I believe that many people have heard the term metaverse. The concept of metaverse is a brand new virtual digital world.
Anything we can imagine can exist in the metaverse. In the metaverse, everyone can be the creator of the concept design of the metaverse. For designers, the conceptual design of the metaverse is a brand new direction and opportunity. Therefore, many designers have begun to dabble in the relevant aspects of metaverse concept design. This article will take you to learn more about what the metaverse concept is, and how designers should deal with metaverse concept design.
Metaverse, literally defined Metaverse (Metaverse) is Meta (beyond) + Verse (universe), is a virtual universe beyond reality. According to the current industry definition and expectations, the concept of metaverse is the next generation of Internet, which can subvert the current way of using the Internet in the same way that the mobile Internet changed the PC Internet.
The concept of metaverse can also be understood as the virtual world in human consciousness. It does not refer to a specific application or product, it is more like a concept, a virtual digital universe carried by digital form, and we must know that meta The universe is not just a game, but the game is the carrier of the best form of metaverse at present. At the same time, NFT (Non-Fungible Token) is also a very popular presentation method in the metaverse, and it is an important infrastructure of the metaverse. If you want to generate NFT avatar online for free, please refer to "NFT Avatar Free Generator, Let You Have Fun with Avatar Design!" ".
If the transition from human-computer design to UX meant the separation of computers from the "real world" to computers becoming an inherent part of our world, then metaverse design describes the next stage in this evolutionary journey: computers becoming the gateway to new worlds. entrance.
Metaverse design will not only change the way we entertain, but also integrate into our daily life. The challenge of connecting metaverse design to the physical world lies in human sensory experience. Our sense of sight, hearing and touch all need corresponding feedback in metaverse design. Designers need to begin to regard users as players rather than simple users. We need to understand the players who occupy this virtual world and reposition our own design, which will force designers to reimagine good design.
In a virtual world, the designer is not concerned with how quickly the player can complete the goal, but rather with the degree to which the player is immersed in the pursuit of the goal in the first place, and this can be found in many modern video games.
Today, many good product designs are intuitive, easy to use, and beautiful. In the Metaverse, however, there is much more to consider. All forms of user experience design in the Metaverse will involve design for immersion, which needs to allow players to experience immersive effects, allowing players to become one with the character, live and interact in the virtual world, rather than simply Observe and passively accept it. The main force of players in the metaverse is young. Only by combining youthful design and immersive space construction can more players be attracted to experience.
Designing for a virtual world means designing for a brand-new, immersive world. What the metaverse wants to build is the entire world and social relationships, not a certain product or a certain system. Therefore, designers must broaden their skills and dabble in more new disciplines, not just limited to what they see in front of them. For example, they need to learn disciplines from economics to urban planning to anthropology, as well as improve their own knowledge of building 3D scenes. skills to achieve better visual effects.
Since unethical design can manifest itself in the virtual world in tangible ways, designers should scrutinize their designs more carefully. While "digital rights" may seem like an abstract concept today, the immersive human perspective of virtual worlds will make these rights more concrete as metaverse concept designs emerge.
Likewise, designers may see more players expressing their inner grievances, such as organizing groups of avatars in virtual spaces to march, protest, or even engage in acts of digital vandalism to demand change.
While this will present an ongoing challenge for Metaverse concept designers, it also represents a huge opportunity for early pioneers. The internet today mirrors many of the injustices of the real world because it is an extension of the real world. The rich and well-connected have too much influence, the voices of the few are marginalized, and people are reduced to consumers. And the Metaverse concept design represents an opportunity to assemble a new world inspired by our best ideas about how to create a fairer, more just, and richer society.
However, for this to happen, designers need to incorporate the lessons they have learned from the digital age and leverage the tools they have developed in their past experience, such as research, collaboration, empathy, and user advocacy. Most importantly, they need to proactively resist decisions that hurt players and publicly veto those decisions before they go into effect to guarantee minimal harm to players.
From the above description, it can be seen that the conceptual design of the Metaverse is a very complicated process, involving a wide range of skills and disciplines. It needs to focus on the user experience of Metaverse players, and also requires the support and collaboration of the team. If you want to start dabbling in the conceptual design of the metaverse, choosing a useful tool for related work can save you a lot of worry. Pixso, a new generation design collaborative work, is recommended here. Pixso is a professional design tool used by domestic UI/UX designers and product managers. It has a large number of built-in design system resources, which can help to quickly start the design work.
Easily draw prototypes: Start agile and efficient work with the help of free metaverse concept design templates from the Pixso resource community. Work with the product manager to disassemble user needs and integrate them into the overall design of the product.
Integrated solution to UI/UX collaboration: The powerful Pixso will provide you with integrated UI/UX design, the ability to integrate interaction + vision, and unlock a new level of online design collaboration.
Save a lot of repetitive work time: The component-based design concept allows high-fidelity prototype design to delivery experience from beginning to end, saving a lot of other repetitive and tedious work time.
Meet the high-fidelity interaction needs of UX designers: support interactive event demonstration, rich transition animations, instant, dissolve, intelligent animation, push, slide in, slide out and other gradual in and out motion effects, easily build excellent user experience interaction , to experience the final product form.
