Who will build the meta-universe?

原文标题：《 Architecting the Metaverse 》

By Chloe Sun

原文来源：《构建元宇宙》（Architecting the Metaverse）

You've probably heard that Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook to become a Metaverse company, and earlier this year Epic Games, the company behind the Unreal engine, announced a billion round of funding to support its long-term vision of the Metaverse. The metadverse is definitely the hottest buzzword in tech. In this article, we will briefly discuss what the meta-universe is, who builds it, most importantly why it matters to architects, and how meta-universe designers can play an important role in the coming digital economy.

What is the Metaverse?

The term "metasomes" was coined by Neal Stephenson in the 1992 science fiction novel Avalanche as the successor to the Internet, and forms Stephenson's view of how the digital world might evolve in the near future.

As you may know from movies like Player One and The Matrix, anything we can imagine can exist, and we can connect all the way to the meta-universe to prolong our extraordinary real-life experiences. There are many articles offering various definitions and criteria for the metasverse, and here are two of my favorites:The Metaverse: What is it, where to find it, who will build it, and Fortnite"And"Status quo of the Metaverse 2021‌ ".

Who will build the meta-universe?

Unlike the centralized meta-universe oasis in Player One, the tech community believes the meta-universe should be an open and interoperable ecosystem, not dominated by any one company. As Mark Zuckerberg put it, "Hopefully in the future, asking a company if they're building a meta-universe will sound just as ridiculous as asking a company how their Internet is doing."

At the same time, Roblox and Epic Games, currently the biggest "metasexes", agree that the metasexes must have decentralized genes to avoid being monopolized by a few. "The energy around the metasverse will come from users, not companies," says Roblox co-founder Neil Rimer.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney also stressed, "The Metasomes are not the product of any industry giant, but the product of millions of people. Everyone contributes to the metasomes through content creation, programming, and game design. Contributions add value to the metasomes in other ways."

After years of being primarily a 2D directory with hyperlinks, the Internet is finally starting to become interesting, with the potential for 3D experiences that will transform the way we work, shop, and live. How can architects play a role in shaping and enriching the vast meta-universe?

Why is it important to architects?

Big picture: The rise of the digital economy

The world is undergoing a major shift from a physical to a digital economy, and the convergence of the two has accelerated dramatically since the pandemic.

Balenciaga is releasing a video game for its fall 2021 collection

We've seen various brick-and-mortar retailers close their doors, while fashion brands like Balenciaga chose to launch their latest collections in video games. Commercial real estate owners are struggling as tenants abandon offices or downsize, while video conferencing companies like Zoom have been hugely successful and thriving during the pandemic. Like it or not, COVID-19 has changed our work culture, accelerated the rise of e-commerce and changed the way businesses operate.

Some of the industry pioneers in building the metadverse include games, fashion, Hollywood, and cryptocurrencies. There is no choice but to join the new game. Otherwise, you won't survive as a company.

NFT in art: The rise of digital assets

NFT in art: The rise of digital assets

The market for digital goods is already over $10 billion, and for digital items to have real, lasting value, they must exist independently of the entity that may decide to remove or disable the item at any time. That's where the latest application of blockchain technology, NFT (Irreplaceable Tokens), comes in. "Irreplaceable" means it is unique and cannot be replaced by something else. Thus, the value of NFT is understood as proof that the creation of digital projects is "unique".

Digital creation can be anything, including digital architecture. Toronto-based artist Krista Kim has sold the first NFT-backed digital home for over $500,000. In many North American cities, that's more than a real home.

Another trend in the crypto world is investing in virtual real estate. As part of the NFT market frenzy that began in early 2021, blockchain-based real estate prices in virtual worlds soared. A block of virtual land in the online blockchain-based world Decentraland recently sold for over $900,000.

Decentraland, Sandbox, Somnimum Space and other virtual worlds allow people to show off their NFT art collection, walk around with friends, visit buildings and attend events. For many, this may be a scam and the platform may be too early in its evolution, but it's definitely an interesting and potentially lucrative area for builders to take their design skills in the physical world and extend them to the virtual world.

Business Model change: From consultants to content creators

Architects often complain about the difficulty of finding good clients who fully support their ideas and pay their bills on time. Most of their designs will be on paper forever, they can be rejected for a variety of reasons, and most "on-paper architectures" are worthless because they are not approved by clients. Even if your design is lucky enough to get built, construction is notoriously expensive, time-consuming, and fraught with uncertainty. When a project goes wrong, you have a lot of potential to be sued.

