The Metaverse for Museums

For years, we have been players in phygital andonlife, a situation that leads us to live in a constant contamination and mixing of the real and virtual.

Today, however, this experience is getting closer and closer to having a “clearer” area of action, where instead of simply viewing a content, we will find ourselves moving within it. We will experience a place that will not simply surpass reality, but will be a space that, according to our friend Fabio Viola:

“goes beyond the mere idea of digitizing physical experiences by creating new ways of action, interaction and reaction by taking advantage of virtual reality, blockchain, nft and immersiveness, which have now come to full maturity.”

This space is now known to everyone as the metaverse: with this article we will try to understand whether and to what extent it will affect the museum sector.

What is the Metaverse and why you should care about it

“The metaverse is like sex for teenagers:

everyone talks about it, no one really knows how to do it,

But everyone thinks others do it, so they say they do it.”

(semicit. Dan Ariely).

Although the name is traced back to writer Neal Stephenson, who created the word to describe the virtual environment in which the digital avatar of the protagonist of the dystopian novel Snow Crash (1992) lived, the first time I began to understand the real implications of the concept of the metaverse was through the words of Matthew Ball(HERE his blog).

The promise of the metaverse is to enable greater overlap of our digital and physical lives through a combination and amplification of multiple elements of technology (AR, VR, video) made everyday through wearable devices.

At the same time, our behaviors and actions in the metaverse will influence what happens and appears in everyday life thanks to forms of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Ownership of objects, bought and created, will be physical and digital thanks to blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies, without friction or barriers to entry.

American singer Travis Scott in his concert within the video game Fortnite has exceeded 12 million viewers

Proponents of the metaverse envision a future in which we can go to work, meet, live and spend leisure time using holograms that will allow us to virtualize once exclusively physical experiences.

The revolution at the gates: Meta and Big Tech aim for the Metaverse

As evidence that we are at the beginning of what will be a revolutionary stage in the tech world, of a change that could be epochal, I share with you an excerpt of the thoughts of Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, taken from the Founder’s Letter, 2021:

“In recent decades, technology has given people the power to connect and express themselves more naturally. When I started Facebook, we mostly typed text on websites. When we had phones with cameras, the Internet became more visual and mobile. When connections became faster, video became a richer way to share experiences. We went from desktop to web to mobile; from text to photos to video.

But this is not the end of the line.

The next platform will be even more immersive-an embodied Internet where you are in the experience, not just watching it. We call it the metaverse, and it will touch every product we build.

The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence-as if you were right there with another person or in another place.

To feel truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology.

That is why we are focusing on building this.”

On the same day, the birth of Meta, the company that controls Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger and Oculus services, was announced.

Not only a new name, but also a new vision for the new creature (in Greek, mèta means “after, beyond,” and is meant to symbolize the opening of a new corporate chapter aimed at building the Metaverse).

Meta is a “social technology company ,” which is a company that produces technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses Beyond the current two-dimensionality. The horizon is to bring immersive experiences such as those of augmented and virtual reality, to help build the next evolution of social technology.

But Zuckerberg is not alone.

Indeed, given the possible applications in the social, gaming and business genres, the metaverse is also attracting the growth ambitions of a variety of tech companies(Epic Games, Tencent, Microsoft foremost among them), each intent on competing to create its own metaverse.

And this affects you closely.

Toward a Metaverse for the world of culture

Of the need to create tailored experiences for museum visitors, we talked about it starting with the revolution BYOD underway.

Other thoughts had also emerged during the discussion on topics such as immersive exhibits, augmented reality, and video games (to get an idea read The new frontiers of the museum experience).

But what exactly will happen to museums? What will they become?

It is Zuckerberg himself who facilitates the task by taking us inside his vision of the metaverse in Meta’s first commercial set in a museum of all places.

Four students are looking at French artist Henri Rousseau ‘s work (“Fight between a tiger and a buffalo”) when, at one point, they find themselves immersed in the painting, among the 3-D animals and drumming theme music in the background.

Will this actually be the case?

I decided to ask Fabrizio Gramuglio, former speaker at the Italian Museum Summit and founder and CEO of XPLUS-a startup whose goal is to enable everyone to have unlimited experiences by removing all geographic, economic and physical barriers-an opinion on the matter.

The word from Fabrizio Gramuglio

“Without a doubt, metaverses represent – and will represent in the coming months – the new trend capable of bringing together social lovers, investors, technocrats and gamers. I mention the latter because they are the target audience that is well acquainted with these new universes and has already been frequenting them for years.

