An Optimist's Case for the Metaverse
Virtual reality will create a more equitable, more sustainable, and more prosperous future.
In October 2021, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his company’s new name of “Meta” and its strategic pivot towards building a “metaverse” – an immersive digital world experienced through virtual reality goggles. Reactions to this announcement have, for the most part, fallen somewhere between ridicule and revulsion.
Some of this criticism is focused on Facebook/Meta’s trustworthiness as a company rather than the technology itself. But many critics decry the entire nature of virtual reality as escapist and dystopian, predicting that immersive virtual reality will trap us in the Matrix, placating humanity into a narcotic stupor while the real world around us crumbles into ruin.
I am vastly more optimistic about the future of virtual reality, and believe that:
Virtual reality will create a more equitable world
Virtual reality will create a more sustainable world
Virtual reality will create a more educated world
Virtual reality will create a more prosperous world
Virtual reality will create, on the balance, a world of improved human well-being
From “realistic” to “real”
To believe that VR can be so transformative, you have to believe that it’s special. In a world where we are surrounded by screens, it can be hard to understand what’s different about one more:
Especially one that looks as goofy as this:
The main differences are:
A VR headset blocks out everything else from your vision, making you feel like you’re experiencing something rather than watching something
In VR, your view changes when you move your head and body, giving you control over your experience that you don’t get with other types of screens.
These two properties, by themselves, seem to be incremental rather than revolutionary. But functionally, the experience earns the right be called “virtual reality” when you can easily forget that you’re in it.
This first happened to me when I was experimenting with a small VR game called “The Lab,” where a “dog” follows you around as you play:
When I got to the archery stage of the game, I thought I’d test out the dog’s programming by seeing what happened if I shot it with an arrow. I pointed the arrow down towards the dog, and…
I couldn’t do it. Violent video games on a TV feel like acting as a character — this felt like shooting a dog in real life. Even without an attempt at realism (the dog has no face!), the simulated reality tapped into my moral decisionmaking, and I couldn’t do it.
This is not just my own personal anecdote — you can see professional athletes stricken with vertigo in VR, a woman paralyzed by fear in a VR horror game, or read about how Walmart trains every new employee with VR after finding that it produced better and longer-lasting results than traditional training. The kinds of VR experiences that used to cost tens of thousands of dollars are now available in $300 devices, and this is kicking off an explosion of investment in the ecosystem.
For decades, consumer-grade virtual reality was Tofurky; now it’s the Impossible Burger.
Virtual reality will create a more equitable world
I forgive the “thought leader class” for their dismissiveness of virtual reality and their exhortations to take a walk outside, to appreciate the beauty of an oak tree, to invite a friend out for dinner instead of meeting them in the metaverse. It’s not surprising that they feel this way. They live in five-bedroom houses in safe neighborhoods, ten minutes from a great new sushi spot to invite that friend to. If you can do anything you want in “real reality,” why strap a headset to your face?
Outside Palo Alto and Park Slope, the situation looks very different.
Travel
Less than 20% of the world’s population has ever flown on an airplane.1 Even if economic growth makes air travel more accessible, the atmosphere cannot sustain 7 billion people regularly flying.
Still, why shouldn’t everyone get to travel? In virtual reality, leisure travel is an infinitely reproducible good. A person with access to a VR headset could visit the Grand Canyon one night and Central Park the next, maybe even getting yelled by a virtual New Yorker for stopping in the middle of the sidewalk.
Some people might not even want to travel virtually, but to just have a moment of peace and quiet. In India, people have roughly 100 square feet of living space per capita, usually shared with many family members. “Alone time” is a scarce resource for many. A VR headset could just block out the people and noises for a minute of solitude.
Will these experiences be anything like real-world travel? Today’s VR headsets are a mainly sight-and-sound phenomenon. These senses can influence our perceptions of other senses: cheese tastes better in a virtual cow barn than it does on a virtual park bench2 — but today’s headsets cannot capture the bite of an icy wind or the chewiness of the famous New York City bagel. The experiences will continue to get better; Scent VR and Taste VR are early technologies which may one day allow VR experiences to simulate smells and tastes. Nevertheless, even if VR is never a good substitute for traveling, it will be a fantastic substitute for not traveling, which is the much more common condition.
Experiences
Behavioral research has shown that after a person’s basic material needs are met, experiences create more happiness than similarly-priced material purchases.3 Even more importantly, people feel more connected to each other by shared experiences than they do by shared material purchases.
