Public Relations in the Metaverse

Is the Metaverse the future of PR?

This blog art­icle will explore poten­tial oppor­tun­it­ies and chal­lenges for the PR industry in the Metaverse.

I’ve been work­ing with imple­ment­a­tion strategies for new tech­no­lo­gies since 2007, and I see the poten­tial of the Metaverse. But I can also see many challenges.

Should the com­mu­nic­a­tions industry dive into the Metaverse — or take it slow to begin with?

Here we go:

Entering a Mixed Reality

I spent part of this sum­mer in Dalarna, a pic­tur­esque and rur­al part of Sweden. My broth­er-in-law brought his Oculus Quest 2, the VR gam­ing plat­form, and we played around. 

My son, who is six years old, took to the tech­no­logy as if it was the most nat­ur­al thing in the world — des­pite the head­set being far too big for him.

The Metaverse, a mer­ger of vir­tu­al worlds, is begin­ning to enter our lives.

Wikipedia describes the Metaverse as “a col­lect­ive vir­tu­al shared space, cre­ated by the con­ver­gence of vir­tu­ally enhanced phys­ic­al real­ity and phys­ic­ally per­sist­ent vir­tu­al space, includ­ing the sum of all vir­tu­al worlds, aug­men­ted real­ity, and the Internet.”

The poten­tial of the Metaverse is noteworthy:

“Imagine walk­ing down the street. Suddenly, you think of a product you need. Immediately next to you, a vend­ing machine appears, filled with the product and vari­ations you were think­ing of. You stop, pick an item from the vend­ing machine, it’s shipped to your house, and then con­tin­ue on your way.

Next, ima­gine a hus­band and wife. The hus­band offers to go to the store, but the wife can­’t remem­ber the name and type of product she needs. Her brain-com­puter inter­face device recog­nises it for her and trans­mits a link to her hus­band’s device, along with what stores and aisles it’s loc­ated in.”
Source: The Metaverse Is Coming And It’s A Very Big Deal (Forbes).

Gamifying Business

Games will soon be indis­tin­guish­able from real­ity if we main­tain even a frac­tion of our cur­rent devel­op­ment speed.

With his now almost archetyp­ic­al first prin­ciple think­ing, Elon Musk poin­ted out that, not long ago, com­puter games used to look like Pong. Today, games can immerse the gamer in vast and photoreal­ist­ic open worlds. 

Musk goes even fur­ther to ask, “How do we know that this has­n’t already happened?” According to him — we don’t.

“The strongest argu­ment for us being in a sim­u­la­tion prob­ably is the fol­low­ing: Forty years ago we had Pong. Like two rect­angles and a dot. That was what games were. Now, forty years later, we have photoreal­ist­ic 3D sim­u­la­tions with mil­lions of people play­ing sim­ul­tan­eously, and it’s get­ting bet­ter every year. Soon we’ll have vir­tu­al real­ity, aug­men­ted real­ity.“
Source: Elon Musk: ‘We’re likely liv­ing in a sim­u­la­tion and Pong is proof’ (Wired).

A bit closer to our poten­tial base real­ity, I’ve hypo­thes­ised what hap­pens to PR when the online world ceases to be flat. Almost all of our exist­ing cor­por­ate com­mu­nic­a­tion has been two-dimen­sion­al; it was two-dimen­sion­al before the Internet and has remained two-dimen­sion­al with the Internet.

The idea is that we’ll see a grow­ing num­ber of applic­a­tions for vir­tu­al real­it­ies (VR), aug­men­ted real­it­ies (AR), and 360-degree envir­on­ments. These real­it­ies will then begin to merge into mixed reality. 

Does the Metaverse seem to be the logic­al con­tinu­ation of that trend — per­haps even a brave new world to counter the Splinternet?

Read also: The Splinternet: Mankind’s Battle for Internet Control

The End of the Flat Web

The Earth is round, and we should­n’t worry about fall­ing off the edge. The web, how­ever, has been con­sidered flat and best viewed through 2D sur­faces. ¹Some people believe that the Earth is flat, too. Good luck with that, by the way.

If the ceases to be flat, things are going to be different.

As com­mu­nic­at­ors and PR pro­fes­sion­als, we struggle with con­quer­ing a flat web. We tend to think of the online space as a large print magazine. We still talk about pages, even.

But there are lots of ideas from lots of people of how we all could put these new tech­no­lo­gies to use:

It’s safe to say that we can only begin to ima­gine the vari­ous use cases we’ll see emerge from mixed real­ity technologies.

Facebook and Apple as Prime Movers

With Facebook mak­ing ser­i­ous moves into the Metaverse and per­sist­ent rumours about Apple releas­ing AR glasses, it’s not a stretch to ima­gine that the age of avatar­ism will increase its depth.

