This is perhaps not a message you want to hear, after having spent the last year-and-a-half staring into Zoom/Teams/Meets screens, but the future of meetings is digital. But I’m not talking about the painfully flat, anxiety-inducing experience that is the video call. I’m talking about the immersive, emotional event that takes place in the metaverse.
What is the metaverse, you say?
That is a question I’ve been wrapping my head around during the better part of 2021. First of all, it seems like a name for something that does not really exist yet. The Lexico definition of the metaverse is a ”virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users.”
So, pretty much like gaming, without necessarily the gaming part. And that just might be the entire selling point of the metaverse. The metaverse is a gaming-like space for people who are not into gaming. When that concept sunk in with me, I started asking a much more important question:
What is the metaverse for?
Thinking further about it, the question then became:
What isn’t it for?
It has become increasingly easy for me to imagine a future where we will see any type of experiential event play out in the metaverse. There will be specific forms of metaverses for conferences, sports championships, music concerts, art installations, and fashion and design weeks. The Coachella metaverse? The Burning Man metaverse? Surely someone, somewhere, is already developing them, officially or unofficially.
When we look back at the Covid-19 pandemic, I think we are going to view it as the first flat steps towards a natural interaction with the metaverse. The conference call boom was the normalisation of digital meetings. The metaverse, and its immersive applications through augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR), will be the next phase for interaction.
In this second issue of Scandinavian MIND, we take a closer look at how art, design, and fashion are moving towards the metaverse. We feature Jacob Felländer, whose new exhibition The Great Escape partly takes place in a 3D-universe based on his photographic art. We list the new direct-to-avatar fashion brands that are designing specifically for the metaverse. And we speak to Emma Ridderstad, Founder of the VR-company Warpin Media, about how ”everything you can do online, you can do in VR and in AR.”
We also take a look at how technology is changing the way we view design and mobility. In our second cover story, the Swedish designer Isabelle Olsson, Design Director for Home, Wearables and CMF across all Google Hardware, talks about how the future is a better version of today. I think that’s a promising perspective to have.
When this magazine hits the shelves, we will celebrate the first year of Scandinavian MIND. We started this platform with the notion that everything in our lives is going to happen in the intersection of lifestyle and technology. One year later, that message is stronger than ever.
Welcome to the great tech infusion.
