What Can Architects And Designers Contribute To The Metaverse?

No gravity, no square footage, no expectations-virtual reality presents a new frontier. What can architects and designers contribute to the metaverse?

- Christopher DeWolf

Hunn Wai is an industrial designer, and like all industrial designers, he specialises in creating things you can touch and manipulate: real objects in the real world. That might sound obvious, except Wai also calls himself a “metarchitect”, and he is increasingly interested in designing things that don’t really exist at all, at least not in the physical sense. It’s not just digital design, or user experience design applied to virtual environments. It’s something entirely new.

“It’s all in service of digital experiences,” says the Singapore designer, who runs the studio Lanzavecchia + Wai with his Italian partner, Francesca Lanzavecchia. “If we move into this new space called Web3, metaverse, spatial Internet, suddenly a lot of things in the physical world might not need to be adhered to anymore; things like scale, things like gravity, things like how you enter a space. It’s full potential.”

Wai stumbled into the metaverse in 2018, when he began playing a video game called Journey on his wife’s Playstation console. “I’ve never been a fan of video games. It seemed like a strange way to spend time,” he says. But there was something different about this one. “It removes all superfluous controls. You go there in the middle of a sand-dune planet and you learn along the way because there are no explicit instructions on how to execute a move. You’re there like a newborn—you figure out how to walk, how to fly. It’s an experience you can’t have in real life.”