Backbones and Blueprints: Metaverse Futures and Scaling the Metaverse

The metaverse, as imagined and articulated in so many places already, is a complex open system with multiple goals and many interconnected relationships between technological, human, and environmental components.

Understanding what impact these relationships might have on the development of the metaverse - and how the metaverse might bring changes in these relationships—is challenging, but necessary for safe and sustainable futures.

Across one or both of these workshops, you will explore how to think about the metaverse as a system that can be shaped for a future we all want to see, by considering the multiple possible futures of the metaverse and what a metaverse at scale could look like.

Workshop 1: Metaverse Futures: Preparing for different possible metaverse futures by telling better stories and building better systems in the present.

• Date: Tuesday, 30th August 2022
• Time:11:00am - 12:00pm
• Location: Meta HQ Sydney |Level 41, Tower 2 International Towers, 200 Barangaroo Avenue, Barangaroo, Sydney | “Zooper Dooper” seminar room

In this hands-on learning experience you will:

• Focus on challenges and opportunities the metaverse may present.
• Consider and co-design different potential future scenarios specific to a few areas of interest surrounding the metaverse .
• Take part in facilitated group activities to learn and apply fundamental cybernetic concepts.

At the end of the session, you will be able to:

• Imagine and articulate multiple visions of the metaverse informed by a cybernetic approach to feedback cycles, people, technology, and the environment
• Discuss the possibility and preferability of different possible metaverse futures

Workshop 2: Scaling the Metaverse: Exploring the link between the history and future of building complex communications infrastructure.

• Date: Tuesday, 30th August 2022
• Time: 1:00pm - 2:30pm
• Location: Meta HQ Sydney | Level 41, Tower 2 International Towers, 200 Barangaroo Avenue, Barangaroo, Sydney | “Zooper Dooper” seminar room

In this learning experience you will:

• Explore the 19th century Australian Overland Telegraphy Line (OTL) as a case study of a “cybernetic system” with broad impacts across human, technological and ecological systems.
• Develop important and relevant tools and questions for designing, building, running, regulating the metaverse.

At the end of the session, you will be able to:

• Apply insights from historical communication systems to thinking about new communication systems
• Articulate a wide range of impacts the metaverse will have on systems
• Imagine new tools, structures, or approaches that need to be built to scale the metaverse well

No specific prior skills are required, just come prepared to share your expertise and point of view.