by Karla Paniagua, Abril Chimal, Patricia López & Edgar Flores
The following paper describes the achievements of a foresight workshop designed and executed through 2022 to identify the long-term scenarios created by undergraduate students concerning the metaverse and the creative industries in Latin America. The working model recovers elements from Voros’s (2003) foresight approach, Bleecker’s Design-Fiction, Candy and Dunagan’s (2016) Experiential futures model, Kjaer’s (2014) macro trends model, and Bishop & Hines (2012) futures archetypes. The experience was facilitated by three teachers collaborating with 123 undergraduate students from CENTRO (Mexico City). The main conclusions include nine scenarios for the future of extended reality technologies in Latin America, presented through 2D, 3D, staging, and analog prototypes; optimization of participants’ knowledge about the Metaverse; improvement in participants’ understanding concerning the prospective process, among others.
Introduction
The entail between metaverse and education finds its precursor in the bond between digitality and education. We can refer to Reed Rinner’s Mars Mission (1995) project as a forerunner of the digital experience at the service of education and futures thinking. This case is interesting because of its pioneering nature, coeval with the metaverse concept (Stephenson,1992), and encompassing education, digitality, speculation, and foresight.
Regarding the pairing of metaverse and education, the paper Educational Applications of Metaverse: Possibilities and Limitations by Bokuyng et al. (2021) discuss the options of this combination and quote from Smart et al. (2007), these four factors of the metaverse; according to the variables augmented technologies & simulation, intimate & external experiences: Augmented reality, lifelogging, mirror worlds, and virtual worlds.
The following table (Figure 1. Metaverse Types) is taken from Exploration of Educational Possibilities by Four Metaverse Types in Physical Education by Ji-Eun Yu (2022) to clarify these modalities.
|
Classification |
Definition |
Reference |
| Augmented Reality | It is a technology that enhances work efficiency by augmenting virtual information in real space in real time and allowing users to interact with the augmented virtual information. | Kezim & Ozarslan, 2012 |
| Lifelogging | It is a technology that captures, stores and depicts everyday experiences and information about objects and people. | Gurrin & Smeaton, 2014 |
| Virtual Reality | It refers to a specific environment or situation or the technology itself that is like reality but is not real, created by artificial technology. | Wohlgenannt Simons & Stieglitz, 2020 |
| Mirror World | It is a representation of the real world in digital form. It attempts to map real-world structures in a geographically accurate way. it offers a utilitarian software model of real environments and their workings | Che & Lin & Lu, 2011 |
Figure 1. Metaverse Types
According to Zhang et al. (2002) in The Metaverse in Education: Definition, Framework, Features, Potential Applications, Challenges, and Future Research Topics, educational experiences in the metaverse requires the following technologies: High-speed communication and networks, computing technologies, analytical technologies, modeling and rendering technologies, interaction technologies, authentication technologies, intelligent wearable devices, avatars, non-player characters (NPC), learning scene, learning resource, learning logging,[1] learning analysis. In the authors’ own words, the metaverse helps assist blended learning, virtual experiment learning, language learning, competency-based education, and inclusive education, among other benefits.
Note that the experience we refer to does not occur in a virtual reality environment. It is an on-site workshop where participants develop systems thinking and long-term thinking skills, using various resources from foresight, design-fiction, and extended reality (RX) across the process.
The workshop was created in 2018 as part of the STEAM-Lab program. The working model created by alumni from the Design of Tomorrow CENTRO’s program (Paniagua, 2019) aims to reduce the gap between undergraduate students’ knowledge and skills when they conclude their minor. The content includes a foresight workshop whose theme changes yearly. In 2022, as part of a collaboration between CENTRO and Meta, the workshop’s theme was the intersection between the metaverse and the creative industries in Latin America. The educational experience, an intensive 8-hour sprint divided into four sessions, was carried out throughout the year with the guidance of three alumni of the postgraduate course in futures studies at the same institution. The teachers led 123 students from the minors of Architecture, Interior Architecture, Film and Television, Marketing and Advertising, Textile and Fashion Design, Industrial Design, Creative Computing, and Visual Communication. For the design of the workshop content, the following questions were designed:
- What is the metaverse, and what technologies are part of it?
- What could the future of the metaverse in Latin America look like based on the signals and critical challenges detected in the present?
- To which Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) (UN, 2023) do the challenges and concerns expressed in the scenario relate?
- How can we communicate this exploration’s outcome effectively and excitingly?
For this experience, we consider metaverse as “a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments” (Ball, 2022, p. 19). This concept distinguishes the entire metaverse (a territory where technological solutions converge) from virtual worlds, where Decentraland, Horizons Worlds, Minecraft, Roblox, Second Life, The Sandbox, etc., are platforms in a broader universe under development.
