Why the Metaverse Has a Social Engagement Problem

Sometimes the best way to introduce users to the metaverse is by completely ignoring everything we’ve heard about the metaverse.

With brands including Adidas, Gucci and Warner Music, to name just a few, plunking down close to $2 billion collectively by some estimates buying virtual “land” in the past two years, excitement has cooled considerably as more people come to believe that companies like Meta got ahead of themselves with a hype cycle that’s failed to deliver the virtual worlds promised.

Speaking with PYMNTS for the J.P. Morgan Payments Global Innovators in Payments Series, Gravity Sketch Chief Experience Officer Daniela Paredes takes a pragmatic view.

“We like to not think about the metaverse at all,” she told PYMNTS. “We’re a company that is focused on enabling the designers and the creative teams to communicate in the best way possible” and focus on the real-world design capabilities of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) for creating products, rather than futuristic virtual experiences.

In this world, she said VR platforms enable designers to express 3D ideas without translating them into 2D sketches — or worse, words — both of which defeat the purpose of what 3D virtual design can do for products and as communications platforms.

With Meta Quest Pro VR headsets retailing for $1,100 and the less powerful Meta Quest 2 priced in the $399 range, it’s an expensive way to not experience very much at this point.

Getting back to reality and what real people (not avatars) think, she said: “What is the metaverse? It’s like talking about what is the internet. The internet is nothing without the experiences, without platforms, without all the services that we have available on the internet. In a way, it’s just talking about this technology that’s enabling people to be able to interact in a more spatial way, and that’s the way that I think about it.”

Read also: Collaborative 3D Platforms Bring Digital Smarts to Industrial Design

What the Metaverse Lacks

Paredes said she believes the biggest inhibitor to a commercially viable metaverse is the absence of experiences that consumers want to return to again and again, as they do with social apps.

“You need to have things that are actually going to help you in life or just give you different things to do, like work, sports, leisure, whatever it might be,” she said. “You need to have those things. That’s the challenge right now for the metaverse.”

At present, the metaverse is perhaps best understood as a spatial design environment allowing designers and engineers to imagine and create products in ways that CAD/CAM software either doesn’t allow or isn’t made for, like the immersive meta-wonderland so often described.

That’s not the easiest concept to convey.

“It’s a challenge, to be honest, because when you talk about spatial and you talk about spatial experiences and giving users a spatial way of communication, people are like, ‘What are you talking about?’” Paredes said. “We don’t necessarily talk about the metaverse because it’s a very specific term, and it has a strong connotation towards this kind of gaming or fantasy world.”

There are some positive developments like Meta’s second-quarter 2022 opening of the Meta Store on its Burlingame, California, campus to let people try out headsets and experience immersion 1.0, including Ray-Ban Stores “smart glasses” that offer a kind of metaverse-lite experience.

Paredes added that this is “not necessarily just gaming, but things like productivity, like Gravity Sketch,” adding that chains including Best Buy are setting up AR/VR demo spaces too.

See also: Metaverse Meltdown Looks Poised to Continue into 2023

Use Cases IRL

Putting aside metaverse worlds and experiences, Gravity Sketch is focusing on the design, communication and workflow uses that AR and VR are making possible right now.

The company is lending AR/VR headsets to potential clients and others to show how the “spatial-verse” can enhance product and experience design, she said.

“For example, the headset is all you need,” she said. “The computer is inside here. You don’t need anything else [aside from] the controllers. You need to lend the headsets and teach people how to use them.

“Having worked with the technology for eight years, I 100% believe in it,” she added. “I’ve seen it grow and evolve and become something more robust every single day. The important thing for all of this is making sure that there are tools, there is software, and there are experiences that are meaningful for people. Otherwise, this metaverse is not going to happen.”

But as for the endless connected virtual worlds of travel and retail and events, “It doesn’t happen like that, at least not yet,” she said.

On the upside, however, she added, “The minute you show someone … that you can have an idea and directly create it in 3D in a very simple way, the same way as you learn how to interact with the world, that’s how we move, that’s how we behave, all of us as humans, they automatically get converted. They start using it over and over, and they become kind of like evangelists.”