When science fiction writer Neal Stephenson dreamed of the metaverse—a term he coined in his 1992 novel Snow Crash—he envisioned a long city street that’s “always garish and brilliant, like Las Vegas freed from constraints of physics and finance.”
While Las Vegas certainly isn’t known for its constraints, Stephenson believed a digital world could be truly limitless.
Chatter about the metaverse peaked in late 2021, almost three decades after Stephenson’s novel was published, when Mark Zuckerberg announced he would build the virtual world and change his company’s name from Facebook to Meta. The company would be more than likes, comments, and shares, he said, and Meta would develop the community on top of the Oculus platform it bought for $2 billion in 2014.
The Facebook-Meta name change came a year-and-a-half into the COVID-19 pandemic, which demonstrated the potential of a digital life without much physical interaction: Zoom replaced meetings, Slack subbed for water-cooler talk, and offices stood mostly vacant.
“Our view is that the metaverse can still succeed.”
Researchers Andy Wu and David R. Clough felt the brunt of these forces and believed strongly that the metaverse—in one form or another—was inevitable. Wu, the Arjun and Minoo Melwani Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and Clough, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, continue to see the potential for the metaverse to bloom.
Metaverse chatter has somewhat faded from popular discourse amid advancements in artificial intelligence. However, in an article
published recently in California Management Review, Wu and Clough say they believe it’s only a matter of time before the metaverse starts taking shape.
“Despite the lack of consensus amidst competing incentives in building the metaverse, our view is that the metaverse can still succeed,” they write, “but it might call for a shift in mindset and an openness to learning from seemingly distant domains of knowledge.”
Along those lines, they invoked the discipline of urban planning—specifically focusing on the desert oasis of Las Vegas.
Two researchers turn to Fortnite to quell pandemic boredom
Wu and Clough share a few passions outside of scholarship, including the mass-multiplayer game Fortnite, which they began playing together online during the pandemic.
To some, Fortnite is more like a virtual world than a video game: Millions of users have gathered on the platform for online concerts headlined by Ariana Grande, Travis Scott, and other stars. Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Fortnite parent company Epic Games, has likened the Fortnite community to the metaverse in discussing the company’s investment in the online social entertainment world.
The researchers started playing Fortnite
during the pandemic “to break the monotony of constant Zoom meetings,” Wu says. But soon, they found themselves spending real money on virtual clothes, called “skins,” in the game, a level of engagement that felt a bit wacky at first.
“One day, David purchased a superhero skin in Fortnite, and I thought that was insane,” Wu says. “And eventually I spent $60 on virtual clothes myself.”
What can metaverse developers learn from Las Vegas?
At an academic conference at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2022, Wu and Clough saw a striking connection between the Las Vegas Strip and the digital platforms they had studied over the past decade. “People visit Las Vegas for the sense of hustle and bustle, which is generated by the presence of all the other visitors. In much the same way, the metaverse will really take off when it attains a critical mass of user activity concentrated in time and space,” says Clough.
The Las Vegas Strip is located in Paradise, Nevada, an unincorporated desert city. Vegas is “a vibrant, 24-hour environment that offers an eclectic range of immersive entertainment and commerce to a global audience,” Wu and Clough write, noting the similarity to metaverse proponents’ aspirations.
Wu and Clough know they’re far from the first to connect the metaverse to the Vegas Strip—they’re aware of Stephenson’s comparisons in his seminal novel, for one thing—yet they argue that the Strip is a perfect model for a future metaverse.
The Strip largely formed as the result of corporate cooperation, rather than top-down urban planning and careful economic development. Hotels, resorts, and casinos first flocked to the area in the 1940s and worked together to build the entertainment hub it is today: a destination for gambling, trade shows, comedy, music, and some of the finest restaurants in the country.
“It is simply the result of a consensus that has emerged that this is the place you go to have fun or meet people,” the pair write.
Can businesses come together to build the metaverse?
While plenty of companies want to build the metaverse—whether it be Meta, Epic Games, or another tech giant—Wu and Clough write about the metaverse as a massive, interoperable collection of worlds. Just like how elevated footbridges connect competing resorts in Las Vegas today, a true metaverse could allow users to hop between different and even competing worlds, rather than confining them to separate closed-off experiences.
“The metaverse has the potential to be the most important use case for generative AI.”
While new technologies have captured the collective imagination—generative AI and machine learning—Wu says the metaverse and AI are inextricably linked. After all, generative AI could help build an expansive, intricately detailed virtual world, he says.
“The metaverse has the potential to be the most important use case for generative AI,” Wu says. “Generative AI is most useful in areas where content production is expensive. And the most expensive content production is 3D animated graphics.”
Today, the metaverse is still a dream. But so was Las Vegas at one point—and it came to fruition, the researchers point out.
“It is absolutely ridiculous that this lush, opulent street exists in the middle of the desert,” Wu says. “There’s nothing remotely natural about it—it’s clearly a man-made invention.”
Two principles for building the metaverse
To get the massive virtual world off the ground, Wu and Clough offer two recommendations to metaverse architects:
- Focus on the linear geometry that helped Vegas succeed. “A linear layout has the advantage that there is no clear status hierarchy among the resorts spread out along the street,” the authors write. That can be true as metaverse architects build different hubs in the online world, emphasizing that none reign supreme.
- Cooperate with competitors. Just like the resorts on the Vegas Strip connect, so should competing hubs in the metaverse. “Today’s proto-metaverses are almost entirely self-contained virtual spaces siloed from one another,” the researchers write. “To integrate these virtual spaces and achieve the grand vision for the unified metaverse, the developers of the proto-metaverses will need to agree on a common set of standards for interoperability.”
Building a virtual world that’s both equitable and cooperative must go beyond serving the customers of just one company, the authors suggest, and invite all people to escape reality.
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Image: Image by HBSWK with assets generated using Adobe Firefly, an artificial intelligence tool, and from AdobeStock/Dabarti
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