Demand research collaboration: UX designers want to know the experience and suggestions of each role, so team members can comment online in the design draft to efficiently complete brainstorming and feedback collection.
In the future, there will be more designer positions dedicated to the conceptual design of the metaverse, and it is always right to learn from now on. To become a metaverse concept designer, in addition to professional skills and knowledge, you also need to have the courage and vision to design a better world for players than the world they want! Quickly click the top of the page to use Pixso directly for free!
Ten years ago, Michael Beneville opened his studio in the Flatiron neighborhood of New York City. The renovated two-story office features 20-foot ceilings, custom furniture and a wall of arched windows overlooking 19th Street. It’s been months since Beneville and his team have worked closely together in the studio, a small creative studio known for its work on immersive experiences like Area15, a large entertainment complex in Las Vegas. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, studio employees are scattered across the country, but they regularly gather in the studio’s online virtual meeting room, around a virtual digital table, with their avatars holding virtual digital coffee cups.
The virtual studio looks a lot like its physical counterpart. Presented in a flat style, it contains all the defining architectural elements - windows, hardwood floors and a modern staircase. Beneville: "It basically presents a one-to-one correspondence with the real scene." He completed the ventilation arrangement through online conference guidance. Still, the space lacks the ambiance of many real textures and unique details of a brick-and-mortar office. No random post-its on the computer screen, no coffee ring stains on surfaces, no scuffs on the floor, no coats on the chairs. But the good thing is that employees can access this virtual office from anywhere as long as there is an internet connection.
Beneville and his team built their digital version of the workspace on a platform called Vatom Spatial Web, a software developed by Beneville and his partner Eric Pulier to build 3D virtual worlds where people can Live in an avatar and navigate the scene as if it were real. With VatomSpatial Web, Beneville is creating his own little piece of the Metaverse, a form of habitable internet powered by blockchain technology and accessible through web browsers, VR and AR headsets.
Such virtual spaces are becoming more common and more complex as companies race to build platforms intended to draw people to corners of their respective metaverses. Metaverse is an all-encompassing term used to describe the groups of software that build worlds, each with its own rules, aesthetics, and uses. For platforms like Spatial.io, Microsoft Mesh, and Facebook’s HorizonWorlds, metaverses can seem like extensions of work or life, where human avatars can meet in glossy real-world environments or hallucinatory virtual ones. Meanwhile, big platforms like The Sims, Minecraft, Second Life, and Roblox have been building expansive, immersive virtual worlds for years, allowing players to build their own systems and continually explore these expansive environments.
In the future people will not experience a single metaverse, instead, they will browse multiple interoperable metaverses, all of which can be connected to each other in the platform interface of digital space, and all supported by blockchain and platform currency, provides impetus to the economy. "Nobody's building the metaverse," Beneville said. "Whatever happens to the metaverse is going to bring all of this together into something that can serve humanity."
But what does it mean to serve humanity at its best in this new digital realm? Who decides? This virtual world still needs to be designed and built for all its functionality. The question is, who is in charge? For centuries, architects, engineers, and developers have largely determined the shape of the built environment out of necessity, and the real world is complex enough to require safeguards in the form of regulations, zoning, certification, and best practices. That's a good reason why not just anyone can build skyscrapers.
The Metaverse, on the other hand, is often thought of as a holistic reimagining of the built environment. People often compare it to the Wild West, where anyone with a pioneering spirit and a bit of encryption technology can plant a flag for themselves and build their own virtual world in any form they like. Of course, the reality is not so equal. The Metaverse is increasingly subject to elements such as money, access, and knowledge that control real-world real estate. Speculative crypto investors and real estate firms are already buying tracts of “land” in the Metaverse, one of those virtual spaces that can fetch thousands of dollars.
In Decentraland, one of the largest metaverse platforms, the price of a plot (roughly 52 x 52 feet) has jumped to over $10,000 in the virtual zone with the highest traffic to gamers. The main reason for this price surge was driven by Meta's rebranding around Facebook and investments in Metaverse technology by other companies and brands such as Microsoft, Google, and Nike. This is also due to the limited basic land economics and platform virtual area. Decentraland states that it will only offer 90,000 lots, effectively recreating a virtual model of the scarcity dynamics seen in cities like New York and San Francisco.
Janine Yorio likens the current metaverse gold rush to the early days of Web 1.0, when early companies were successful in developing new technologies. Yorio is the co-founder of Republic Realm, a metaverse development company investing in metaverse real estate and NFTs (non-fungible tokens). Her team has invested in more than 2,500 real estate projects on 19 metaverse platforms, including six large-scale real estate projects on platforms such as Decentraland, The Sandbox, and Axie Infinity. "We're actually an owner of the Metaverse," she explained.
