ARCHITECTURE IN METAVERSE
Metaverse offers opportunities for architects and urban planners
The concept of “metaverse” has become popular with everyone since Mark Zuckerberg announced his vision for Facebook. The metaverse, which marks a new era in virtual reality, was described as a fictional world in Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel Snow Crash in the early 1990s. Facebook, which has the data of billions of people since the beginning, promises to establish a virtual public space with the metaverse. It allows users to perform their daily routines in front of the screen such as shopping, going to the movies, concerts, spending time with a friend in a cafe, without physical effort, which they experience in all areas of life with virtual reality devices.
Place of Architecture in the Metaverse
The complexity of the projects carried out in recent years reinforces the role of architects as project managers. For the architect to realize his/her dream project, s/he has to manage a group including the employer, the parties consisting of engineers, consultants, subcontractors, and government authorities. For architects who are tired of working as a project manager, the metaverse is a space filled with opportunities for them to realize their dream project without this complexity. Public spaces are needed to be established in the virtual world such as theatres, cinemas, concert venues, amusement parks, streets, and cities. All of these together getting the brand-new world “without real-world barriers” are waiting to be designed.
Purchasing the land in the virtual world
Of course, technology partners will have a great share as well as creative parties for the spaces to be created in the virtual world. For this, virtual lands in the metaverse have already started to be sold at high prices. You can build whatever you want on the land you buy from metaverse platforms with a limited area or use it as an advertising space.
Sandbox and Decentraland are hugely popular platforms for digital land and real estate sales. While the parcel prices of the virtual lands on the 3D Virtual reality platform Decentraland, consisting of 90600 parcels of land, the parcel prices of virtual lands on Decentraland, a 3D Virtual reality platform, were sold at $20 when they first appeared on the market, while the prices of digital land plots today have reached amounts of more than $ 100,000. Snoopverse, created by Snoop Dogg on the land he bought from Sandbox, was designed as a concert venue and similar to the singer's real-life California home. After the famous rapper bought this area, 65% of Sandbox's virtual land has been sold those including who want to be his neighbor.
Seoul is the first city to enter the metaverse, which is seen as the future of the Internet. In Turkey, which is quickly adapting to technology and loves construction, it is a matter of wonder what kind of real estate projects will be realized on which virtual lands in the future…
References
https://fortune.com/2021/12/09/snoop-dogg-rapper-metaverse-snoopverse/
https://metropolismag.com/projects/architecture-virtual-environments/