The Metaverse of sound

The term “metaverse” is often associated with visual experiences - virtual reality, immersive video games, and social platforms like Second Life and even Roblox. We often imagine some sort of early nineties dream vision of an immersive world that’s almost as real as our own or augmented scenarios where the thin line of reality is blurred by helpful visual elements from the digital realm. But the end result often falls short of that and the experience is found lacking.

But what about a metaverse of sound?

Think about it. A virtual visual world needs a lot of hardware. Special glasses that due to their helmet-like nature makes us look less than cool or small thin glasses that only give us a fraction of a display. And still not making us look cool.

So what would a soundbased Metavrse or augmented reality be like? In a way we are already there. We are all, most of us, already living in a world of sound. An augmentation of reality that is portable and easily acquired to most people and that is partly powered by the greatest visualization hardware known to man.

I’m talking about podcasts, audiobooks and good old fashioned radio. Audio experiences that are made available to us with the mundane technologies of yesteryears like headphones and earpods and that are augmented further by the raw power that is the human mind. I still think there is a lost opportunity here to be able to share an experience with others. We see them everywhere we go, people just like you or me, wrapped up in their own world but physically inhabiting the same visual world as all us others. They have rich experiences listening to music, learning new languages or visiting other worlds. Sadly all on their own.

The experience is not shared and it’s really hard to join in. Not that it’s something that we necessarily want. I think most of us like the alone time and to enjoy our Podcast on our own but

The first thought that comes to mind is to build a parallel reality of sound that we all can inhabit as an art project or maybe in the realm of cultural heritage. (Shoutout to my old employer The National Heritage Board of Sweden).

While walking around in a city, like Stockholm, you could quite easily project a world of sound on top of the real world to let all who want to visit it to enter into an augmented historical world. Voices and sounds of the past could be placed spacely where they belong. Hear sounds from the harbor of 1920, listen to a recording about or even with the person depicted in the statue before you and wander off to figure out what that interesting sound in the distance is.

No need to start a recording on your own. The recording is always playing and others hear the same thing as you, at the same time in the same place. Let the art speak to you directly in the most direct sense of the word possible and make that experience communal.

Besides that, what can we use it for? Not everything is art and culture after all.

Well, assistant and directions come to mind. While listening to your favorite Podcast a level of meta reality could be allowed to slip through and inform you that the tunnel ahead is closed off for maintenance. Or where to go next while working in a warehouse.

Maybe you should be made aware that the shop that you just passed has the items in your shopping list on sale right at this moment or even that they are having a sale in general. We could even give the manikins in the shop window a voice. (As creepy as that is).

Could this be used to augment the world for people that have lost their eyesight?

My aunt has been navigating the world for most of her life using her ears, by touch, a kain and a guide dog. This could give a whole new level of assistance as well as communicating things that we that have eyesight often take for granted like the fact that the road is closed and pedestrians should take another way around.

What other uses could there be?

Well how about getting information about the other people in the room? This person is the CEO of this and that and so on. Mabe pricing information or nutritional data about the product you hold in your hand in the store or instructions on how to operate the machinery before you on your first day on the job.

The possibilities are endless.

So how can we harness this frankly feasible and fully realizable idea based on readily available technology and make something out of it? Well I have decided to conduct a few experiments over the next couple of weeks to figure that out.