“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.”
Hunter S Thompson, Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas
Since the earliest days of human civilisation, people have used narcotics to escape everyday life and enter new and exhilarating worlds. Narcotics alter our perception of the world by altering human brain and body chemistry. We feel things as real that we would otherwise unconsciously dismiss as impossible. Despite the richness and depth of the experience that narcotics offer, our inability to accurately control, shape or share the hallucination make them an unreliable tool to create an alternative reality on a mass scale. Buy the ticket, take the ride.
The desire for narcotic-fuelled hallucination is natural. We have sought communal escapism since our ancestors shared stories around the campfire. The storytellers in that era were selling arbitrary rules that defined conduct and success in life. Over time, spiritual and philosophical enlightenment has given way to more practical concerns. Since the advent of mass, replicable media, consumer brands have gradually succeeded in using stories to become synonymous with and sometimes representative of the characteristics of success in particular lifestyles. Through James Bond or Sex And The City we learn that we should aspire to wear Rolex watches with our Manolo Blahniks, drive Aston Martins and drink Grey Goose martinis.
Brands have followed consumers and creators whenever a new media format has emerged. Newspapers, magazines, books, movies, TV shows, video games and social media all offer alternative worlds, moments of escapism. Even era-defining games such as Fortnite are also billboards for Ferrari and Disney and myriad other consumer brands seeking to influence new audiences.
Clan quests aside, most of these escapes are personal fantasies. When we stare at our phones we are transported away from our everyday world into a single-track day dream. What if we owned that car or partied on that island? How popular would we be if we could mix that cocktail so casually? When we tear ourselves away, multichannel reality, however grey we might believe it to be, comes flooding back. Although we carry our digital experiences into our real world interactions they are ultimately separate.
Now major tech firms are once again seeking to create an alternative reality with all the richness of a narcotic reverie but the controllability of a video game or immersive theatre production. To be successful, such a metaverse must be persistent, immersive, widely-shared and functionally superior to reality. Given the significant potential of such an environment, brands are now asking themselves how they might influence consumer values and beliefs in this new channel.
How they will achieve this depends in great part on what metaverse we actually get. It is easy to be cynical about the jerky, low fidelity representations of a Walmart store or Facebook (Meta) meeting room and what they infer about the nature of a future metaverse. In fact, the software and hardware already exists to create photo-realistic virtual environments in real time, it is simply a question of compressing both into a reasonable physical form factor and budget. Platforms that provide very accurate spatial positioning are slowly falling into place, as are the machine vision technologies needed to identify objects so that they can be accurately rendered in a metaverse environment.
Speculation around how fast technology will develop and be adopted is natural: a narcotic for a tech-obsessed era. Since most of the fundamental hardware elements of the metaverse are in their infancy and the learning curves for such technologies are unpredictable, the remainder of this paper will assume that metaverse technologies will be deployed at scale at some point. What follows therefore focuses on exploring how brands will appear in the metaverse and how they will monetise.
A Metaverse Story
Norfolk, the future
Birdsong and pale morning light wake Jude just after dawn. The fact that both are artificial does nothing to detract from the freshness he feels as he rolls out of bed.
He layers up, puts on his running shoes and leaves the house. The lanes are quiet at this early hour. Jude sees all the cars for miles around. He plays Pace Car, speeding up to avoid the nearest of them at the crossroads further up the road. Then he races an evening runner in Adelaide. He loses, but beats Coach Lewis to the next bend.
Now and again he sees a clip. Eldar stalking in the woods outside Holt from the gamesmaster at the Norwich club; a flock of tropical birds from BA flutter across the road as he gets closer to home. Only two months until he and Rowan fly to Bermuda.
Back home he showers and has breakfast. The kitchen speaker mixes songs with news and sections from the pre-read material for the morning’s meetings and workshops. Familiarity mixes with novelty just so. By the time he layers up for his first meeting Jude is feeling prepped and ready.
His colleague Sanza is taking a walk during the morning stand up. Jude and the rest of the team are in their workspaces. Everyone is virtual today. Sanza stops at the Pret A Manger in the square bordering her local park. She orders for everyone. People blink in and out of L3 as they answer their doors and receive their coffees.
The meeting starts with rapid fire updates and commitments, then flows into a more in depth smaller working session for Jude and the creative team. They zoom in and out of the market testing data and interview videos. Their helper has tried to glean themes and patterns from it, but as ever hasn’t got it quite right. It takes all morning to make the product changes and build an entity that they’re happy with. It’ll be in customer layers in the afternoon.
Jude takes an hour at lunchtime to run some errands. Rowan took the train to Paris two days ago and he misses her. So Jude finds a florist on Google, then uses his corporate Sony subscription to layer into a droid in the Avenue Montaigne. He buys a bunch of flowers and carries them to the pavement cafe she’s stopped at to collect her thoughts.
Even though they are 300 miles apart and connected only by photons and bits, there’s comfort in being able to be there in some way for just a moment. They’ll share a drink later.