About the Workshop’s Model
The team developed the conceptual framework described in Figure 2—workshop’s stages and deliverables. The row at the table’s end represents the deliverables generated at each stage.
| Session 1. Inputs | Session 2. Foresight | Session 3. Outcomes | Session 4. Communicating |
|
Students identified the forces of change and wrote scenarios based on these drivers. | Students explored different technologies for recreating their written scenarios. | Communicate the results, giving and receiving feedback from their colleagues. |
| Signals and trends giga-maps | Futures scenarios (written) | Futures scenarios (multimedia) | Optimized scenarios |
Figure 2. Workshop’s stages and deliverables. Source: Own elaboration
To carry out session 4, the participants who developed virtual reality models worked with DALL-E 2, Photoshop, Rhino, Twinmotion, and Meta Quest 2 headsets. Alternatively, scenarios could be presented through 2D digital images, staging, 3D analogic souvenirs, audio, or any other form of representation that attendants found interesting to communicate the look and feel of the imagined future.
Ideation was guided according to Candy and Dunagan’s Experiential futures ladder (2017): the future is described as a setting where a scenario happens; a specific situation arises in this scenario, involving specific stakeholders and stuff. According to Candy, quoted by Candy and Dunagan:
[A]n experiential scenario is the manifestation of one or more fragments of an ostensible future world in any medium or combination of media including image, artifact, and performance. It involves designing and staging interventions that exploit the continuum of human experience, the full array of sensory and semiotic vectors, to enable a different and deeper engagement in thought and discussion about one or more futures than has traditionally been possible through textual and statistical means of representing scenarios (Section Experiential Futures, Design Fiction, and more, par 4).
The more tangible the scenario becomes through its mundane objects, the smoother the process of reflecting on the implications of the future, which otherwise becomes an undifferentiated, abstract mass that is difficult to grasp. Creating these objects of ordinary reality involves the practice of design fiction.
According to Bleecker et al., “design fiction is the practice of creating tangible and evocative prototypes from possible near future to help discover and represent the consequences of decision making” (2022, III). Thus, in the territory where tension is exercised between strange possibilities and science fiction, students imagine stories that they then shape with different languages. What is sought is that these mundane objects speak of possible futures, and what the participants consider feasible is revealing.
Results
To avoid mere extrapolation, it was explained to the participants that the scenarios must be written in sets to support contrast: what is the worst that could happen? What is the best that could happen? What could happen if a radical transformation occurs? and what could happen if the conditions continue without significant surprises? In this sense, the team chose the scenario archetypes that best resonated with their concerns about the future.
To write scenarios that became multimedia representations, the participants collected facts that allowed them to ask themselves what was causing the change. According to Bishop and Hines (2012, p. 189), those facts should be credible, novel, likely, impactful, and relevant. Afterward, students conducted documentary research in primary and secondary sources (books, journals, etc.) and participant observation to compile findings that functioned as nails around which threads were tightened toward possible future; the mere selection of milestones is revealing in terms of what participants consider significant.
Once the participants wrote their conjectures about the future as a story based on the collection of information regarding the present, the participants translated this content into multimedia languages.
This transition from signals (anomalies) to trends (patterns, figures 3-4) and from there to scenarios and scenes implies asking: what is a day in the ordinary life of people like? How are ordinary people in the future? Which kind of rituals do they have? What mundane objects do they use? These questions, which allow the sensorial experience of futures, are taken from the Experiential Futures and Design Fiction frameworks.
Figure 3. Trend report example
Figure 4. Trend analysis using KJAER’s compass example.
Figure 5. Exploring virtual prototypes.
During the workshops, the attendants created 15 scenarios with unspecified temporality but at least ten years ahead. The five scenarios that completed the process well according to the stages listed in Table 2, which involved extended reality technologies in their development, are presented below. We know that this form of selection leaves out interesting performances involving sound, staging, and souvenirs of future making, which we hope to discuss in later work.
Scenario 1 (Fig. 6). Surviving the Radioactive Winter
The world is suffering a nuclear winter caused by an escalation of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Following the onset of the nuclear catastrophe, the governments of the United States, China, and European countries have left the planet. Meanwhile, in Latin America, local fiefdoms began to be created in specific areas trying to take control within the political vacuum left by the failed governments. Ordinary life for the remaining population exists below the surface, in massive tunnels acting like bunkers to defend themselves from the toxic air of the nuclear winter and the animals affected by the nuclear contamination. An explorer of the nuclear deserts tries to smuggle food from one side of the city to the other, wearing an anti-radiation suit and gas mask to prevent radioactive contamination.
Scenario 2 (Fig. 7). A Continuous Display for a Full Cinema Experience
In Mexico, movie theaters have almost disappeared. People prefer to stay home and carry out ordinary activities such as going to the supermarket or the movies through immersive platforms. In this same scenario, domestic robots are part of the ordinary reality.
