Two giant names in the world of architecture and online media are now teaming up to take over the metaverse as Vice Media Group has announced a new partnership with Bjarke Ingels Group for a new virtual office space called the Viceverse.
The newly-opened space is hosted by the popular Decentraland platform where it will serve as a kind of virtual innovation lab for the company’s digital creative culture agency, Virtue.
Through its creation, the company says, Virtue will now be able to pursue innovative new ways of collaborating with clients that include brands like Coca-Cola and Beats by Dre.
“It's not about just getting in there and planting a flag, we wanted to do it in style with aesthetics and ideas when creating, so we teamed up with BIG,” creative director Morten Grubak told Campaign magazine. “It just made sense to make a space for ourselves where we can invite clients and collaborators to dip their toes in that space without actually doing a big-scale campaign. That’s why we set up an office.”
“We're going to have two floors to begin with,” he continued, “and a secret one as well. And then we can upgrade with a new floor as the project develops because the building is designed to be 12 floors tall. Visually, it is aesthetically by far the most beautiful open metaverse platform, even though it still looks like a PlayStation One game.”
BIG’s design for the Viceverse centers around a parametric wayfinding tunnel set within a large cube that offers users a first-floor NFT gallery, followed then by a program of interactive spaces where pitch meetings and peer-mentorship can be equally conducted in real-time.
Viceverse also has space specifically reserved for experimentations with DAOs and Web 3.0 technology. Virtue’s new co-president and chief creative officer Chris Garbutt says they are already looking to expand within the space, and that opportunities presented by its current form are only the beginning in terms of discovery and experimentation.
“It’s a bit like the Wild West,” he observed. “Another colleague of ours talks about sort of going into frontier with a tent and a horse, and you're going to get a bit fucked up along the way. So a lot of our clients are experimenting and dipping their toes in the water, but others are a little bit ahead and recognize that they have to be in [the metaverse].”
11 Comments
Heheh, the Dezeen thread noted that this was a rehash of one of BIG's previous work - same digital model at lower LOD.
Not architecture.
I'm all for weird designs that push the boundaries of "space" and "material" in a world without gravity or budget - why not buildings that move and grow in real time, spaces without walls or fixed palletes, and other wild ideas that are beyond my imagination. But to see BIG rehash an existing real world design is just so ... ugh.
Sure, 3d space with no rules sounds like a lot of fun, but when I am fucking around in Minecraft it's also not architecture.
if you want real architecture in the digital realm check out surfing in counterstrike
The meta verse will prove that humans are just as dumb in their wildest dreams.
I am afraid that this will further isolate us from the natural world and we will continue to lose more of it to misuse and abuse.
This is the natural world.
V irtual is artificial.
Reminds me of this video on door design in games: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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