MAPPING THE IMPOSSIBLE CITY

With the Metaverse on its way, researchers have discovered the boundless opportunities it presents for urban planning and future smart cities. Djoko Prihanto, Chairman of the Singapore Institute of Planners and director at DP Urban, leans us in on his thoughts on the possibilities both in Singapore and abroad.

-  Manfred Lu

Fiction has long borrowed the idea of "another world" from mythology, legend, and religion. Heaven, hell, Olympus, and Valhalla are all ideas of alternate philosophy, with creative ideas poured intensively through art, literature, and eventually films on separate realities that could exist outside the plane of our universe. Towards the end of the previous century, the advent of computer access and the space race punctuated speculations that we indeed inherited the ability to tap into new technologies to develop our parallel universes. Films such as The Matrix and Paprika play out this scenario perfectly despite displaying the horrific consequences of such quests developing into a genre known as science fiction.

Far from fiction, however, were engineers and developers who have slowly perfected the mechanisms to achieve this dream with the rise of highly-rendered video games, virtual reality headsets and the widespread use of social media.

The line between fiction and reality finally blurred on October 28, 2021, when Meta, previously known as Facebook, announced the development of the Metaverse - a combination of multiple technology elements, including virtual reality, augmented reality and video where users "live" within a digital universe. As part of what researchers coin as Web 3.0, the development of the Metaverse foresees the decentralisation of the digital age in which society enters an era of 'network fever'. Like in The Matrix, where humans live out their lives within a simulated reality, the dense and multi-layered volume network creates opportunities for culture and design all at once without interference from real-life affairs.