Like real-world developers, RepublicRealm has partnered with architects and designers on projects, including Metajuku, a 16,000-square-foot mall in Decentraland based on designs in Tokyo’s Harajuku district. Republic Realm hired Austin, Texas-based designer Martin Guerra to design the striking space, where avatars can roam around and spend virtual goods from their encrypted wallets. However, the company's most ambitious and lucrative development is called "Fantasy Islands," a planned community of luxury private island villas sold as 3D NFTs on Metaverse platform The Sandbox. Owners use the virtual villa in a similar way to how they use it in real life — as a quiet retreat, a gathering place for virtual friends, or a delicatessen for storing any NFTs or items purchased in the virtual world. storehouse.
Republic Realm's in-house 3D designer and developer Vlad Yakovlev designed the villas, which each sit on a 325 x 325-foot plot. From eco-lodges in Costa Rica to Mediterranean-inspired island homes, these virtual homes have their own unique style. The current most valuable virtual home in the Fantasy Islands portfolio is a futuristic building in Iceland. So far, Republic Realm has sold six villas (only 100 were built in total) for the equivalent of $15,000. Today, they trade for around $300,000.
These villas are interesting case studies in the metaverse aesthetic. Similar to many metaverse buildings, they have a soft pixelated blur, as if viewed through foggy glasses. Wandering around metaverse buildings can feel like wandering through a project that has just been completed—structurally sound, but lacking in texture. Unlike video games, which are rendered in photorealistic high-fidelity, Metaverse buildings are often designed at lower resolutions, so that the spatial environment can be accessed and loaded by anyone with any web browser.
Consequently, metaverse platforms like Decentraland and Cryptovoxels govern their worlds through a set of rules that, to varying degrees, dictate what parcel owners can build on their land. For example, in Cryptovoxels, users pay extra to build colors. In Decentraland, a parcel must obey a series of design constraints in order to allow the platform's various artworks to render quickly regardless of browser speed constraints. These rules effectively define a range of zoning rules that can determine everything from mandated building heights to spacing between adjacent buildings.
While the Metaverse often sporadically mimics the canonical systems established by the real world, the buildings themselves often deviate from possible workable real-world designs. In the Metaverse, gravity doesn't exist, and neither do material limitations. "Things like structure, material and cost just don't exist," says Leon Rost, principal of Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), who has worked on virtual projects for clients whose lack of stylistic constraints appeals to them. Architects interested in pushing the boundaries of space and form. BIG has teamed up with UNStudio to develop a virtual meeting platform called SpaceForm, where people can collaborate in real time in a futuristic room featuring holographic tables displaying 3D renderings and data visualizations. Meanwhile, Beneville has built suspended performance stages for clients like iHeartRadio that float like satellites in outer space. Jose Sanchez, a professor of architecture at the University of Michigan's Taubman School, who has designed highly immersive multiplayer video games through his studio PlethoraProject, is designing a video game in which players build their own green plant structures. “You have to have an unusual design perspective and thinking, because the same rules don’t apply as much in the virtual world as they do in the real world,” Rost said.
In a recent project, Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg of Spain- and London-based SpacePopular architecture studio created a virtual gallery for Spanish organization Fundación Arquia, modeled on a Barcelona layout. Digital avatars can wander through a seemingly endless labyrinth of sunrise-hued rooms whose features look as though they've been lifted from an M.C. Escher painting, designed with a hazy softness. Lesmes explained that this helps shorten load times and eases the eye from the screen to a new environment. "Lighting is very important to make a virtual space feel better," she said.
Since 2013, Lesmes and Hellberg have been creating virtual spaces for clients including the MAXXI museum in Rome and the RIBA in London. Their belief that an immersive online platform is first and foremost a gathering place determines how they think about designing digital spaces. They found that those who found themselves in a virtual gallery still relied on cues from the real world to navigate. “In order for people to do something in a virtual environment, you need to be able to see it and understand what you can do there,” Hellberg said. guidelines."
Designing for the Metaverse is second nature to many architects who already spend a lot of time modeling spaces in virtual form. Jinha Lee, co-founder of Spatial (spatial.io), says his team works with a small number of architects who have transitioned from physical construction to full-time 3D construction. “They call themselves the architects of the Metaverse,” he says. Lee, a designer himself, made sure that all of Spatial’s environments are well thought out with design details like ambient lighting and open shelving for displaying virtual art , while still maintaining a surreal conception, such as a waterfall pouring from the ceiling of the lobby to the ground. "We wanted our space to be grounded in reality, but with an eye toward the future," he said.
It's those structurally deviating details that lead Republic Realm's Yorio to assert that creating compelling virtual environments doesn't require traditional architectural skills. She said: "You
It doesn't take Zaha Hadid to build something really cool in the metaverse. ’” (Ironically, Zaha Hadid’s firm has just designed NFTism, a virtual art exhibit at Art Basel Miami that explores the interaction of architecture and society in the metaverse.) In What is considered boundary-pushing in the real world may be harmoniously integrated in the metaverse. The buildings there rely on prominent visual experiences to attract visitors, and these spaces are often designed and coded by users or developers with no formal design experience .
This may be an existential threat to some architects, but Sanchez of the Plethora Project sees the field as an opportunity to question who can and should be involved in the design process. “Crowds are more capable of exploring the possible design space with greater velocity and less bias than a single designer,” he says. Those platforms that can grow and gain a foothold are likely to lead to the most interesting and broadest innovations. design concept.
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