He returns to work. The company is joining their colleagues in Tokyo this week. His connected atomiser occasionally lets calming scents ripple through the room; street sounds intrude once in a while, all shared by a thousand people in ten countries. Even though he’s only in L1, Jude feels that sense of connection again.
That evening, once Rowan has headed out for her night out with colleagues, Jude goes deep into the immersion he started experimenting with yesterday. It takes him somewhere totally else for a couple of hours, before winding down to a layer cut just after eleven. Tired out he goes to bed. Only two more days until the weekend.
Five layers of metaverse immersion
Jude accesses the metaverse at a number of layers. Each layer increases immersion, involving more technologies and requiring greater depth of integration with digital and physical service providers. One can think of these as filters that we will apply over real life to customise it to our needs. These layers are:
- Layer 0 - unaugmented real life. The metaverse is ambient, interacting through sounds, smells and public visual displays
- Layer 1 - using a phone, PC or wearable. Additional immersion is made possible by ‘seeing’ the world through a screen or interacting with a wearable
- Layer 2 - worn augmented reality (AR) enabled by smart glasses, contact lens or other head-mounted device. This enables more persistent immersion by reducing or eliminating biomechanical awkwardness and discomfort
- Layer 3 - worn virtual reality (VR) enabled by a headset, enabling complete editing or modification of the world by virtue of direct vision being blocked
- Layer 4 - worn virtual reality, augmented by ‘wearing’ a physical avatar such as a bipedal robot, drone or similar machine and receiving haptic feedback. This level of immersion enables the physical world to be directly interacted with from within a virtual world
Within each layer he sees a variety of clips, artefacts inserted into reality to alter how Jude perceives the world. Some are very subtle, others represent a total subversion of reality.
Theming the world
Jude uses the metaverse to theme his world throughout his day. On his morning run he turns the important act of avoiding traffic into a game. An airline pops up to gently excite him with thoughts of travel to come. Later, characters from a game he’s playing with his friends appear in his real world. At work, his employer themes his workspace to help him feel part of a team that’s distributed all across the world.
There are some very overt revenue opportunities for consumer companies in these types of experiences. One can imagine homeware and beauty companies creating scent and ambient sound packages that create shared ambiences. Some may be able to turn this product positioning into a service such as the one Jude’s employer purchases. Monetising this may be as simple as a subscription or something based on outcomes for employers, other brands or end customers themselves.
Integrating characters from popular IPs into real life suggests opportunities to sell either theme packs for closed ecosystems or NFTs that can appear across multiple ecosystems. Direct purchase of items and skins is well-established in the gaming market. In the metaverse these could be uni-directional (I can see them in my world) or multi-directional (they are associated with me or an environment that I create). These could be priced differently, with bundling of physical and digital products being commonplace in some sectors. For example, in the tabletop wargame that Jude plays, he may have the option to buy products along with NFTs that enable him to use them in his virtual spaces or even in traditional video games.
World theming and editing is clearly also a powerful advertising channel and one that significantly extends the possibilities of ‘outdoor’ by enabling any part of the world to be branded or carry an offer. One can imagine that consumers will be able to opt out of layers with advertising content, likely for a fee. Curated lifestyle themes produced by influencers offer the latter a new source of income and brands softer ways of engaging.
These new options for customising the world need to be approached with some caution. Just as we are all free to choose the social feeds we subscribe to, the friends we listen to and the apps we use to navigate the real world, we should be free to customise our metaverse to suit our needs. But we need to be aware that invisible overlays could lead to even more extreme polarisation of opinion. It would be a dangerous world in which I see a police car drive past unembellished and the person next to me has the same vehicle engulfed in (virtual) flames and trailed by fake news about state control. Brands should be ready for a period of Wild West in which they can get away with a lot of things in the name of innovation and experimentation that they may later regret.
Retaining immersion in the metachannel
There are a number of points in Jude’s day in which he is in a different layer than someone with whom he’s interacting. This is inevitable in a world in which a metaverse is fully deployed. What is most important for experiences deployed into this heterogeneous environment is that immersion is retained for each participant.
For example, at the team meeting, Sanza is walking around the city and goes into a coffee shop. The metaverse enables her to order drinks for herself and for other team members who are physically distributed. This seemingly small moment of team bonding is actually deeply consequent for a successful metaverse. Greater immersion in digital interactions is the metaverse’s essential promise. It isn’t enough for some people to sip real coffee and others to merely playact. Breaking immersion like this is the narcotic equivalent of a bucket of ice water in the face.
Digitisation and vertical decoupling of supply chains to create interconnected service platforms will be essential to enable immersion-retaining business models. It is unrealistic for Pret to deliver a coffee anywhere in the UK within a matter of minutes. But it is possible for them to define the parameters for a coffee delivery that meets their standards, and to charge a premium to the purchaser. Alternatively, a retailer or digital aggregation platform could offer an endless menu via Layer 2. Sanza orders for each of her teammates via an overlaid menu or voice control while she’s choosing her own IRL.
