Starting today, our company is now Meta. Well we have been talking a lot about the metaverse and,
that could possibly be in a metaverse, speaking through the metaverse, a metaverse, there
is the metaverse, metaverse, the metaverse, the metaverse.
This word that is everywhere, I feel like every time I go on the internet,
I hear Metaverse this or virtual reality that. Its gonna happen. Fears about the metaverse. Mark
what you got? Mark why? Mark? It’s the new internet, it’s supposed to be the game changer.
Anything you do in real life can be done in this new Metaverse.
Welcome to the future of the internet. The more I went down this rabbit hole,
the more I realized that architects are going to be on the forefront of this metaverse.
So I would say join the metaverse. Lets create the metaverse. This is Partik Schumaker. He is the
principal Architect at Zaha Hadid Architects, one of the biggest architecture firms in the world,
and the message is clear, Metaverse is going to be the next big playground for architects.
But there is a slight catch, who we consider as architects
is probably going to change as this new world comes to life.
And I will be honest when I first heard about this I was shocked. What kind of game is that?
The concept of Metaverse is not something new. But It has recently come into the limelight
because of this guy. Thank you for having me
here today, & I am ready to take your questions. Facebook, which is now called Meta is gearing
towards a metaverse and it has created a lot of buzz. People are hailing it as the internet 2.0.
But the fact is the concept of a Metaverse was conceived long back. In fact,
Facebook started working on this project in 2014. It bought the company Oculus,
a company that manufactures virtual reality glasses, for $2 million. The company knew
that this is going to be the next frontier. But the concept of metaverse was developed back in
1992 by an American author called Neal Stephenson. In 1992 he published this book called Snow Crash.
It is a book that follows the Journey of this Pizza delivery driver
who works for the mafia and is also a hacker and he gets immersed in a computer generated universe.
It sounds a little silly when I say it like that but so will the story of a young orphan girl
who enjoys her brother’s death, rises to power, sleeps with her nephew burns a city to the ground
and gets killed by her lover, but that is exactly what game of thrones is.
Well hello Khal drogo, would you like to see my dragons?
Anyway this book was where the word metaverse was used for the first time. And we don’t only come
across the concept of a metaverse, but also the concept of avatars and cryptocurrency.
Stephenson was even hired by a company called Magic Leap in 2014,
to help build the Metaverse. But what everybody who has ever read this novel keeps forgetting,
is that this is actually a Dystopian novel and not a Utopian one. And frankly its not
just this novel. From Snow Crash to the Matrix to Ready Player One, each time we have depicted the
concept of a metaverse, it has been because the world people live in currently was not good enough
or was in complete turmoil. Is that where we are headed by ignoring the world we currently have
and building an artificial one? The answer actually lies in how we create this world,
and what are the intentions of the people who are trying to build it. We actually did
something similar with the internet as well Today we are going to be showing our friends
Andrew and Lisa the basic of the internet. And we thought you might want to come along.
The internet as we know was developed back in 1983. For most of its early years it
gained popularity quite slowly. But all of that changed with the advent of personal computers
and most importantly smart phones. The internet exploded into something amazing and terrifying.
The internet itself is not bad, it’s a brilliant piece of technology but it’s about how we use it.
The internet has given rise to social media and it has opened new frontiers of work and education,
at the same time social media has been geared in a way that has the potential to make us
more anxious and depressed. What Internet has done has is that it has connected us,
but what we do with that connection is on us. The metaverse will have a similar effect.
There is a lot to discuss on this topic and maybe we will go into it some other time.
But for now lets come back to how a new world with the metaverse will look like.
Keeping these extra saturated visuals of Facebook aside, we have already started to
explore the concept of virtual reality and pairing it with our world. In 2003,
a game was launched called Second Life, which was also inspired by the world of Snow Crash.
In this virtual world that promises users a second life, users can create an avatar of their own and
meet new people, shop and participate in social activities. From then on we have just created more
and more immersive games. In 2020, rap star Travis Scott performed five virtual concerts in Fortnite,
which Epic Games claims was attended by 27.7 million players. So what actually started as a
game now became a virtual concert venue which was attended by millions of people around the world.
This is exactly the kind of connectivity that the metaverse can provide for us.
Now Lets now come to the main topic of the video the people who will build the metaverse
and everything that will come to life once you wear those VR headsets. The Architects.
In this new world the possibilities are endless. Maybe you create the world like Ariadne did
in the movie inception or you create a mirror dimension like in Doctor Strange. The rules of
reality including gravity will not be at play in the metaverse and so what constitutes a building
or urban design will probably change. And with that, who we call as architects will also change.
