Seoul is entering the metaverse
A new kind of placemaking
In November last year, the Seoul Metropolitan Government announced that it would be bringing the city into the metaverse, creating a virtual communication landscape for the people of Seoul to connect with their facilities, services, and neighbours. In doing so, Seoul will become the first city in the world to enter the metaverse.
But what does that actually mean? Well, for a start, it will have a large bearing on ‘place’.
In creating ‘Metaverse Seoul’, the city’s government is committing to much more than just a new communications platform. Within the metaverse, residents and business owners will wander the streets as avatars, interacting with each other, and interacting with digitised city spaces. In essence, they will experience Seoul as a digital place.
As Seoul sets out on a plan that will bring citizens closer – using the metaverse to overcome the constraints of time, space and language – the project raises an important question: are people’s needs different in the metaverse? and should digitised public spaces look fundamentally different from their analogue counterparts?
In the Seoul based ‘Meta-Horizons’ project, Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) are seeking to answer these questions.
Using the metaverse to shape the built environment
Throughout ZHA’s thought-provoking project, it’s made clear that the metaverse and the built environment should not be seen as mutually exclusive. While one often maps on to the other, the two can also support each other in the design and development stages of complex projects.
In the built environment, for example, virtual reality (VR) tools can help to visualise spaces before they’re built – understanding how people will move around, interact with each other, and spend time in the space. Such tools are already in use in live projects today:
ZHA-Social has created a tool they name ‘workplaces.ai.’, which uses VR and artificial intelligence to visualise planned office spaces, analysing a range of factors including workplace design, spatial organisation, and optimised routes through the office. This allows office spaces to be designed against a ‘social performance indicator’ – ensuring the best design for a happy and effective workforce.
ZHA+A+I has created a series of dynamic analytics tools, which can be used to understand the impact of architectural decision-making on residential floorplans. In real-time, users can make changes to proposed digital floorplans, and receive instant feedback on how light, visibility, air-flow, and sense of space might be affected.
ZHA is currently developing plans for the ambitious ‘Unicorn Island’ project in Chengdu, China. When complete, this development is designed to attract the world’s biggest technology companies (‘unicorns’), and will therefore be a playground of cutting-edge office and place technologies. To plan and fine-tune the project, ZHA have conducted extensive metaverse visualising, including use of an immersion room.
Using the built environment to shape the metaverse
“The metaverse is the future of the internet, and it is architects, rather than graphic designers, who will design its sites and spaces.”
If anything were to prove that the metaverse is a place and not just a tool, it’s the continued role of architects in these spaces’ design. Indeed, while architects may use elements of the metaverse to visualise built environments, they also incorporate learnings from the built environment into their plans for the metaverse:
SwissQuote VR’s Real Time Visualisation is a metaverse platform designed for bankers and stock traders to interact and network. While the interface incorporates virtual quirks – like displaying another member’s ‘CV’ upon meeting – the space in which they move around is carefully designed as an architecturally-sound, purpose-built auditorium. In fact, this auditorium became a precursor to the proposal presented for SwissQuote’s Headquarters in 2019.
On 2 May, the Seoul Institute of Technology piloted its first showing of Seoul’s metaverse, allowing users to explore a hyper-realistic digitisation of real places in the city: Seoul City Hall, Seoul Plaza, and SIT itself. As a direction of travel, it is clear that Metaverse Seoul will share architectural and visual cues with ‘Analogue Seoul’.
The future is digital
Through the immersive development of VR, the world has been brought a step closer to experiencing the digital world as a place, not a tool. The rise of the metaverse opens many opportunities and poses many challenges – and as the work of ZHA suggests, these are opportunities and challenges for placemakers.
As Seoul takes its first tentative steps into constructing a metaverse, the city must grapple with questions of local identity, wayfinding, mobility, and sense of place – this time answered through a digital lens. If the world is set to follow in Seoul’s footsteps, there is much to learn by observing the path that the city of Seoul carves out.
