From the announcements and discourse over the past 12 months, for the observer, the concept of the metaverse seems like distant science fiction. A virtual world where ordinary interactions are assumed to be replaced entirely by digital ones? Where the ordinary - school, work, shopping - happens through a VR headset? A dystopia akin to Black Mirror and the Matrix?

It’s no wonder a distant universe feels scary right now. What happened to our real life classmates, co-workers, friends, families…?

I don’t think it has to be like that. Advancements in tech are constant. Opportunities for new ideas, new things, new ways of doing things. Improving, incrementally, what has come before. “Changing existing situations into preferred ones”.

Think of the metaverse as (literal and metaphorical) augmentation - not just replacing what’s come before.

As we talked about last time, everything builds on the previous.. The concept of the metaverse is no different.

The metaverse is presenting an opportunity for businesses, educators, execs, clever folks and ordinary folks to create something new, better, more helpful, more fun… The augmented metaverse can also be human-centred. Layers of experiences that are designed by humans, for humans. Experiences that are useful, useable, desirable.

Of course, as we design this new world, we need new types of principles to adhere to. So, let’s look at past and present themes contributing to the space:

Collected this week:

The 50 year old metaverse
Designing for extremes
Augmented moments of joy

1. The 50 year old metaverse

The first head mounted display (HMD) - that’s a VR headset or AR glasses - was actually created in the 1960s.

Ivan Sutherland, then a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Utah, alongside his PhD research students, investigated the psychology behind placing two coordinated 2D images over a user’s retina to create the illusion of a 3D object. Their objective was to “surround the user with displayed three-dimensional information”.

Sutherland and his team presented this now landmark paper at the Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in December 1968.

Sutherland noted that the usefulness of the display rested on more powerful computers than was available to them. For real-time moving images, the only solution at the time was “a very expensive special-purpose computer at NASA Houston”. It was cumbersome, tethered to heavy cables, and crude in the opaque object wireframes it displayed.

But it was the very first visual display prototype. It allowed the user to move their head and see the point of view moving and rotating, correlating with the room coordinate system.

It sowed the seeds for moving 3D images, for HMD hardware, for spatial computing. Sutherland went on to found the California Institute of Technology’s computer science department, and to build a consultancy that was later subsumed into Sun Labs. He’s still experimenting and researching at Portland State University.

`Above: The very first head mounted display (HMD), designed and developed by Ivan Sutherland et al. in 1965`

This is interesting because:

The metaverse is not a totally radical innovation - rather, the concept, philosophy and technology have been incrementally explored and improved over seven decades
Universities and research labs often lay the groundwork for how society, culture and business will unfold. There’s not a massive gap between research and commerce
Sutherland et al. explored on the basis of possibilities. They didn’t imagine how their research would be applied in products 50 years later. One idea fuels the next. Use cases evolve. Culture, society and business mutate through time.

2. Designing for extremes

News this week that Google Glass is back, and being tested in public, with some key changes to functionality.

The new version is being tested as an assistive technology, unlike Meta’s Rayban Stories which focuses on image capture for sharing and entertainment. The new iteration of Glass will focus on utility use cases, such as translation, transcription, visual search and wayfinding. Crucially, it will use overlays on the lenses to display information. The field test is being used to train its AI, as well as to build out mainstream applications for an AR HMD.

Another small step towards designing for the metaverse. However, similar niche products have been around for a long time –

There have been AR assistive glasses designed specifically for visually impaired people on the market for years, such as OrCam’s MyEye. These glasses use systems of cameras, memory and audio to help recognise faces and scan written text to play back as audio. However, as a niche product, they remain cumbersome and expensive. Google is attempting to develop a mainstream use case for the technology.

This is interesting because:

The essence of inclusive design is first identifying the problem faced by a specific audience, then building a product that solves that problem. The best, most timeless products will always help people with real life issues
Field research helps organisations to feel out those extremes, and find other related applications
Products designed for extreme use cases are intended to be accessible and intuitive. But if it’s intuitive to that group, it’s intuitive to everyone else. These are the products, like the OXO Goodgrip, that often find a more mainstream use case
Even though a technology already exists in a primitive form for a different market, for commercial reasons it may be years before it’s adapted and applied for a broader audience

`Above: Google's AR glasses (2022) is currently being field tested. It is being developed to allow simultaneous translation and transcription, amongst other features`

3. Augmented moments of joy

Years ago, I worked on building image recognition software for the European Commission.

It was developed for designers, visual thinkers and design businesses, to help and facilitate new product concepts.

More importantly though, it was a primitive AI to augment synthetic creative thinking. Live sketching allowed auto-suggestion, associative thinking, new ideas. Generative visuals in real time. The works. Like a souped-up, auto-Pinterest.

Interesting how these ideas bloom into other forms and ideas. Grow legs and carry forth into consumer domains.

We’ve long been able to search image repositories by keyword, face or place. Android has long had in-built image recognition software, powered by Google Lens, that helps users search the infinite Google repository. But iOS 15 now also has the Visual Lookup feature. When it works, it’s joyful.

It doesn’t work for every image capture - only if the Photos app identifies an object. Animals, plants, landmarks, products, art. Once identified, it offers a layer of information - similar images, information from the web, Siri knowledge, similar content in other apps.

So what’s going to happen next with Visual Lookup? Apple have announced the CutOut tool, to separate the object and drop it into other apps. But this becomes really interesting in the context of headsets.

Looking to headsets, the logical next step seems like a persistent layer of augmented information. Imagine Visual Lookup happening in real-time AR, as we navigate the physical world around us.

Depending on where you stand, that’s either petrifying or electrifying. And it’s not far off: Snap have started to release its experiments in the space, such as Custom Landmarkers.

`Above: iOS’s Visual Lookup allows auto-image recognition for landmarks, animals, plants, artwork`

This is interesting because:

Features are dropping into our everyday tools sometimes so seamlessly that we don’t even notice…
One feature can develop a use case, which unlocks another, and the next after that…. Primitive image recognition became image suggestion, which became augmented information which becomes…?
Seeing the evolution take place in public-facing products is fascinating to track. Consumers are regularly adopting AI and ML tools, but may be none the wiser. Tech very quickly goes native
Business use cases can be transferred to consumer use cases. Response from users influences where products go next. The most successful firms closely monitor the user’s reaction and application