Tese virtual items are designed to be placed into virtual metaverse environments such as Decentraland, Somnium and Horizon Worlds. In light of the current space exploration efforts, such as Elon Musk’s stated ambition to facilitate the colonisation of Mars (truly the stuff of science fiction), there is talk of a second space age and it remains to be seen how the dialogue between science fiction and design will continue to evolve in the 21st century. Tim Berners-Lee is said to have
found inspiration for the World Wide Web in Arthur C. Clarke’s short story Dial F for Frankenstein, in which a telephone network becomes sentient and takes over the world. Who can say what tomorrow’s works of fiction will inspire and how they will shape our living spaces. One thing is for sure though: as virtual reality and artificial intelligence continue to develop apace, the boundaries between sci-fi and design will become increasingly blurred. For a new generation of young designers, the
metaverse is fast becoming what ‘the final frontier’ represented to their forebears in the 1960s, an exciting realm of possibility waiting to be filled with new ideas and concepts. But as Reisinger is quick to remind us: ‘We are not escaping from the material world anytime soon. Instead, I believe we are expanding our experience into a new hybrid era of extended reality, in which art and culture are freed from spatial and temporal constraints and the rules of experience are rewritten.’