Experiences which are scare today, and thus expensive — NBA courtside seats, front row tickets to Hamilton, or private space travel — have no reason to be scarce in VR. These VR experiences don’t have to be limited to what a person can even experience today; a VR stream of an NBA game could allow you to actually walk onto the court and watch the game from the referee’s point of view, or even from the basketball’s point of view! Art lovers could not only stroll through the Rijksmuseum, getting inches away from Vermeer’s Milkmaid, but actually touch its surface, feeling the cracked texture through a haptic glove.
Human connection
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us the stress of being isolated from one’s friends and family. During the pandemic, we’ve turned to Zoom and FaceTime because, despite their limitations, the world feels a little smaller and our loved ones seem a little closer when we can see their faces. Isolation from family is much more severe for immigrants: 17% of the American labor force was born outside of the US, and some of them almost never get to see their children in person. The cost of travel, the inflexibility of certain visa regulations, and now pandemic restrictions can essentially make such a worker a stranger in their own family.
VR can bring families closer together than ordinary video calls have been able to do. Purpose-built devices like Amazon’s Glow, designed specifically for reading to kids, can build family relationships across distance. With better VR capture and streaming hardware, possibly delivered by smartphones, a grandparent could visit their grandkids as though they are in the room themselves. A family that can’t go to Disneyland could visit in VR, and see each other’s faces as they meet Mickey Mouse. Far-flung Friends and families could even share a holiday meal together, everyone preparing Grandma’s recipe in advance and then getting to see each other’s faces while they eat and talk.
Is it sad to think of a parent, stuck thousands of miles away from their own child, having to talk to them in virtual reality? Yes, it is. The world needs more good jobs, in every country, so that people don’t have to travel thousands of miles to support their families. The virtual experience is not a substitute for holding one’s child — it’s a substitute for not getting to hold them at all.
Disability and Aging
Economic barriers are not the only obstacles to experiences. Physical disability can be debilitating, isolating, and can limit people’s agency to go where they want and do what they want. Many people with disabilities already enjoy video games as a respite from their disability4, a place where their character or avatar can even possess superhuman abilities. VR can take this further - a person who was once an avid hiker but has suffered a debilitating stroke can go back to their favorite trails, experiencing them as though they were there in person5.
The elderly are a particularly important market for virtual reality, especially those living alone or in assisted living communities, where the risks of social isolation and depression are very high6. Companies like Rendever are creating VR experiences specifically for seniors, allowing them to relive memories like visiting the street they grew up on, or to enjoy new experiences, like swimming with dolphins, that they can no longer physically do in the real world.
Virtual Reality will create a more sustainable world
Another major achievement of virtual reality will be the advent of digital products that can, in many cases, substitute for real-world products but carry much smaller carbon footprints.
Apparel, home decor, and other goods
VR economies blur the lines between goods and experiences, highlighting the experiential purpose of physical products: a person buys a product to fulfill some “job to be done,” whether that’s “maintaining healthy teeth” for a toothbrush or “connecting with family and friends” for holiday cards and postage.
Consider buying a band’s T-shirt at a concert. The job of that T-shirt isn’t to protect you from the elements — it’s to show your support for the band, connect with others who also like the band, and mark you as an insider who has attended their concert. But that T-shirt comes with a significant environmental cost. A UN report found that worldwide clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014, led largely by fast fashion: people are buying 60% more clothing than 15 years ago, but keeping it for half as long. The apparel industry produces 20% of global wastewater and 8% of global greenhouse gases.
A limited-edition virtual T-shirt could perform the same “jobs to be done” with a negligible carbon footprint. It would show all of your metaverse friends that you’re a fan of the band, it would help you connect with people wearing similar T-shirts on their avatar, and would give you status as an early fan of the band. Not being limited by the physics of washable cotton, the T-shirt could blink whenever you were near someone who also listens to that band, and announce you as one of the band’s first 1000 fans.
If you doubt that digital goods can be valued as much as physical goods, ask a 10-year-old whether they’d rather have a new pair of jeans or a rare Fortnite skin. If you doubt that displaying your fashion to your online following can be as satisfying as wearing it in the West Village, ask a journalist whether they’d rather be permanently banned from New York City or permanently banned from Twitter. The places where we spend our time become the places where we make meaning, and when those places are online, our most prized possessions will be digital.