Immersion is power­ful. “Form fol­lows function.”

Still, how­ever fun and excit­ing the Metaverse is already prom­ising, espe­cially for kids today, we must remem­ber that occupy­ing men­tal band­width isn’t everything. 

Artificial restric­tion to con­serve men­tal band­width can be at odds with ask­ing users to immerse them­selves further.

Are Facebook and Apple’s strategies to push users towards total immer­sion good for us? Will we be exposed to unfore­seen men­tal health side effects? Are we crav­ing more social media pup­petry — or more authenticity?

Not Meta’s First Dance

We would be wise to remem­ber that the prom­ise of avat­rism has had its fair share of false starts.

Many down­loaded and played around with the app Layar, through which you could see a lay­er of digit­al con­tent on top of the phys­ic­al world. Augmentation was also some­thing Google took a stab at with their Google Glass pro­ject, but only by using a small view­find­er in the upper corner of the user­’s visu­al field.

Meron Gribetz foun­ded Meta Vision in 2014. The com­pany had great ambi­tions and a work­ing pro­to­type. Funding ran out, and the com­pany had to close shop in 2019. It’s not known which com­pany bought Meta Vision’s assets.

“The story of Meta’s demise is as much about the aug­men­ted and vir­tu­al-real­ity industry as it is about hard­ware star­tups, their founders, and their often futile attempts to com­pete with bil­lion-dol­lar com­pan­ies.“
Source: The Story Behind Meta, the AR Startup That Just Had Its Assets Sold to a Mystery Buyer (Variety).

With com­pan­ies like Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft inves­ted in the race, the Metaverse is a much more tan­gible pro­ject than it was for a small Silicon Valley star­tup in 2014.

Focus on Comms, Not Tech

Against this back­drop, I worry that brands will become too applic­a­tion-cent­ric for the Metaverse. 

Imagine a real-estate brand run­ning apart­ments and offices. The brand might deploy applic­a­tions from vir­tu­al tours for pro­spects to aug­men­ted envir­on­ments for its com­mun­al areas. Such early devel­op­ments will likely be costly, and the res­ults will likely be rel­at­ively poor from a user perspective.

But we know from past tech­no­lo­gic­al advance­ments that new applic­a­tions tend to be com­mod­it­ised quickly. In some instances, the applic­a­tions are freem­i­um, even. For example, WordPress is power­ing about 37% of all web­sites (62% of all CMS sys­tems) globally.

As a PR pro­fes­sion­al today, I often advise against devel­op­ing avant-garde applic­a­tions for nov­el tech­no­lo­gies. Sure, there won’t be a short­age of cool PR ideas for such applic­a­tions, but we should be mind­ful of play­ing to our pro­fes­sion­al strengths — and devel­op­ing VR- and AR applic­a­tions isn’t one of them.

However tech­no­lo­gic­ally determ­ined our soci­et­ies may be, tech-focused com­pan­ies and star­tups will surely volun­teer to do most of the heavy lift­ing of devel­op­ing these new tech­no­lo­gies, driv­ing adop­tion rates, and pivot­ing into sus­tain­able use cases. Tech com­pan­ies will do all this while fiercely racing each oth­er against rap­id price drops.

Agencies have already pitched ideas for devel­op­ing incred­ible new VR- and AR applic­a­tions. Somehow, we’ve been down this road sev­er­al times before. 

I know that I sure have.

Early Adoption vs High Entry Costs

When should we, as PR pro­fes­sion­als, trans­ition into the Metaverse? 

In the early 2010s, I helped sev­er­al brands devel­op new user com­munity applic­a­tions. These applic­a­tions included gami­fic­a­tion fea­tures, but devel­op­ing these plat­forms required sub­stan­tial fin­an­cial investments. 

A few years later, we could buy white-labelled user com­munit­ies for a dime and a dol­lar per month. 

Today, basic imple­ment­a­tion is often a 5‑minute pro­cess of sign­ing up, upload­ing a logo, and pick­ing out your brand col­ours. And there are no short­ages of avail­able soft­ware sold on the cheap as services.

When Apple releases an AppStore for their forth­com­ing AR glasses, there will be sub­stan­tial PR oppor­tun­it­ies, for instance. 

Will invest­ments in devel­op­ing early applic­a­tions out­weigh the bene­fits of doub­ling down on the con­tents of your com­mu­nic­a­tion? It’s an import­ant con­sid­er­a­tion that deserves priority.

But as a guid­ing prin­ciple, organ­isa­tions should adopt new tech­no­lo­gies when they improve cor­por­ate com­mu­nic­a­tions — and when imple­ment­a­tion makes busi­ness sense.

If noth­ing else, com­mu­nic­a­tion is use­less when leav­ing the mar­ket behind.