The Meta-Design World Is Here

This is what happens when haute craftsmanship meets high technology.

- Justin Fenner and Marni Elyse Katz

WHEN ARCHITECT LUIS FERNANDEZ was working on his first environment for the metaverse, a soaring, interactive gallery conceived to display NFT artworks, he kept running into a problem: none of the established platforms or available technology could make the room's virtual gleaming marble, ivy-covered walls or central water feature look as photorealistic as he'd hoped.

Fernandez, who has also designed interiors and menswear, ultimately teamed up with two sophisticated platforms called Mona and MetaMundo, which helped him and his design team achieve the elevated, high-fidelity look he was after. The resulting space uses high-end materials and proportions that feel familiar but isn't restricted by tedious things like gravity.

You can play God a little bit, Fernandez says. Obviously there's no physics. There's no materiality. For me, keeping some semblance of the real world, but then playing and tricking the eye with certain things that you just can't build (in real life), is the way that I've chosen to pursue it.

Increasingly designers are using the metaverse and other future-looking technologies as a proving ground for their most ingenious ideas. And that's not just because they offer exciting ways to push boundaries that handcraftsmanship cannot. In video games, the linchpin of the metaverse, cinematic environments are equally as important as heroic characters and gravity-defying gameplay. So younger designers who grew up playing The Sims or Minecraft are especially well primed to find innovations in virtual spaces that translate to the real world. And even if they haven't logged hours playing games, many creatives in this field have already been using the technology that underpins these virtual worlds (computer-aided design, 3D renderings, and the like) for decades.