Travel and transportation
During the COVID-19 pandemic, as travel, office commuting, and economic activity ground to a halt, US energy consumption posted the largest one-year drop in history:
This of course came at the cost of widespread economic devastation that has taken trillions of dollars of borrowed money to stabilize, and is not a recipe for future well-being. However, the pandemic offers a model for a more environmentally sustainable workplace.
Early indicators of return-to-office policies show that permanent, at-home, full-time remote work is probably not going to be the principal way of working in 2022. This is not just due to intransigent management: for most roles, the tools are simply not good enough for effective remote collaboration. Staring at Zoom tiles and struggling to ask a question without interrupting are not hallmarks of a great meeting.
Meetings in VR will have more human presence, more analogues to physical space, and more collaborative tools like whiteboards and shared visualizations.7 VR will be a major part of unlocking the remote work problem, and massively reduce the amount of business travel and office commuting.
Real Estate
The real estate industry, broadly speaking, contributes roughly 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions and 40% of global energy use.8 Real estate’s carbon footprint includes the embodied carbon used to manufacture the building materials, the construction process itself, and the ongoing electricity and heating costs of the buildings. In the US, the median new home has more than doubled in size since 1950, causing significantly increased emissions9:
Why do Americans keep building bigger houses even as family sizes continue to shrink? Some of it could be purely functional: bedrooms for guests, storage for emergency food supplies, kitchens to prepare food. But some of it is also experiential: physical space is enjoyable, it feels liberating, it taps into primitive senses of comfort and safety. Virtual reality can create the sensations of large spaces, like the Architectural Digest-worthy virtual homes included the Oculus Quest 2:
If you can easily step into a house like this in virtual reality, might you be more satisfied with 100 fewer square feet when you take off the headset? 200 fewer square feet? Could we start shrinking our real estate needs as we spend more time in limitless virtual environments?
Virtual reality will create a more educated world
As a parent of young children and a lifelong learner, the impact of virtual reality on education is easily the most exciting to me.
Scaling Great Teachers
The scarcest resource in education is the fantastic teacher. Some people are lucky enough to have had a teacher like this; I am lucky to have had several. Everyone can recognize these teachers on their first day of class, and they are frequently the subject of Hollywood movies like Stand and Deliver or Dead Poets Society.
The impact of a teacher is measurable, and it is large. Teachers matter more to student achievement than any other aspect of a school.10 There are methodological ways to identify these teachers, but currently no good way to have the teach more than ~25 students at a time.
Like a more powerful and more compelling video lecture, VR lectures from the world’s best teachers can help communicate ideas in the most compelling ways, with real-world teachers running tutorial sessions after the lectures to work through the lessons with a smaller group.
1:1 Tutoring
High-dosage tutoring, defined as three times per week for 50 hours per semester, is the most effective known educational intervention for kids who are falling behind in school.11 Because of these results, tutoring is often proposed as one of the most reliable ways to close educational achievement gaps in American schools. However, 1:1 tutoring is too expensive to provide to every student for more than a few hours per year.
An AI-backed virtual tutor, delivered in virtual reality, could be a way of scaling up tutoring to a universal level. For basic math classes, there will only be about 100 types of wrong answer for any question. The tutor could recognize the error the student is making, explain the logical flaw, and then give the student a followup question to test that they had learned the correct methods.
This won’t be as effective as true 1:1 tutoring, and should be combined with it, but from a cost perspective would be one of the few ways to scale any type of hands-on tutoring to the entire student population.
Field Trips
Almost everything in school is told to students rather than shown to them. You can show a student a probability experiment with dice, or an egg drop experiment from the school’s roof, but the rest they read in books until it’s time for an annual field trip.
Real-world field trips are rare, expensive, complicated affairs requiring chaperones and transportation. Even then, they often fall flat since the context of the destination is no longer present (you will learn more about capitalism than about mass hysteria at the Salem Witch Museum). They’re more recreational than educational, and are considered a special treat for students.
VR will be able to deliver “field trips” every day, or every hour, as essential parts of the curriculum. Students learning about the circulatory system could put on their headset for five minutes to experience the aorta as a red blood cell would. Students learning about the Hundred Years’ War can visit a synthetic recreation of the Battle of Agincourt and see the effectiveness of the English longbow firsthand. Class will be a thing that you “do” rather than a place that you attend.
Simulated Experiences
Most children learn about history as something that’s done by other people, often the so-called Great Men. “Washington did this, then Adams did that, then Jefferson did this other thing.” This doesn’t teach the student that they, themselves, can and will be a creator of history, and that their actions will be studied by students in the future.
