couple of your friends. 

When you arrive at Cafe Habana, you hold your smartphone over the entrance and you’ll suddenly see a coupon pop up that was posted by the business itself, offering you a 10% discount, and the latest review giving a 5-star rating to its burrito dish. 

Or let’s imagine you’re on the road, traveling to the next city and looking for local points of interest along the way. Drive past the next highway stop and you’ll see a creator is offering a free 3D experience as a way to bring visitors to their town. 

This is an example of the AR metaverse that Peer envisages. It’s building a kind of social media app overlaid onto the real world that’s designed to get people out and about. In some ways it sounds a lot like Pokemon GO, with an app that allows you to switch effortlessly between AR mode and map mode as you explore your immediate surroundings. The digital content you come across will be hosted on the Peer blockchain, tagged to a specific place, time and person. There will be a coin, known as Peer Metaverse Coin, which serves as an incentive to use the app, post great content and refer your friends. Users will post their content at locations that are geolocated and mapped to the real world, so others will be encouraged to get outside in order to find and interact with it. 

Peer’s vision couldn’t be any more different from the physically isolated metaverse experience being pursued by the likes of Facebook and Microsoft. Instead of asking people to stay at home and don ridiculous headgear to interact with comical, cartoony avatars of their friends, Peer integrates digital content into the physical world, and you’ll only experience it when you go there in person.  

People are social creatures and they enjoy the great outdoors. Our homes are simply a place to retreat to at the end of the day. Our lives are spent on the outside, not on the inside, and so the metaverse as many people imagine it is quite unnatural. Most people don’t want to stay at home all day, stuck inside a virtual dimension. They want to get out and about and experience things in person. 

For the metaverse to take off, it needs to intersect with our lives on the outside, enhancing our real-world experiences. What’s needed is a metaverse we can genuinely touch and feel, and that will only happen in a real world that’s augmented by the digital experiences we’re trying to build. 

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