Sorry for the harsh reality, but apart from that, architects are no longer masters of modern society. The architect works as a project manager with other consultants, engineers, contractors, clients, and government officials to realize the project and, like other professionals who provide their services, charges an hourly fee. As investor Naval says, "You'll never get rich renting out your time." Rather than providing a one-to-one service, architects can reshape business models to provide scalable products/services, reusable solutions, and benefits millions of users, not just one customer.

The meta-universe needs a huge amount of content to entertain its users. We need experiences like virtual amusement parks, virtual cinemas, virtual concerts, virtual schools, virtual conferences, you name it. For architects, the meta-universe is a virgin land of possibility, a utopia without the constraints of the physical world. Architects can create unique designs supported by NFT for people who like to collect unique assets.

Architects can also build cities, buildings, furniture, sculptures, point clouds, textures and other digital assets and sell them multiple times to virtual worlds, games, and movies. This is very similar to what an artist would do for a game or film. In addition to static designs, architects can develop design "formulas" that users can adjust to produce various results, such as Grasshopper scripts or Houdini digital assets.

While architecture is a relatively local business, you can offer digital products/services on a global scale. It may be difficult to find customers who value your design in your region, but it is much easier to find users who appreciate your taste on a global scale. As 1000 True Fans claims, you can make a living doing what you love.

Whatever you do, try to think like a content creator, use your efforts to grow exponentially, navigate the digital jungle to find ways to market yourself across platforms, reach potential users with quality content, engage them and grow your audience.

How to extend the design frontier to the digital world?

So, you're excited about new opportunities, but how do designers get into games?

Learn from the game industry

Games are the tip of the metasverse. Games are considered to be the best vehicle for the metasomes, especially sandbox games, which are becoming more and more popular now, and have the metasomes in their original form. Games like the GTA series, Minecraft, Fortnite, etc., all offer a highly freeform gameplay experience, and many also offer professional tools for making homemade Mod extensions to enrich the content and extend the life of the game.

Games are also an industry that architects can relate to. A game like SimCity is a classic city-building video game that many urban designers find inspiring. World building in games is the process of building an imaginary world, much like the design process in real life. Environment Artists transform 2D art created by concept artists into believable 3D environments. The tools used are 3D modeling software that architects are more or less familiar with: Blender, 3Ds Max, Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter.. And game engines like Unity and Unreal.

Learn some programming

- Think like a developer

Key concepts in computational thinking

Computational design is not a new topic in architecture. We've seen terms like derivative design, parametric design, algorithmic design. I don't want to argue about the differences between these terms, but in general, this is a new approach to the problem. Instead of relying solely on the intuition and experience of the designer, the designer abstractions the design process, breaking down big challenges into smaller ones, defining parameters or constraints that will affect the design output, iterating through design workflows and options, and finally following analysis principles. Computational thinking is key to extending design as well as software developers.

Tools like Grasshopper have been well adopted in architecture. Applying computing tools to your design workflow to amplify computing power is a good way to do so.

If you want to learn how to program, Processing might be a good language to learn programming in a visual arts context. Python is also a relatively easy language to learn, with a wide range of applications for data analysis/visualization, artificial intelligence/machine learning, Web development, and other general purposes.

- Program Content Generation (PCG)

In computing, program content generation (PCG) is a method of creating data through algorithms rather than by hand, usually by combining manually generated assets and algorithms with computer-generated randomness and processing power. In computer graphics, it is commonly used to create textures and 3D models (Wiki). Procedural generation is commonly used in video games and movies to allow developers to make much larger amounts of content, as well as the possibility of games with endless content.

There are many ways to programmatically generate content, and I encourage you to watch Kate Compton's great talk at GDC.

Townscraper is one of my favorite indie games and another great example of the PCG. Users can randomly click and create beautiful cities based on tile limits, similar to solving sudoku.

Townscraper, developed by Oskar Stalberg

On the programmatic side, Houdini is a great tool. It is designed for artists working in 3D animation and VFX in film, television, video games and virtual reality. Houdini integrates these worlds into one powerful platform. What really sets Houdini apart from other 3D animation software is its programmatic nature. Houdini has an open environment and provides scripting through various apis, but Python is the preferred language for most packages.

CityEngine is developed by Esri R& D Center Zurich is a commercial 3D modeling software application developed specifically for generating 3D urban environments. Using a programmatic modeling approach, it supports the creation of detailed large-scale 3D city models.

