How metaverse can transform mega to meta cities

The pandemic is opening opportunities and avenues for us to rethink our cities in the metaverse.

In brief

• Humans are making better use of physical space by blending it with virtual.
• Companies are using virtual lands to create new marketing channels through immersive experiences.
• The possibilities of a hybrid physical-virtual world go a long way.

In her 2020 essay, “The pandemic is a portal”, the celebrated Indian author Arundhati Roy vividly describes how the COVID-19 pandemic was a setback for India. Yet she also has a message of renewal: the pandemic, she says, is “a chance to rebuild this doomsday machine we have built for ourselves.”

Pandemics, she adds, have historically “forced humans to break with the past and imagine their worlds anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”

Almost without us noticing, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we go about our lives. It made us shift into a virtual world where we worked, socialized and shopped. But as many parts of the planet now adapt to co-exist with the virus, this merger of the physical and virtual worlds remains, and may offer us a chance to tackle the age’s concerns of social inequality and environmental degradation.

While the metaverse is often thought a futuristic, dystopian phenomenon, in some senses virtual world is already making a difference. While we do not spend hours immersed in 3D computer-simulated worlds, we are increasingly making better use of physical space by blending it with virtual. People are already living more from their homes and neighborhoods, freeing unused physical real estate for better use, making fewer demands on transport infrastructure and freeing cities to become better places.

There’s a burning need. The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened inequality and the richest 10% of the population now reportedly own 76% of the wealth, according to the World Inequality Report 2022. In a related concept, urban infrastructure inequality is restricting the opportunities of people living in poor communities by, for instance limiting access to drinking water or transport.

Between hype and reality

Often life imitates art and nowhere is this truer than Hollywood. The 1980s film, “Back to the Future”, features devices such as drones, flat screen televisions, smart glasses and many other things besides, decades before they became part of daily life. In more recent times, the 2018 Steven Spielberg movie “Ready Player One” depicts a dystopian world where people escape a grim existence by visiting the OASIS virtual simulation. As avatars, they compete, fight and fall in love. Maybe it, too, will prove to have elements of truth in years to come?

As the metaverse begins to take shape, virtual worlds such as Decentraland, The Sandbox, Somnium Space and Cryptovoxels also equip users with avatars. Many companies are using the virtual land to create new marketing channels through immersive experiences, digital goods like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and sponsored content. Indeed, more than 200 major consumer brands have reportedly bought virtual land in the metaverse, including Atari and Wari Music Group.

Even at a time when interest rates are rising and asset prices falling in the real world, the land grab in the metaverse has kept prices there high. A plot of land reportedly sold for US$450,000 in December 2021.