Finding meaning in the Metaverse

How AR and VR can help us find Truth amidst the Fiction

Imagine 10–20 years from now, we’ll each have a pair of contact lenses that can create AR and VR as well as we want (except maybe touch, taste, and smell). By then, the words “AR,” “VR,” and “Meta” will likely be relegated to academic writing and old-timey company branding in favor of something hip, now and organic.

Alas, I’m not hip enough to pick the popular words. I have some suggestions at the end of my most recent talk, but they’re intentionally boring.

The future User Experience is a bit easier to project. Open your eyes and you’ll see 3D holograms in the real world perfectly mixed with real objects and people. Close your eyes (or otherwise elide the natural light) and you can be virtually anyplace else. Audio must also mix perfectly. But AR and VR are only two points on a spectrum. If you start with AR and add enough virtual stuff to distract you from reality, you’re effectively in VR. If you add digitized 3D “twins” or otherwise live camera feeds of your real-world environment into VR, you’re essentially back in AR again, or at least a simulation of it.

VR fundamentally strips away the most common constraints of reality: location and travel, physics, even somteims time, where hours can often seem like minutes and we can travel to the historical past or imagined futures. We can pretend to be someone else in VR (or perhaps more of our truer selves?) to temporarily remove the constraints of our births: sex, appearance, even changing aspects of our personality. We can gain ‘superpowers’ inside these worlds too, like flying, invisibility and content creation. But they’re only ‘super’ when they’re rare. Eventually, everyone just calls them ‘abilities.’

On the way to that ubiquity, power imbalances invariably lead to social strife. Without the normal constraints of reality or other ways to defend ourselves, we are more vulnerable to other people’s powers, personalities and agendas. If we increase our individual power, beyond prose and memes today, towards experiences with effective super-powers, we also turn up the volume on the negative expressions as well. This is not an arms race that anyone can “win.”