When Pandemic Clashes with Metaverse

By Susan Wang '22

Imagine a cosmos beyond the physical world: you may travel to a myriad of places in seconds, be it an online shopping center, music venue, or museum. The people you meet are wearing digital designer-brand clothes. You can socialize with each other using personalized avatars and pay for products in cryptocurrency. Moreover, you own a virtual patch of land, where you have built your estates and amenities. If you do not like the designs, no worries—you can tear them down and reconstruct everything in hours. You are a denizen of the metaverse, a digital extension of the real world based on the internet, augmented reality, virtual reality, and so forth.

As a topical jargon in the tech world, the coining of “metaverse” can be traced back to Neal Stephensen’s Snow Crash, a science fiction novel depicting a virtual alternative to the universe. The term recently gained popularity after Mark Zucker rebranded Facebook as Meta in October, 2021, which signaled the corporation’s goal to revolutionize social media by enhancing users’ immersive experience. Many other tech companies such as Microsoft followed suit, announcing their plans for bridging the online and physical worlds.

Despite all the clamors and mania, the metaverse is not here yet. There is still a significant gap between the fabled interconnected virtual universe and today’s digital world. However, the pandemic from 2019 to 2021 has certainly accelerated the development of the metaverse by promoting the growth of gaming, videoconferencing, and virtual retail industries.

Many of the closest analogues to the metaverse today are immersive games like Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft, which flourished during the pandemic as people obtained more leisure time at home. According to gaming market researchers, the total revenue of the digital gaming industry rose from 120.1 billion in 2019 to 180.1 billion dollars in 2021. In 2020 alone, the daily active users (DAUs) of Roblox skyrocketed to 182 percent of its pre-pandemic DAUs. The total users of Fortnite rose from 250 million to 350 million from 2019 to 2021. It’s more than the income and user statistics that have improved—gaming industries also took opportunities to develop new events and means of socialization. For instance, as people were unable to attend concerts due to COVID, Fortnite launched a series of virtual live concerts in 2020, which attracted millions of users to attend. In October, 2021, Roblox launched its week-long electric music festival, garnering 1.156 million unique online attendees. In addition, Sotheby’s, a multinational arts corporation, set up a replica of its London gallery in Decentraland, a virtual reality based platform where users can design and purchase real estates, artworks, etc. The arts showcase culminated into an auction on November 18, 2021, which sold two art pieces by Banksy for 3,093 Ethereum (a cryptocurrency), equivalent to 12 million dollars.

Virtual conferences, the alternatives to in-person meetings, entered their golden age during the pandemic as remote learning and working-from-home replaced in-person education and businesses. Zoom is widely acknowledged as a precursor of metaverse as it provides real-time online conversations. At the beginning of 2020, the stock price of Zoom was around 69 dollars. As of today’s date (December 9, 2021), its price has reached 189 dollars. The active users of Zoom increased by 2900% from 2019 to 2021, which can be largely attributed to teachers and students during remote learning. Schooling on Zoom became so prevalent that many students joked about attending the prestigious Zoom University. Besides pure videoconferencing, meeting softwares also developed functions that allowed users to customize their experience. For example, Gather Town, a pixelated video chat platform, allowed an unparalleled amount of user interactions by encouraging users to design their own avatars and meeting rooms. The software was launched in May, 2020 and has brought together millions of users. In August, 2021, I experienced Gather Town personally while engaging in a poster session at a summer research program. Walking in Gather Town reminded me of playing early Nintendo games, a throwback to my childhood memories. I could roam around the virtual community space, interact with objects like white boards and podiums, and bump into people whom I can communicate with via typing or videoconferencing. The amount of user freedom in Gather Town rendered the experience more humane, which marked a significant progress towards the realization of the metaverse.

Last but not least, the online retail industry has witnessed remarkable growth during the pandemic. The rampant viruses did not diminish people’s consumption power but enlarged it, at least in the virtual world. The total net revenue of Amazon rose from 280.52 billion in 2019 to 386.06 billion dollars in 2020. Many virtual retailers also took advantage of augmented reality to demonstrate the intended effects of their products by processing real-time videos or images. For instance, researchers at Amazon hardware lab are crafting Outfit-VITON, an image-based virtual try-on system. They plan to present their research in January, 2022 at an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Conference. The launch date of the system is not declared yet, hopefully in the near future. With the help of virtual reality and augmented reality, online retailers may overcome one of their most serious challenges: the lack of try-out opportunities for customers. The pandemic and increased at-home shopping thus provided an impetus for virtual retailers to revolutionize their technologies and improve customer experience in the upcoming metaverse.

Pandemic bred changes, and the development of the metaverse is one of them. Despite its immense promises, some critics suggest that our society is not prepared for the metaverse, and that it would divert attention from or even aggravate current issues such as the tensions among political entities and the polarization of politics. Some, such as Kevin Roose, a New York Times columnist, viewed the metaverse as an escapist dystopian. In the immersive virtual-based world, how can we tell truths from lies? How can we remain independent thinkers? The answers to these pressing questions remain unclear. However, one thing is certain: the current and the future generations will gradually unravel the miracles and challenges of the metaverse.