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The Social Metaverse

• Purpose: Meeting other people in digital environments for socializing, education, and enjoying shared activities
• Problems Solved: Transcends the limits of physical location, allows you to display the identity and join the community of your choice, and wear great clothes
• Key Access Method: Consumer VR headsets, PCs, smartphones
• Contribution to the Wider Metaverse: Meaningful connection to others, proving the need for "rules of engagement" to discourage bad behavior, the ability to create new worlds as well as preserving those that might be lost

There are two main categories of digital experience that are most closely associated with the broad term "Metaverse" today: virtual reality (VR) social Metaverse spaces such as VRChat and Horizon Worlds, and PC-based Web3 Metaverse spaces like Decentraland and The Sandbox. (I'm going to discuss these separately, because, as we shall see, they are indeed very separate from each other.) But they're not the only Metaverse categories in town. There are the gaming Metaverses1 growing in worlds like Fortnite and Roblox, and purpose-built Metaverses like the ones created by apps in the areas of wellness, service provision, and social good. Then we have the whole separate category of Metaverses created for corporate use. These bear a relation to the general Metaverse not unlike the relationship between corporate Intranets and the global Internet - separate, but vital for the provision of key services to the companies that run them. Finally, there is the Metaverse-adjacent category of augmented reality (AR), which is separate from the Metaverse now, but will become increasingly important to it in the future.

Let's spend some time getting to know what each of these Metaverse and Metaverse-adjacent categories consist of today, including what problem each solves, what hardware each runs on, and what activities, values, and expectations each is likely to contribute to a more unified Metaverse of the future. Once we've done that, we'll have the foundation to look at how this world is likely to evolve, and what the most significant engines for that evolution will be.

Entering a New World

The social Metaverse is often the first fully immersive Metaverse that people experience when they put on a VR headset. Both VRChat and Horizon Worlds, already mentioned, are big titles here, as are Engage and Rec Room. These are all full-blown Metaverses, featuring two-way communication with other people in real time in an immersive, interactive environment. You can access all of them in either a VR headset or on the two-dimensional screens of a PC or smartphone. Rec Room gets the award for supporting the most access platforms by being available via Android, iOS, Windows, Xbox, and PlayStation, as well as in most VR headsets.

In all of these digital locations, when you first enter, you're prompted to create or import an avatar that will be your digital embodiment while you are in the space. Personal preferences vary at this point - you can either choose to have a different avatar in each different world, perhaps looking professional in Engage while looking scruffy and streetwise in Rec Room, or you can go with a service like Ready Player Me that gives you the option to reuse a favorite avatar across a growing number of popular platforms. Because the most common VR headsets only know where your head is, and the VR hand controllers only know where your hands are, many avatars of the current generation don't have legs. This changes when you move into higher-end VR hardware, as we'll see later, but for now, be prepared to be a floating torso with a head and hands in many VR social Metaverses.

Once you've selected what the upper half of your body will look like, you will then be given a choice of which individual room within the digital world you would like to join. The mechanisms for each platform vary slightly, but in general, you'll see a list of public events that anyone can attend, as well as a list of private events to which you must have an invitation to attend. Selecting an event teleports you to the room or space where it's happening. Once you're in the room, you can join whatever the event is. If it's a presentation, you can sit or stand in the audience and ask the presenter questions. In many platforms, you can raise your hand to be recognized, just like in the physical world, and can stream emojis over your head to indicate your response to what someone else is saying, in lieu of facial expressions or body language, then can mingle and meet people afterward, just like in the physical world. Destinations like Engage, Virbela, and Spatial tend to be a bit more business-focused than some of the other locations, and gathering is, in many cases, done purposefully in certain rooms among certain groups, to discuss certain topics.

VRChat, Rec Room, and Meta's Horizon Worlds are more about wandering and discovery. Instead of starting off in a private place, where you have alone time to read through a menu that is mostly text, you're dropped into a central spawning point, with lots of other people, and it's up to you to wander around and discover portals to other worlds that other people have created, which use more visuals to advertise themselves than text. These worlds can be very elaborate - I've gone bowling with friends in VRChat, and had archery competitions with strangers in Horizon Worlds, for example. The emphasis in these worlds is more the serendipitous discovery of new places, and new people, as well as having fun.

What Problems Does the Social Metaverse Solve?

While these activities sound very simple, they are actually solving several problems at once.

Physical Location

One of the most obvious problems is the problem of physical location. If I want to spend some time with a friend who is located somewhere else in the world, whether it's Kansas City or Canterbury, meeting in a VR social Metaverse space really does give me the feeling of spending time with them, far more than a phone call or even a Zoom call does. There's something that happens when your avatars are both moving in the same digital space, maybe trying to figure out how to pick up that bowling ball, or putting on costumes together and dancing at virtual Burning Man, that gives that sense of presence, of an actual visit, that you don't get from a 2D screen.

There are several other immersive worlds worth mentioning that focus specifically on bringing people together, including Bigscreen and Meta's Horizon Home. Notable for its focus on families and children is Half + Half, while AlcoveVR creates a cozy space for family to visit, share memories, and play games with elderly family members who live too far away to visit often in person. vTimeXR adds an extra dimension of providing exotic 3D environments for your gatherings, so if you'd like to get together with your distant pals in a Japanese garden or a beach on Bali, vTimeXR can be your group's VR travel agent, while gathering around a 3D map of a physical location in Wooorld can help you share memories of a past trip, or plan a new one together.

Identity

Another problem that the social Metaverse solves is the problem of identity. In VR worlds, you can choose any avatar to represent yourself that you damn well please, and it certainly doesn't have to look like the physical you at all. This can be extremely liberating if there is anything about you that others may judge you for, consciously or unconsciously: gender, disability, height, weight, age, skin color, shoe size, place of birth, you name it. As one 18-year-old woman in South Korea put it in a recent interview about the Metaverse, "There are parts of this avatar that are reflecting the real me and some that are not. . In real life, I gain weight easily, but in the Metaverse, you can choose your body."2

If you've ever wanted to explore how people treat you when you're something that you're not in the physical world, now's your chance.3 Even if you're just experimenting with unusual haircuts or different clothing styles than you would sport in the physical world, the Metaverse offers the opportunity to display yourself to others as you would truly like to be seen, instead of being limited by the body that you were by chance born into. When surveyed, 52% of GenZ (born roughly 1995-2010) says that they feel "more like themselves" in the Metaverse, and this freedom of identity, or even from identity, plays a large part in that sensation.4 This was recently expressed by an 18-year-old woman in the United States in this way: "I feel I'm more able to express myself when I'm online. I like the combat look because it shows people that I'm a fighter, I'm strong. It gives me a sense of equality."5

The freedom that many people feel when represented by an avatar, rather than their identifiable physical selves, does have a downside in that sometimes people feel that this gives them carte blanche for bad behavior. (This is why personal boundaries in the various...