The case method of teaching, widely used in professional schools like law, business, and medicine, asks students to do exactly this: place yourself in this position. What would you do?
Virtual reality can bring this kind of instruction to K-12 students. A high school student could become Lyndon Johnson in 1964, with people immediately reacting to “her” imposing 6’4” avatar. She would first meet with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the White House and be tasked with ensuring legislative passage of the Civil Rights Act. She will have to invite Senator Everett Dirksen into the Oval Office and discuss the bill, whose avatar will be controlled either by an AI or by another student. The VR experience will make the stakes feel as enormous as they were, unlike exercises where students just “pretend” to be various historical characters. But the stress she feels will be a lot closer to the actual stress of the job, and teach her that she, herself, could someday be making decisions of equal consequence.
Virtual reality will create a more prosperous world
What is prosperity? It’s having the things that make us happy, and avoiding the things that make us unhappy. For a person who is starving, or a person with a toothache, their need is physical and must be addressed in the physical world. But after someone has met their physiological needs, prosperity can take any form. It can be a traditional physical good, like a luxury car or a large home. But empirically, people’s lasting happiness is driven more by their access to experiences, sharing those experiences with people they love and respect12, and social status among one’s peers.
Many of the economies built around prosperity, from Starbucks to Mercedes-Benz to the real estate market, are built around an assumption of scarcity. Some, or all, of the value of these products comes from the fact that nobody else can have them. This scarcity can be replicated with digital goods, and the prices of rare “skins” in the game Fortnite are evidence that a huge revenue stream can be built on this artificial scarcity.
A much more prosperity-building way to earn money in virtual worlds is to celebrate the abundance of virtual worlds and get as much value in the hands of as many people as possible. Do people enjoy a cup of coffee at the top of the Eiffel Tower (BYOC)? Instead of selling it for $20 to a ten thousand people, sell it for 50 cents and try to sell it a million times! What is the value to a grandparent of playing a game with their grandchild? Of a student without access to good educational resources at home to have a full curriculum available in VR? Of a burn patient using virtual reality to reduce their pain, as has been clinically demonstrated?13 These experiences are valuable to people, and people will pay for them. VR will support robust business models that create vast amounts of well-being and capture tens of billions of dollars in revenue.
Reality is just the beginning
Most of what I’ve described above involves taking real human experiences that exist in the world and making them instantly and inexpensively reproducible and transportable. “Walk the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland, but do it from your house in Vladivostok for 99 cents.” But real experiences are in fact an infinitesimal fraction of the total universe of experiences one could create in VR.
The best example I’ve seen of this is Birdly, which back in 2014 (!) created my favorite VR experience to date. You assume the avatar of a bird flying over San Francisco, and you’re strapped to a device that lets you tilt your wings and your body to soar any direction you want. As you dive and accelerate, a fan blows in your face, and as you ascend and decelerate, the wind dies away to a momentary calm.
That reminds me of another story I’ve heard, about a man who tried to become a bird, but flew too close to the sun…
The Risks
I’ve been pretty optimistic above, but the optimistic scenario won’t just happen by itself — people will need to make it happen. In ten years, we could have achieved several of the lofty goals above, or we could find ourselves in a VR dystopia like that portrayed in the Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits.” What will make the difference?
Meta’s peers must not let VR become a one-company offering.
Facebook/Meta has been betting more and betting earlier on virtual reality than any other tech giant, starting with their acquisition of Oculus in 2014. Their recent rebranding and strategic pivot shows that they are “all in” on VR. Zuckerberg has demonstrated that this market is his top priority and he has even re-orged Meta’s AI unit into the Reality Labs VR division.
Other tech giants are reportedly investing in virtual reality and augmented reality, but none with the focus and commitment of Meta. VR is simply too important of a market to be in the hands of one company, and while many companies will be able to build thriving businesses in hardware, controllers, software, and experiences, only Meta’s ~trillion-dollar peers will be able to bring enough market power to build an entire ecosystem.
VR needs to have its iOS and Android, and preferably, two competing business models. Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and NVIDIA: step to the plate.
Advertising in VR must be specifically regulated.
The psychological effects of virtual reality make it much more capable of influencing people’s behaviors than traditional media. In a behavioral experiment at Stanford, people who experienced eviction and homelessness in virtual reality were 40% more likely to sign an affordable housing petition than people who just saw a video or read an article.14 This influence can be weaponized, and if we wait to see whether it will be, it will be too late.