People talking about omnichannel experiences often mistook this term to mean that the customer could buy anything they wanted from any channel at any location at any time. Metachannel experiences will in fact require this type of optionality if they are to provide something beyond novelty. In a metachannel experience a business must be able to serve a customer any product or service in any physical, virtual or augmented reality channel at any time. Furthermore, the brand must be able to make that experience cohesive for metaverse moments involving multiple consumers, whatever layer they might be in at that moment. Making this seamless will also require extensive use of AI to understand, unprompted, the nature of the desired outcome and facilitate a suitable transaction from the available options. The only place in which a business that is mainly dependent on human decision-making will be able to survive is at the edge of a fully-deployed metaverse.
Although technically complex from a hardware perspective, Jude’s use of a wearable robot to purchase flowers and deliver them to Rowan is actually relatively simple by comparison.
Curating reverie
By excluding or editing aspects of the real world, the metaverse enables escapist experiences on par with narcotics. Virtual reality is already a proven game-changer in treatment of severe brain injuries for just this reason. Unbound from the physics of real life, VR can render patterns and immersive games that stimulate different areas of the brain than we usually actively use.
Part of the challenge of conceiving the metaverse as an entertainment format is that we instinctively think about it replicating experiences we can have in real life. We think about taking a dream holiday or the set of our favourite movie. But this is very limited versus what would be possible if we combined biometric sensors with AI and the same kind of feedback sensors described in the story. Just as drugs open up new combinations of memories and inner feelings to create wild hallucinations, immersive metaverses can create shared reveries that are utterly unpredictable from today’s vantage point and utterly compelling to the audience. They are as alien to us as the latest Star Wars movie in IMAX format would be to a seventeenth century theatre-goer. We simply lack the vocabulary to describe the experience.
Consumer products are interesting in this context. Because they are mass market products, they provide known, familiar outcomes to the consumer. If those feelings could be captured in algorithmic format then it is conceivable that they could be used as ingredients in personalised metaverse entertainment. This might be as customised foods, beverages or apparel that fit with a particular moment or further down the long arc as microservices that a metaverse experience director might incorporate into an immersive reverie.
A distinct set of software tools would be required to enable such a thing. For example, a creator is likely to want to make the audience feel what they are feeling from a reverie. Therefore they may need a metaverse compiler, which takes their biometric feedback during the experience and translates it for other users. In this way multiple people can experience the same hallucination together, each getting different stimuli but the same shared feeling. Brands in effect become libraries of stimuli, providing foundational ‘layer 0’ reference points for the layers above them. For the consumer they are also candles of familiarity amidst an explosion of novel feelings, enabling them to access and engage with the experience, just as Jude’s content feed blends familiar music with news and work-related information to help him absorb the latter.
Summary
A widely-distributed metaverse will open up new opportunity spaces for consumer product and services companies. Accessing them will require them to fully commit to digitisation of their business models and operating models. Market dynamism and complexity mean that it will be impossible to compete without differentiating ability to develop modern software and algorithms, access to rich, topical and real time data and a decision-making culture that makes best use of these assets.
Despite the challenges, metaverse models bring the opportunity to take conventional consumer business models and turn them into digitally-enabled horizontal models. The latter have greater scaling potential as they are platforms woven into a large range of business models across the ecosystem.
For food service businesses, this means becoming distributed experiential service platforms (DESP) that enable other businesses to maintain immersion in their own experiences. Food and beverage businesses provide the ingredients behind these services in the physical world and potentially in the digital. The latter could extend as far as selling their insights into cognitive responses to different products that can be remixed in digital experiences or, more prosaically, data about tastes and preferences in different markets that enable the same feeling to be shared by a disparate group.
Hospitality and leisure businesses will build distributed digital tourism models that offer consumers escapism on demand. These are more likely to supplant or supplement the escapism that consumers get from social media today than replace the traditional holiday. Even bringing an unexpected pop of the Las Vegas Strip to a dreary London winter commute might brighten someone’s day, as might having a meeting in the depths of a Malaysian jungle. Providing bursts of escapist joy as a service is a logical extension of the curation that countless concierges and experience designers do on a daily basis. This opportunity is also open to homewares and durables businesses, who will need to pivot to think about digital as well as physical stages for their products.
In the above ways and likely many others, the metaverse is a continuation of the great decoupling that began with the software industry. This trend began when information was decoupled from physical containers by the internet, then computers were decoupled from physical connections by mobile and control of objects was decoupled from the objects themselves as software ate the world. Most recently, through blockchain, ownership of objects has been decoupled from their physical location. Now the metaverse decouples manifestation of objects from their location. We can edit the world in real time and share that edited view with others without the need for intermediary communication.
As Albert Einstein famously put it, ‘reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one’. Now that we can control that illusion in an utterly convincing manner, the question is what to do with it.
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