A continuous screen occupies all the house’s walls and allows an immersive cinematic experience. In the future, the Twilight movie saga will be considered a classic. Fans gather to watch it repeatedly, reciting all the speeches by heart, like a ritual, and enjoying it with the highest quality picture and sound for an immersive experience. We all run into the forest, surrounded by vampires and werewolves!
Scenario 3 (Fig. 8). New Pandemics Besiege Humans
A zeppelin flies over a polluted Mexico City, announcing a permanent vaccination campaign against a new variant of HIV, whose pandemic has left so many dead that cemeteries have grown to such an extent that very few parks are left. The pollution is such that the city is practically deserted.
Figure 8. New Pandemics Besiege Humans
Scenario 4 (figure 9) | A World Without Women
In 2050, the lack of medical care for women with fewer resources in Mexico City has become extreme. The women around the protagonist do not have access to sexual education or protection, simultaneously lacking maternal and prenatal health services. Therefore, the mortality rate among this group has increased, and the birth rate has also grown. Unfortunately, the number of children with needs is wildly disproportionate to the number of mothers who can care for them. The few hospitals in the community were on the verge of collapse, there was a severe shortage of equipment to attend births, and pre-and post-natal care was inferior, if not non-existent. The city’s female population decreases significantly; society collapses without women.
Figure 9. A World Without Women
Scenario 5 (figure 10) | Blank Space
The new educational system in Mexico is a success, causing an increase in effectiveness in students’ academic performance. It is 15 years since the pandemic ended, and this new educational model began to be implemented in schools. Student performance has been positive, with an increase in their performance metrics since, as they comment, having the opportunity to take their classes home makes them feel more comfortable and able to allocate their time better. Young people who experienced the beginnings of online courses see it as usual and show greater adaptability to this hybrid system, while those who integrate hardly have few difficulties. The Ministry of Education questioned the operation and effectiveness of this method; however, with the change of governing party, a group of leaders with a fresher vision approved what had been fought for months; this system was created to improve the educational quality and preserve the mental health of young people.
Figure 10. Blank Space
Conclusions
The scenarios the students created express curiosity and concern about nuclear wars, radical transformation, the disappearance of specific supply chains, public health crises, environmental crises, political shifts, the gender gap, diversity, transhumanism, and additive manufacturing, among other topics.
Throughout the process, students experimented with the four modalities of the Metaverse: extended reality, augmented reality, virtual worlds, and lifelogging. Due to the time of the workshop and the digital literacy of the participants, the focus was on extended reality and augmented reality; however, many of the students participate in virtual worlds such as Roblox, Decentraland, Minecraft, IMVU Sandbox for recreational purposes, so these were familiar to them. The main area of opportunity is to intensify the practice of lifelogging, which is indispensable for mapping signals and trends and collecting sounds and images that will later be incorporated into the proposed scenarios.
During the year of execution, the teachers proposed and implemented improvements to the workflow, including the incorporation of an app to systematize signals: this measure was helpful, but more critical mass must be generated to feed the imagination by thinking of possible futures based on present conditions (Olavarrieta, C. Gordon, T. Glenn, J., 2014).
Even though some attendants already had a basic knowledge of the Metaverse due to their previous experiences, the workshop improved their knowledge about the Metaverse concept and the possible scope of the extended reality and other Web3 technologies in their professions.
Regarding the foresight model, the workshop was an opportunity to get familiar with the workflow. For following iterations, reinforcing how this work model can be extrapolated to everyday life among the participants is an opportunity to improve the de model.
Concerning the way of communicating the results, the participants were free to choose the format, which allowed the workshop to yield richer results and the students to recognize different ways to present a long-term scenario.
At the end of the educational experience, participants expressed interest in improving their skills using expanded reality technologies. They identified opportunities to optimize their knowledge to produce virtual objects and environments and create stories for video games and immersive cinema. They also explored options of interest in parametric and immersive architecture and prototyping design fiction objects.
Bias statement
Regarding the sponsor’s relation with the process, throughout this educational experience, Meta did not give feedback on the contents nor interact with the participants. However, to comply with the word count for this work, the extended reality examples were preponderant. It was possible to present audio prototypes, 2D images, and analog objects during the workshop. This implies a specific cut that privileges a particular type of salience.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Emilio Sosa for his editorial support in completing this work.
Author’s Affiliation
Karla Paniagua |Futures Studies Coordination, CENTRO. kpaniagua@centro.edu.mx
Abril Chimal | STEAM-Lab Program, CENTRO. lchimal@centro.edu.mx
Patricia López| STEAM-Lab Program, CENTRO. elopezg@centro.edu.mx
Edgar Flores | STEAM-Lab Program, CENTRO. efloresl@centro.edu.mx
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- Practice of keeping a record of one’s learning and educational activities through a variety of formats, including journaling, notebooks, digital notes, sound logs, etc. ↑
