More realities of Extended Reality (XR)
Much of what we think we know about XR is wrong
XR has Avatars representing our true selves in a safer space than IRL. It’s the ultimate empathy machine, where we can all have superpowers. The Metaverse is a social space where we will all someday play, work and even live.
These ideas are widely believed and often aspired to, but unfortunately remain largely bunk. Let’s take them apart, unpack and hopefully debunk.
The most important take-away from the previous article is that Virtual Worlds exist primarily inside our minds. They’re our mental models for the world around us, real or virtual. Communication, and most of XR, is about how we share and anneal these mental models among people.
As you may have heard once or twice recently, folks are calling this next phase of on-line experience “The Metaverse.” Similar folks 30 years ago heralded the internet as “Cyberspace.”
Thus far in internet history, we’ve built a vast web of mostly 2D dynamic layouts that show the artifacts of people: articles, photos, videos, tweets. But rarely do we interact directly with other people on-line, except in games, audio and video chat (and even those are limited in terms of interactions).
The next phase of digital experience is where we more directly re-introduce people into the mix. In retrospect, the most fitting term may be The Internet of People. I gave an awkward talk on this in 2015. It’s essentially like the open web: decentralized, extended to everyone, everyplace, for everyday lives. I’ve also jokingly called it the World Wide World.
I’m not cool enough to name things. But “Cyberspace” and “World Wide Web” eventually reduced down to just “The Web” in popular use. We don’t know yet what this next thing will be commonly called.
But one thing is certain: for some folks, the Metaverse is just a Meta-purse. Depictions in gushing articles of its potential to take over everything— that ignore our real human needs, real behaviors, and the realities of life — are just as limited as a Web lacking humans.
So let’s actually talk about people…
