5 Principles to Guide Design in the Metaverse

Want to ensure the metaverse lives up to its promise? That requires listening to and learning from your community, unleashing your imagination, and letting what’s worked, and hasn’t worked, guide us as we create new, immersive experiences.
While the metaverse is a term used in a variety of ways and even taking on different meanings, for us at Roblox (dubbed “the nearest and most expansive vision of the metaverse”) it’s about human co-experience – people sharing experiences in immersive 3D spaces.
Morgan Tucker is Head of Product, Music, Brands & Education at Roblox. This piece is part of CoinDesk’s Metaverse Week.

Two key factors are critical. These experiences are social. You do them with other people, not on your own. And they’re immersive. That doesn’t mean you have to go out and buy expensive hardware or fancy headsets, but rather that your mind’s eye is in the experience. You feel immersed, like you are really there.

Instead of passively reading textbooks or watching videos about ancient Rome, you actively step into an immersive 3D recreation and explore the city and its culture with your friends. Or instead of shopping on a site to choose your next pair of Vans, you walk into a virtual Vans skatepark, quickly customize and put on your new virtual sneakers, and then have fun practicing skateboarding tricks with your friends and other like-minded skateboarders.

Having created a vast array of experiences, from concerts to Webby-award winning conceptual fashion exhibitions visited by millions, we’ve identified best practices to keep in mind. In addition to democratizing and broadening the reach of people’s favorite real-life experiences to a more global audience in the metaverse, we can improve on these experiences thanks to the power of collective creativity.

When approaching a new metaverse project, here are five core principles for designing memorable and truly immersive experiences:

1. The metaverse starts with the best parts of reality
2. Give metaverse users agency and autonomy
3. Show, don’t tell
4. Optimize for emotional impact
5. Strong vision weathers technical adversity

Source : coindesk