No gravity, no square footage, no expectations—virtual reality presents a new frontier. What can architects and designers contribute to the metaverse?
Hunn Wai is an industrial designer, and like all industrial designers, he specialises in creating things you can touch and manipulate: real objects in the real world. That might sound obvious, except Wai also calls himself a “metarchitect”, and he is increasingly interested in designing things that don’t really exist at all, at least not in the physical sense. It’s not just digital design, or user experience design applied to virtual environments. It’s something entirely new.
“It’s all in service of digital experiences,” says the Singapore designer, who runs the studio Lanzavecchia + Wai with his Italian partner, Francesca Lanzavecchia. “If we move into this new space called web3, metaverse, spatial Internet, suddenly a lot of things in the physical world might not need to be adhered to anymore; things like scale, things like gravity, things like how you enter a space. It’s full potential.”
Wai stumbled into the metaverse in 2018, when he began playing a video game called Journey on his wife’s Playstation console. “I’ve never been a fan of video games. It seemed like a strange way to spend time,” he says. But there was something different about this one. “It removes all superfluous controls. You go there in the middle of a sand-dune planet and you learn along the way because there are no explicit instructions on how to execute a move. You’re there like a newborn—you figure out how to walk, how to fly. It’s an experience you can’t have in real life.”
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The game’s purposeful limitations, and the way it creates an immersive digital realm that forces players to really engage with their surroundings, struck Wai as a revelation. Here was a virtual reality that didn’t feel hackneyed or conventional: it was fresh and exciting. He became increasingly interested in the possibilities of the metaverse and the role architects and designers could play in it.
“I’m an ’80s kid,” says Wai. “I’ve grown up with tech, since before web1, since before dial-up modems. I’ve always been intrigued by virtuality, but what never convinced me was that it was always stuck behind a screen. I find it’s not as rich an experience as materiality.”
But Wai’s experience with Journey suggested otherwise, and he became convinced of the metaverse’s potential when the digital artist Mike Winkelmann, alias Beeple, sold an NFT work of art for US$69 million (about S$98 million) at a Christie’s auction in March 2021. NFTs—non-fungible tokens—are unique digital files encoded in a blockchain that can be used to certify the authenticity of a digital object, and the total global value of NFT trading soared from US$82 million in 2020 to $17 billion in 2021.
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