Empathy and Coexistence in the Metaverse
The dust has settled on the Fall 2023 semester at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. And with that we wrapped up our third cohort of Metaverse Design, a mix of juniors and seniors from the Interaction Design program. For this semester, the creative prompt for capstone projects focused on bringing a solution mindset to our increasingly fragmented world — “How might we use the metaverse to advocate for tolerance and empathy, bringing a sense of peace to global communities?” Read on to learn more about what we covered in the class and how each team of students brought to life their version of a metaverse that promotes empathy and coexistence in the metaverse.
Class Structure
This is the third year that we have offered this class. This time we had fourteen students with varying degrees of 3D experience ranging from none to awareness of Unity game engine. Neil Blevins and I co-taught the class assisted by an amazing group of guest speakers.
The class consists of four interleaved learning streams: concepts, hands-on, projects and guest lectures. These are carefully curated so that each modality builds on the others.
In terms of concepts, we start from a clear interaction oriented definition of the metaverse, present the metaverse design framework and key technical underpinnings of the metaverse that directly influence design decisions. We relate these design concepts to key aspects of interaction design, including personas, journey maps and visual prototyping. We also build on students’ understanding in important concepts from established approaches to level design, character development and game mechanics. In addition to covering key concepts in class lectures, this year we were also able to share reading materials with the students (more on that below) that were followed up by engaging class discussions.
In terms of hands-on learning and tools, we settled on Blender for 3D asset creation and Unreal for prototyping 3D interactions. Projects such as grey box level design and Mixamo character creation allows students to immediately combine concepts, their hands-on learning and their existing knowledge of design fundamentals, such as shape and color theory, to immediately bring creativity and originality to their classwork. Most of the projects are done in teams that provides an opportunity to sharpen skills in collaboration, presentation and critiques. The capstone project takes up the last eight weeks of the class and provides an opportunity for the students to pull all the ideas together in the service of a specific creative goal.
Guest lectures are an important element that allows students to connect what they are learning and doing in the class with the realities of studio work and real projects. They are introduced to cutting edge aspects of current developments in metaverse design and delivery. A very special thanks to all our guest speakers including Jade Kwan, Ian Steplowski, Morgan Tucker, Oren Haskins, Jean-Daniel LeRoy, Skylar Thomas, Sam Anderson, Barry Katz, Hilmar Koch, Ziah Fogel, Travis Kehler and Mahesh Ramasubhramanian.
Capstone Projects
Five teams interpreted the capstone prompt, “How might we use the metaverse to advocate for tolerance and empathy, bringing a sense of peace to global communities?”. We were blown away by the values, creativity and ingenuity the students tapped into and we hope you will too!
Anthill Culinary by Evette Cho, Andrew Choi, Anannya Kapur, Carolyn Kim
One of the first times that kids discover they are “different” is when they open their lunchbox at school and find themselves on the receiving end of statements like “Yuck, what is that?” Anthill Culinary turns learning about multicultural cuisines into a fun foraging and collaborative cooking game. Backstory: After earth is destroyed, ant-stornauts migrate to a future planet and remain committed to preserving Earth’s culture.
Workverse by Purva Gangur, Riya Gajeshwar, Sanjhal Jain, Vrushti Desai
Zoom fatigue is a permanent fixture of our post-Covid world. The social benefits of a colocated team working in the trenches together leads to deeper empathy and the ability for differing ideas to coexist leading to better product and biz decisions. What if a social-work metaverse was just a click away in Slack or Zoom? A space for serendipitous connections or even the ability to park a knotty problem and escape as a team to a de-stressing escape room.
Bloom by Amber Chung, Evelyn Lee, Jay Han, Stella Kim
Social media has led to communication bubbles where differing views are shouted down and users retrench to their own tribe. Could a social metaverse instead emphasize the power of knowledge through a collaborative, healing environment? Bloom uses the metaphor of a community garden to explore this question. Each tree in the garden represent different topics with fruits that represent voice recorded messages. Negative sentiments are dealt with as nature would, the fruits they represent rot and fall back to the ground.
Two Worlds Apart by Yitong Wang, Nakya Higgins
Two Worlds Apart is an open world game that challenges players to think about the legacy we will leave for the next generation. The core mechanics are rooted in the Chinese philosophy of Wuxing to restore balance to Earth, which has turned into a chemical wasteland. Large artifacts within the world represent the collective history of civilization, while smaller artifacts capture the personal, family story of the player’s avatar. #futureoflifein2099
Redlined Neighborhoods in Alameda County by Romy Aboudarham
The metaverse is employed as an immersive educational tool to help users understand the modern day realities of historically redlined neighborhoods in Oakland’s Alameda county. The experience begins by asking the user to enter their race and income. Based on extensive research, the user is spawned within a realistic, immersive 3D world streamed by the Cesium plugin for Unreal. This leads to a very visceral contrast between a tree lined neighborhood with birds chirping or buildings next to train tracks with not a park in sight. Spatial datums educate the user by sharing information such as the number of grocery vs liquor stores in a neighborhood.
Parting Thoughts
With each year we have taught this class, the tools and awareness around the metaverse continues to steadily increase. The students interest, deep understanding of immersive experiences and their capstone projects are a testament to that.
This is in contrast to the intense hype cycle associated with the metaverse that sharply waxes and wanes. The long running debate on whether it should be call spatial computing or VR-AR-XR-MR instead and the argument over whether a headset is required for immersion or is the screen a valid way to interact with the metaverse. When viewed from a user-centric interaction design perspective, it frankly doesn’t matter! What does matter is that it opens up a unique way to build digital experiences that leverage spatial and physical paradigms already native to users and rooted in centuries of industrial design and human factors work. Metaverses allow for novel collaboration spaces and an opportunity to rethink social interaction in a virtual context.
The metaverse has 600m monthly active users, most of them under the age of 13, and design needs to serve this community with intention and purpose, not as a passive bystander.
Neil and I are compiling our slides and reading materials into a book to make the learning approach of this class more widely accessible. We should have more to announce on that soon…We are very grateful to the students for being the first proof readers and their many questions and suggestions. Once again, a big thanks to our amazing guest lecturers for making time in their busy schedules to give back to the community. We would also like to thank Erin Malone, IXD chair, and fellow faculty members at CCA.