CityEngine user interface

- Artificial intelligence design

AI is a hot topic in the technology world, and we've seen a lot of great applications in computer vision, natural language processing, and more. In a design environment, AI can be used to train machine learning from existing content to generate new content. Of all the machine learning platforms, GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) is definitely the latest of the Generative Adversarial networks to get the most attention from design professionals. Here are some examples that I find encouraging:

Stanislas Chaillou

Stanislas Chaillou thesis project uses GAN to generate floor plans of different styles.

Artist Refik Andaol applies data-driven machine learning algorithms to create abstract, dreamlike environments.

A recent paper from Simon Fraser University and Autodesk Research improves GAN to generate automated house layouts for architects.

NVIDIA Research's latest model uses GAN under the hood to convert 2D images into 3D objects for game developers, artists, designers and architects.

Sneaker brand New Balance is using Runway, a user-friendly machine learning tool for creators, to design their next sneaker.

New Balance

Ultimate Quest: What value can architects bring to the metaverse?

- Architect identity crisis in the digital economy

Architects are already facing an identity crisis in the physical world. We used to be master builders, knowing all the knowledge and techniques of architecture. However, in modern industrial society, many majors, such as structure, machinery, electricity, budget and construction management, have been separated from the discipline of architecture, and most of the rest are modeling, visualization, collaboration and so on. We lack core technologies. .

"Architecture is a profession that requires a lot of time. The minimum amount of architectural work is at least four, five, six years, which is really too slow for the revolution that is taking place." Rem Koolhas, a Dutch architect who won the Pritzker Prize, pointed out the industry's shortcomings in adapting to today's changing social and technological climate. Technology is advancing, and the goal of technology "outsiders" is to restructure or revolutionize the AEC industry. From industry to academia, we need to change to adapt.

The meta-universe is a new playground in which architects can participate with other stakeholders. If we compete with game designers or developers, what additional value can we bring to the game?

- The architect acts as a bridge between the physical and virtual worlds

For centuries, architects have led the way in the construction of the physical world. As project managers, working with all disciplines to deliver projects to end users, we have a comprehensive understanding of the project, whereas other consultants are more likely to be familiar with only part of the big picture.

With the trend of creating digital twins in AEC industry practice, architects can act as a bridge between the physical and virtual worlds. "Digital twins in architecture, engineering, and architecture are dynamic, up-to-date replicas of physical assets or sets of assets -- whether buildings, campuses, cities, or railroads -- that bring together design, construction, and real-time operational data. Digital twins simulate, predict, and inform decisions," Autodesk said.

Architects can run simulations to virtually create real-world scenarios to "test drive" unbuilt buildings. Digital twins use data from connected sensors to tell the story of a building over its entire life cycle. From testing to use in the real world. With iot data, we can measure specific indicators of a building's health and performance, such as temperature and humidity. Digital twinning can also enhance the physical experience, assuming you have a stadium that can only accommodate 20,000 people for a live concert, but you can engage millions of users in that event with digital twinning while dynamically interacting between the two.

There will be a number of interesting applications in the meta-universe that host digital twinings or scanning data such as point cloud data and photogrammetry of real-world locations. Just use assets creatively and plan experiences and interactions in both areas.

- Social responsibility in virtual worlds

Architects are good listeners and communicators. We start by listening a lot to understand what our customers want and what the community wants. In addition to serving clients, architects tend to place their social impact and responsibility first on serving the community as a whole.

Architecture is the expression and expression of culture. Before the concept design, we try to understand a specific cultural environment, including language, local memory and lifestyle. While the metasurses are not location-specific, users do come from different cultures, and we can design "native" metasurses full of diversity and cultural inclusion.

- Value of the building

This is a very deep topic, and I just want to quote Rem Koolhas again: "Architecture stands with one foot in a 3,000-year-old world and the other in the 21st century. This almost balletic stretch makes our profession surprisingly deep. You could say we were the last profession to have memories, or the last profession to go back 3,000 years and still show the relevance of those long roads today. At first, I thought we were really ill-suited to deal with the present, but the gift we offered was memory."

History is like a mirror. Every time I look at it, I will reflect on it. The "value of architecture" varies from history to history. From "stability, utility and beauty" in Roman times to ruskin's "Seven lights of architecture (Sacrifice, Truth, Power, beauty, Life, obedience and Memory)" in the 19th century.

From Le Corbusier's "Toward An Architecture," 20th-century modern Architecture rejected decoration and embraced pure form as the new spirit of the industrial age, To Christopher Alexander's "pattern languages" that had a major impact on software engineering... Do we need to define new values for architecture in this digital age? This is an open question for readers. The more we can define and realize the value of architecture, the better we can build a great immaterial metasverse.

The meta-universe is unfolding and developing. Architects, are you ready?

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