Left unregulated, a dandruff shampoo company might pay for VR avatars to start shedding dandruff in the metaverse, causing people to become more anxious about their own dandruff the next time they’re in the shampoo aisle at Target, essentially monetizing psychological harm. VR advertising regulations should err on the side of over-restrictive until the impact of VR advertising is better understood. In the interim, VR business models can mirror the business models of the experiences that they virtualize, like entry tickets or annual passes to a VR theme park.
Investors and research agencies should fund technologies that lower the barriers to VR content authoring.
The biggest obstacle to attaining VR’s loftiest goals is the incredible difficulty of authoring content for VR. One person can make a high quality YouTube video in their home, with less than $1000 of equipment. VR authoring is structurally more difficult because the content must be 3D and must respond to user inputs. But it’s also artificially more difficult because the content authoring tools are in their infancy, and require specialized skills. VR content creation is thus still mainly a corporate investment like app development that requires a business model to support it.
Just like smartphones have democratized photography, and allowed anyone to create a video that would pass for a Hollywood trailer in 1990, VR authoring tools will allow VR to become a medium of individual expression like a blog post or a photo.
Foundations and nonprofits should sponsor free, high quality VR content.
YouTube is today’s Library of Alexandria. Channels like 3Blue1Brown and Khan Academy teach math and other subjects in ways that paper textbooks could never rival. StoryCorps preserves the stories of older generations for the younger and future generations. Primitive Technology shows us how our ancestors tamed their environments with nothing, and how they made an axe or a roof tile for the first time.
The tiny budgets for these channels would be rounding errors on any income statement, yet they create immense and even priceless value for the world. The ROI on an invested dollar in VR experiences will be even higher. There are many people who won’t be able to afford to purchase experiences in VR: the social sector should fund these experiences for all, the same way they fund many nonprofit creators on YouTube.
Will we “tune out” of the real world and leave it to ruin?
In 1974, philosopher Robert Nozick proposed his famous “Experience Machine” thought experiment:
Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience that you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life's experiences?
Notably, Nozick offered only the option to plug into this machine for the rest of one’s life, and, in his writing, outright assumed that nobody would ever consent to such a thing. His assumption was wrong: empirically, researchers have found that ~30% of people would consent to plugging into the Experience Machine forever, experiencing an illusory but pleasant life.15
More recently, perhaps conditioned by nearly two years of a pandemic spent in isolation, people may be more willing than ever to sign their lives over to the Experience Machine:
Virtual reality is Nozick’s Experience Machine made real, but one that doesn’t ask us to plug in for life. VR will not feed the hungry, heal the sick, or liberate the persecuted. Those are challenges that must be met and defeated in the physical world.
What VR can do is expand our horizons, bring us to a greater understanding of ourselves and our minds, and if done right… make us better citizens of both our physical and virtual worlds.
If you liked this post, read…
Dawn of the New Everything by Jaron Lanier, the philosopher-king of virtual reality who founded the first VR company and coined the term itself
Experience on Demand by Jeremy Bailenson, the leading researcher on the behavioral effects of virtual reality
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, the novel that coined the term “metaverse”
Email me: amal@dorai.org
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/07/boeing-ceo-80-percent-of-people-never-flown-for-us-that-means-growth.html
https://ift.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1750-3841.14275
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5394dfa6e4b0d7fc44700a04/t/547d589ee4b04b0980670fee/1417500830665/Gilovich+Kumar+Jampol+%28in+press%29+A+Wonderful+Life+JCP.pdf
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lakenbrooks/2021/10/13/disabled-gamers-are-using-video-games-for-self-care
Companies like WalkinVR (https://www.walkinvrdriver.com/) will help disabled people experience VR through other input modalities besides rotating their head and moving their bodies.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14506087/
There are a LOT more problems than these to solve in remote meetings. I’ll discuss these in a separate post, or set of posts, focused entirely on remote meetings and the technical barriers to improving them.
https://builtin.com/product/jobs-to-be-done-framework
https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/03/1035161
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR4300/RR4312/RAND_RR4312.pdf
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w22130/w22130.pdf
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5394dfa6e4b0d7fc44700a04/t/55bd5dc4e4b067fc8a7d3b6f/1438473668653/Kumar+Gilovich+%28in+press%29+Some+Thing+to+Talk+About+PSPB.pdf
https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/new-study-shows-value-of-virtual-reality-for-pain-management/
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0204494
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09515089.2017.1406600