Key points:
I talk about the potential of virtual reality and virtual worlds to improve language teaching.
That application requires software tailored to it, and it’s unreasonable to expect the same virtual world that runs games and provides for shopping to do that as well.
I argue that, if the Metaverse comes together, it will be as a cluster — a soldered-together mass of many virtual worlds.
I received my master’s degree from a Korean women’s university. I’m neither Korean nor a woman. It’s a long story.
The degree was in “TESOL,” which is essentially just foreign language education where the target language is English. Through study and practice, I came to understand that learning a language is much closer to learning to dance than it is to learning biology or history. Language knowledge is composed mostly of skills to be practiced. It’s not just a collection of facts and information to memorize
As such, a classroom is just about the worst place to go about learning a language. The students are arranged like eggs in a carton, sitting in silence, facing the teacher as he explains things like how to conjugate verbs or the difference between “they’re,” “their,” and “there.” Imagine the absurdity of learning to dance that way, and you begin to understand why so many people come awar from years of language instruction with no actual proficiency. Students need to be able to interact, using the language to accomplish different things in different contexts. With extensive practice, guided corrections, and admittedly a little direct instruction as well, the students gradually became good at it.
Virtual reality, then, becomes a much better option. In a moment, two students could be role-playing a cashier and a customer, learning how to politely interact in the real world, surrounded by a virtual grocery store. Later in the lesson, they find themselves in a restaurant as waiter and diner, perhaps interacting with AI-controlled “non-player characters” acting out their virtual roles around them. The utility in VR for acquiring skills — including languages — is just immense.
There’s potential here. But, as a former language teacher, I know I need certain things from a virtual environment to do my job well. These would include:
the ability to bring up visual aids
the ability to change a student’s environment to suit a scenario of interaction
a method of displaying and storing key points or notes for the lesson such that students retain them. Think of this as a virtual white board.
integration of my students’ records so as to review grades, mark attendance, jot down notes about performance, and so on
a method of contacting senior staff in case something is needed or a serious issue arises
a clock or timer
In short, I would really need a virtual world application designed to suit the function of teaching. This is a use case for the Metaverse that I’m familiar with due to my education and work experience, but I imagine the same is true for many people hoping to accomplish tasks virtually. An accountant will need quite different functionality than a therapist, who needs something totally different from a musical performer. Just as not all people use the same software for their purposes, not all people are likely to be in the same virtual environments.
Whether as a result of popular sci-fi or the influence of Mark Zuckerberg, the model that has dominated popular discourse is that of The Metaverse-with-a-capital-M. A single virtual environment in which we can perform all of our activities online. It is a monolithic conception — an alloy of all the utilities anyone might need in virtual space to form one beautiful, shining digital whole.
And developers of the various metaverse platforms thus far created seem to have taken this paradigm on board. Announcements of new projects are so strikingly broad. It’s as if they want people to be able to do anything there. I learned of a new one earlier today: Everdome. Have a look at the use cases presented on their website.
Among other things, Everdome is positioning itself to be a place to game, shop, meet your doctor, engage in social media interactions, and even to use AR to check how you’d look with a new tattoo — all in the context of a near-future sci-fi environment on the planet Mars. It’s incredibly ambitious.
I only single out Everdome because they are the most explicit with regard to this aspect of metaverse development culture. They are not alone. Somnium Space provides nine use cases for their product on the FAQ section of their website, none of which are particularly specific. Decentraland keeps their use case proposition to one, purposely ambiguous sentence: “anything like static 3D scenes to more interactive applications or games.” In terms of software, what couldn’t that be?
It’s not as if there is no reason to make something that has a variety of uses. Buffets exist. So do Swiss Army Knives. But the food at a buffet is never that great, and the scissors in your Swiss Army knife will drive you insane with frustration. Quality almost always comes from focus.
If “The Metaverse” is to come together, it seems likelier to me to be built of innumerable, limited-use-case virtual environments. It will not be a sleek monolith, but instead a chaotic, interconnected cluster, welded together in many interesting ways. It will still make sense to say “The Metaverse” to describe the whole mass of it all, but one could just as easily discuss all of its constituent parts, much like how websites, social media, apps, emails, and a million other things come together to make the virtual tangle we call “the Internet.”
I wish more Metaverse projects specialized. Virtual worlds are incredibly difficult to build, requiring years of development to do anything reasonably well. Ask the gaming industry if you doubt this. Their development cycles span years, often only arriving at their alpha stage by the time they reach their originally stated ship date. Imagine the difficulty of trying to make one that does significantly more than run a game. Add enough functions, and it reaches a point where it simply becomes unreasonable. How can one team, no matter how large or well funded, produce something that serves the needs of gamers, teachers, doctors, brands, and more?
I can only speculate as to why this has been the approach so far. Perhaps it’s due to the popular, Zuck-fi conception of a Metaverse. Perhaps it’s out of a fear of losing potential users by specifying what their project is to be used for. I suspect that it comes from a deeper desire to make something revolutionary, rather than something just “really good.” An excess of ambition. A thirst to be a real “disruptor.”
Regardless of the cause, I don’t think this is an effective strategy for reaching mass adoption. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, developers should give us a reason to enter their virtual world — something we can do there that we can’t quite do anywhere else. Make it work beautifully for that purpose, and we will come. We will spend money there. Naturally and of its own accord, when several such spaces exist, someone will develop a convenient way to transverse them. Only through that joining can we finally have a workable metaverse — the Metaverse*.*