As architects we create projects to last 50 years or maybe more. We play with light and shadow,
use gravity to work for us instead of against, we have crafted beautiful places that go in
tandem with the natural world around us. This inherent craft of understanding the context,
utilizing the resources, this craft of execution that takes years to master, all of this will not
hold much value in the metaverse. The architects of the metaverse will work purely on form on
geometry on the visuals of a project. Things like building codes, furniture, leaky ceilings,
the architects of the metaverse will need to worry about these things. Also If you think about it,
the really famous architects of the world are actually quite old because it takes quite a while
for you to make a name for yourself in this Industry where projects take years to build.
But in the Metaverse, the most well known and creative of architects might be an 18
year old school student who has never had a day of conventional architecture education.
But I don’t think teenagers are going to takeover just yet. As architects building
for the metaverse will not require new skills, just a shift in perspective.
3D modelling on computers and creating Virtual buildings is something that we have been doing
for a long time now. A lot of discussions we have had on this channel have been around these
virtual worlds, whether it was the fluid concert hall by Mariana, or the airscraper by Klaudia
and Marek or even the digital world create by Matheus. But the key difference is that till now
we made these 3D models to serve as a guide to what we will be doing in the real world.
It was a part of the process and not the endgame. Another difference also will be how we design our
buildings. Maybe we will still need knowledge of basic anthrpopometry and create human centric
designs so the world in the metaverse seems similar to our real world. But maybe there will
also be cities inside of this metaverse that will look nothing like our real world, where gravity
would not exist. A world Where buildings will just be explored as pure art. The primary goal of
architecture revolves around giving us shelter and being a facilitator of our day to day activities.
Well a lot of those activities are going to change in the metaverse. As functions of
buildings might change, so will the buildings and consequently so will the architects.
A possibility is that over the years we will see a distinction between the title of an architect
and a virtual architect. And this might also shift the architecture education
as we see it today. In Metaverse, architects not only need to draw architectural drawings,
but also need to integrate professional knowledge in multiple fields. The work of architects
will now include user interface, content design, character design, even game design.
And this will open up the world of architecture to so many more people.
A wider range of game designers and programmers may become members of architectural design
teams. More people will participate in the process of this new age architectural design.
Therefore, in this virtual age architectural education will need to move beyond just history of
architecture and knowing construction techniques and materials. This new age of architects will
require a combination of digital media and 3D technology. So Who is an architect, what
education do they require all of these parameters are gonna change in the world that is to come.
But that being said I don’t think this new world is gonna come all at once
and architects as we know them today are not going anywhere for quite some time. I believe
this whole decade will function as a transition phase for the metaverse. As more and more people
will turn towards VR and AR, we will start seeing offices and museums and movie theatres and many
more buildings start coming up. We will start to see a digital twin of the world we already know.
This might also be a new frontier in the field of architectural conservation.
Conservation itself is a very debated topic. The metaverse might completely take over and
we might preserve buildings inside this digital reality. There have been so many buildings lost to
natural or manmade calamities, so many beautiful structures all over the world destroyed by war.
With the metaverse we can building simulated versions of these buildings and open them to
the public. Another direction we can take is to use the metaverse to recreate world where
the structures were used and were at their peak. Now you might think I am letting my Imagination
run wild. But the world around us is already changing, and all of this has been accelerated
with the popularity of NFTs. So till now we had heard about artwork being sold via NFTs
but in reality it has actually gone much beyond that. Platforms like Somnium Space
and Decentraland have already started selling virtual parcels of land that people can own and
build upon. According to DappRadar, There were more than $100M in virtual land sales in just
a week. And these virtual parcels of land are also inviting architects to building upon them.
The future of the profession of architecture is filled with more possibilities than it
ever was before. It is also going to face so many new and unseen challenges. One
of the biggest one might just be an identity crisis. But I think that is not something new.
The architects of the 21st century are not the master builders that architects once were. Today
the field of architecture design and construction has sprouted so many newer fields. There are
profssionals who take care of the services, the plumbing, the budget, the construction. So already
there is a great debate as to what it means to be an architect and what scope of work is exclusively
ours. But complicated as it is today, I think it will be nothing compared to whats coming
to us. As I said at the start of my video. The stars of this metaverse will be its architects,
but who is an architect, or will be in the future. Who knows. The journey from now on
will be nothing short of interesting, so lets strap on our seatbelts, and lets see what comes
Heyo guys I hope you liked that video. Now there was actually a lot more that I wanted
to pack within this video from the exploitation and inequality that the metaverse can bring,
to even the different kind of metaverses being made. There were even discussions about whether
such a virtual world, building it will it be a good or is it just a replacement for a sad
reality. There was also so much more discussion about who exactly has entered the field of being a
virtual architect and what allsoftwares are being used to create this metaverse. So basically there
were many nuances and discussions that I had to take out from the final edit of this video.
But worry not I am including all of that discussions, all that I had discussed all of
that commentary in a video that is exclusively available to the members of this channel.
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