At the risk of being repetitive, one cannot fail to mention the success of Fortnite, which, with its 350 million subscribers , has been able to transform itself from a “game” (for gamers, a battle royale) into a real social universe capable of entertaining with events and concerts with tens of millions of viewers.

Not coincidentally, Epic games, producer of Fortnite, announced on April 13 this year an investment of $1 billion in the creation of its metaverse.

But back to our Meta.

Regarding the great promise of Facebook, if you had the pleasure of attending Zuckerberg’s keynote presentation(find the short version on Youtube), many of you will have noticed a couple of things, including:

• the keynote was beautifully written and performed, and in some passages it reminded one of the much-hyped Jobs
• Zuckerberg’s dream presentation, for anyone who has attended Second-life or other metaverses, looked too much like the Disney version of reality
• marketing’s attempt to clear its conscience from years of Facebook user data abuse, the media storm that began with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and Zuckerberg’s own questions to the U.S. Senate.

And this is precisely where the audience of technocrats and “insiders” have turned their noses up: first you offer us a vision of the exponential, democratized, open-access future, then you show us a Disney-branded demo, and you give no answers to the millions of tweets about data and intellectual property management?

To make matters worse, a few days later Facebook itself announced that it would discontinue its massive facial recognition program. Just so we understand: after years of wild and indiscriminate harvesting of users “photos, data management and use, Facebook announced that it would stop collecting and categorizing users” photos… but not using your data generated from those photos. The final comment in theVice article, which inspired these reflections, hits the nail on the head:

So what we have here is a move that comes only after Facebook spent more than a decade mining the faces of a large percentage of the humans on planet.

Isn’t that enough for you?

A week later Meta announced to the world its innovative gloves for being able to touch objects in the metaverse, explaining the uniqueness of their technology, the incredible benefits, etc. (Well the marketing style of “Meta-book” you know by now). And, once again, industry insiders not only turned up their noses, but joined HaptX in pointing out the obvious plagiarism.

The reason for this disagreement is quite simple when one considers that the Metaverse all have one common and inseparable feature: the creation and marketing of content by users, and thus an economic system that no longer relies on advertising revenue generated by the material created (example: Youtube), or from visitors purchasing goods and services (Facebook marketplace).

This economic system, which underlies all metaverses, is based on an extremely simple concept: knowledge creation is a commodity, and the identity and ownership of content creators must be defended and preserved.

This concept of “Data Agency” is the basis of every ethical framework that most nations in the world are trying to pursue and enforce, including EU.

And it is also an asset that cannot be managed by a multinational corporation that has repeatedly demonstrated that it considers its content creators as “data to be squeezed” and used for its own purposes.

In short, metaverses undoubtedly represent an opportunity for museums to reach billions of people around the world by offering unique content, creating engaging experiences capable of engaging the user’s five senses, but that doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice our content to Meta for a few additional tickets.”

“This is going to be fun.”

In my opinion, the focus for a museum will not only be on what it is going to offer, but also on the quality of the experience it is going to offer the visitor.

Online, offline, onlife, phygital-or whatever it will be-every reality needs to understand early on that classic interaction within the museum world (whether physical or digital) is not sufficiently engaging (or at any rate will not be so in the near future).

Zuckerberg & Co. have been bold in charting a new course by beginning to invest in means that should lead to a destination that does not yet exist. Certainly, before it becomes mainstream and reaches billions of users, the Metaverse still has a long way to go, but it is evident how many small “metaverses” have already begun to emerge.

A recent example?

The fictional city of Nikeland, built in the game platform Roblox. Nike‘s goal with this one is to launch prototype shoes and have users try them on in the virtual world, before starting mass production in the real one.

A kind of laboratory where users’ interests can be analyzed and hybrid operations can be experimented with (such as during the World Cup or the SuperBowl where Nikeland will bring the virtual version to life at the same time as the real event).

In the near future, this technology will accelerate at an exponential rate, and our lives, physical and digital, will become increasingly involved. We will see a change in culture, in the way people play, work, learn, study and inform themselves.

Some of our habits will eventually be swallowed up by the Metaverse, and within the next few years its applications will exceed our wildest imaginations. Professionals in all fields, as well as brands, companies and museums trying to keep up with the future, must ask themselves what this Metaverse would entail for them and for the world.

“This is going to be fun,” Zuck’s words.

I also feel the same way.