Spooked in the Metaverse

The kids have gone to bed, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring - except for the grown man downstairs having a rave with make-believe friends.

I've recently spent a few nights exploring the online virtual spaces that make up the metaverse, slowly researching and working out what can and can't be done with it, and where it might go in the future, and ultimately how I can use it as part of my art practice one day.

First I took my first steps into the metaverse into the virtual chat rooms of IMVU, which was strange, then I went on an adventure to the open source world of Decentraland which blew my mind, and tonight I've entered the wacky land of augmented reality.

I've got a new phone and since I have enough memory now to hold more than three apps at a time, I've been on a mad frenzy downloading all sorts of creative and productivity apps to waste time on..

And, I've been wanting to explore the Adobe suite on mobile for a while, and today I got my chance and came across Adobe Aero, which is an Augmented reality app. I'm not going to go into much detail, it's a free app, worth having a play with..

But the basic idea is that you point your phone at a flat surface and find and 'anchor point', from there you can choose a digital asset, which is a fancy term for a 3D computer made object. The app has loads of pre made things to play around with and also has the option to insert your own, I don't have any of my own so today I've just been experimenting with the free pre-made assets. Once you've anchored down and found an asset you like, you can place it in into your room, digitally.

It's great, and it give the ability to move it off the ground, floating in the air..

What's been really interesting to me throughout these adventures into the metaverse is seeing what's possible that just isn't possible 'in real life', and I got pretty excited when this popped up, now just think about the practicalities and cost of making an object like this golden knot floating in the air. It's pretty big, to cast that in resin wouldn't be the cheapest of things, and it would be pretty heavy, you could hang it from the ceiling with fishing wire, lots of it I assume, and you'd still see the wire, there would probably be some taped off area below it due to health and safety, so getting the experience of walking underneath wouldn't be an option, and if you wanted any movement in the piece, well you're starting to talk big money and big problems.. But this took about thirty seconds, I can make it bigger if I wanted, move it around my home as much as I want, and it can be animated.

When I see something like this I can't help but think about the possibilities of the very near future, think about a time not long ago when nobody had a mobile phone, and think about a time when it was just teenagers using Facebook.. Now imagine slowly replacing your phone with a pair of glasses, or better still, a chip that fits unnoticeable into your current glasses, you walk into an art gallery for example, there's physical art on display, you're talking to people at the event, having a drink, and as you turn your head, its there, a massive floating golden knot pulling all kinds of shapes, you don't have to get your phone out of your pocket, you don't have to put on a pair of oculus goggles that transport you into a secondary virtual space, nope, you're in a physical space with physical people and physical art, but you now have the added bonus of being able to interact with digital art doing things that physical art just cannot do.

This is extremely exciting to me.. the insane possibilities that augmented reality has with bringing physical and digital together, I believe that is where the biggest advancements are going to be, as great as fully immersive digital spaces are, I just can't see the older generations getting into that, but augmented reality, definitely, our grandparents and great grandparents are on social media these days, there's no reason they wouldn't go with the flow eventually and experience this semi digital world, I mean, look at snap chat filters and all that, everyone uses them, that's the first socially integrated augmented reality, and most people have probably used it at some point already!

Anyway..

...This happened.

I didn't know how to make their dancing/animations loop and ended up dancing by myself, it's funny because I actually was.. all by myself, obviously.

I did do a bit of a better one a bit later on, but I'm more excited about this..

I think this is incredible! We've heard of these Augmented Reality art galleries, these ones where you can walk into a physical gallery and scan your phone on the artworks, and then you can see the artworks become animated in AR, but something like this is even crazier, these assets are not anchored to specific art works, they are the artworks themselves. This takes me back to my research into the future of filmmaking, the one man film crew making films in their bedrooms, once you've learned to make this stuff its quicker than making physical objects, and if everything you made was digital, available in AR, you could rent out a small empty space, and invite people into your empty space, and the art can only be viewed through AR, which will always make your exhibition cheaper to run. Now imagine not renting a room, imagine just inviting people to a location in the centre of town where there's a small sign with instructions to use AR, then your sculptures becomes 10 foot, 20, 40 foot tall, they can be animated and can be interacted with all through augmented reality, and it doesn't cost the artist a penny.

With all the angst of the metaverse and a digital life, fear has kept people from exploring some great ideas.. But with the lower cost, the possibilities that can be achieved only digitally, I just can't see how that's not a step in the right direction...

Although, with saying that, after spending a few hours amongst these augmented characters it did start to get a bit weird. When walking through this augmented forest, seeing the butterfly, the floating golden knot through the augmented view of my smart phone, the lines between fiction and reality began to blur, I was concentrating on the screen for a small amount of time, then when the phone was taken away and the augmented pieces weren't there it was a shock like "Oh, where did they go", our brains aren't fully adjusted to augmented reality yet, I assume its something to do with our brains actively seeing something, its the illusion and our brains convince us there's something there, how were able to see AR, right? But there was definitely a few times when I'd take the camera away and be shocked I was on my own, or shocked I wasn't stood under a tree, the room felt empty as if I'd be teleported away from my imagination and dropped into a dystopian version of where I was, bare and barren, my home.

It was pretty spooky, maybe it was because it was late at night and I was very tired due to being up the night before with the kids, and theres something about being awake in a house where everyone else is asleep that is just a bit creepy anyway without artificial objects and people inhabiting your home with you, then then suddenly disappearing.. It definitely makes you think of what is reality and what's not after an experience like that.. I assume it's what these all night gamers feel when they're pulled off their PlayStation, and ultimately out of the world they've just spent hours inhabiting, living, breathing, getting tense and shocked, it's reality for the player, just as my forest scene was reality for me for that short time..

It takes me back to thinking about NFTs and digital assets on the blockchain, it seems like the Capitalist dream to be able to sell something that doesn't exist, but when these worlds can bring joy, wonder, adrenalin, fear.. they're real human emotions were playing with, when a virtual reality head set is put on, and someone is transported to a fictional world, how fictional is it, really? When your emotions are real, your relationships grow in the same way as they do in physical space, how is it not real?

The world might be artificial, but the humanity is most definitely real, maybe the people feeling angst about this whole metaverse era could think more about what's actually real rather than what's artificially real, see things from a different point of view, I mean, the 'real world' isn't really that real anyway is it?