Lately the news constantly talks about the impending metaverse, virtual reality, and the billionaires who plan to advertise to us as we sleep in our headsets. I have not been wildly excited. I don’t wish to spend all my time immersed in a virtual world, and I find the idea of it distressing. But today I watched some videos that Christoph Niemann made in 2018 and got more excited about the concept of virtual spaces than I have been in a while....
I was leafing through the UCSB MAT program website and checking out some of the students' work there, and randomly clicked on Mengyu Chen’s website. He mostly seems to do things with VR and AR, but I really loved some of his work on “Objects”, particularly the “Misanthropist”. https://www.mengyuchen.com/object/Misanthropist It’s a stool that runs away from you. The video really helps to illustrate it. It’s not perfect, but I think it a brilliant project....
I haven’t been super happy about the idea of living in a metaverse world, I’ll be totally honest. I mean, I like designing the spaces I live in and sometimes wish that my computer felt more like an environment that I create (I would give a lot to have a Material You style UI for my laptop), but I really don’t like the sort of video game uncanny valley environments....
Lately I can’t stop thinking about workspaces. Rooms. Buildings. Mental Spaces. In a lot of ways, my primary workspace these days is my Notebook. This is the one I’m using right now: It’s a wonderfully permissive workspace in a lot of ways – the laws of organization are flexible and made up by me; the laws of physics can bend for the subjects on the pages; and it is crucially low-stakes, comfortable, and easy to work in....