The metaverse is taking a while to get good. The promise of an immersive, realistic, VR style virtual world is still a long way from being delivered. While we wait, we have been given virtual worlds like Decentraland and Sandbox which are an awful experience.
Before we get into the graphic quality of these worlds, let’s first look at the journey to get there. You probably need a crypto wallet and a discord account. Then you will probably need to download a ton of assets and then, when you arrive, you will be able to experience a clunky, glitchy, mostly empty space that has no advantage over IMVU which launched 18 years ago in 2004. It is a long way from being user friendly.
But back to the graphics. How important the graphics are to the experience depends on who you are and what kind of experience you want. What utility are you searching for? You may not know how good the experience can be. Or you may be looking for something that can be delivered without 4K photorealism at 60+ frames per second.
Graphics might not be important if you are trying to shop.
1999 was the beginning of ecommerce. Some sites, prioritised UX over style. Amazon invented the ‘one click’ checkout. Amazon has never looked great. It’s certainly not the prettiest ecommerce site, but it works. On the other hand, Boo.com was pushing the boundaries of what was possible and failed as a result.
“The site relied heavily on JavaScript and Flash technology to display pseudo-3D views of wares as well as Miss Boo, a sales-assistant-style avatar. The first publicly released version of the site included many large pages; the home page, for example, was several hundred kilobytes which meant that many users had to wait minutes for the site to load, as broadband technologies were not widely available at the time. The site’s front page contained the warning, “this site is designed for 56K modems and above”. (From Wikipedia)
Graphics might not be important if you are trying to chat.
From SMS to IRC-Chat to Messenger to WeChat to WhatsApp to Discord… text based chat has always been the web’s killer app and will be around for a while, but…
A metaverse immersive experience will need to have sound. Voice-chat will be important and earbuds will be a crucial part of the user interface. The next generation of UI will probably not include a keyboard.
The sound-space will be critical to the user experience, but there is less discussion about how sound will be controlled. These worlds could become very noisy very quickly, so it seems that a mute command will be essential. But.. is that a curtailment of free speech! Sound in the metaverse seems like it should have it’s own blog… stay tuned.
Graphics are important if you are trying to simulate reality.
The first adventure game I ever played was a text based adventure called True Grit. It was perhaps a precursor to Red Dead Redemption 2 in so far as it was a ‘Western’. The best text based adventure game I ever played was ‘Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy’ and it was, still is, a great experience.
Then came the Lucas Arts adventure games like ‘The Secret of Monkey Island’ and ‘Sam and Max Hit the Road’. At the time, 1990, they were a great experience, probably the best possible given the technology.
Some people may not know how good the graphics can be. Many people don’t have a PC running a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. Many people don’t own a Playstation 4 or 5 or Xbox. Many of the popular gaming platforms are popular because they can run in a browser or on a phone. So Roblox and Fortnite and Minecraft might be best computer game graphics someone has experienced.
Someone who has never seen TV in HD doesn’t know how the experience could be changed for the better.
Someone who has never stood still in the virtual world of Red Dead Redemption 2 or Far Cry 5 and watched the clouds come and go, the shadows move on the ground, the sun rise and set and the effect of wind on leaves might not care about the poor graphics in the current version of the metaverse.
Someone who has never walked through the virtual world of Assassins Creed Odyssey and listened to the sound of waves against the beach or the crunch of snow underfoot being different to the sound of walking through a wheat-field might not care about the silence of the metaverse.
All of which raises other questions. Will there be weather? Will there be day and night? If there is day and night, what time zone will be used?
Graphics are important if you are a brand.
The web has always been funded by advertising and brands. That’s not going away in Web3 no matter how many crypto-tokens you create or how many decentralised value chains you engineer. In fact, it will probably be a dystopian nightmare. Imagine brand AIs tapping you on the virtual shoulder to flog half price washing detergent.
But what if you are a luxury brand, or a brand that stands for best practise and performance and quality. Do you accept that the current virtual spaces make your clothing or products look like they were made from Lego and put up with it? Do you wait until it becomes better.
There was a time not so long ago when luxury brands advertised in magazines. This is because a professionally shot image on an A4 page was the best way to showcase the product. A 468 x 60 pixel, 72 dpi banner ad just wasn’t good enough.
The decision whether or not to be in these environments as a brand is something that the CMO will need incorporate into the marketing strategy, but will be based on considerations including brand safety and the brand experience is made better or worse by the technology including the graphics.
Advertising
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