Zaha Hadid Architects’ Patrik Schumacher: Metaverse Ambitions and Data Centers as an Urban Force

Hi, welcome. Happy to be here.

The architecture we're bringing into the metaverse is the architecture we developed over the last 25 years after the digital revolution. I call this epochal style parametricism and latest sensation tectonism. It is organic, adaptive, and versatile, like the endless forms of nature. We can express different situations and institutions, and read a lot of information into the built environment. In the metaverse, we foreground this legibility. We also bring the complexity of the contemporary knowledge society. We are not only designing complex individual buildings with deep vistas and layers, but also clusters of buildings forming urban spaces. We are developing virtual cities as collocation synergy hubs for creative industries. So far, it has been seamless; we can import our 3D models with high detail. We are building a metaverse for the community of designers, architects, and brands. The charm is that we can meet and be immersed in beautiful designs with high photorealism, and we can also have information overlays and exploded sections. We are at the edge of what compute can deliver. We use pixel streaming, relying on server farms and high-quality servers to push full geometry. We use gaming engines to synchronize up to 100 simultaneous users, which is the current limit. The limit is expanding, but it is already effective. We compete well with real-life events like biennials, conferences, and exhibitions. We have enough geometry and simultaneous users, and the frontier is expanding to hundreds or thousands of visitors. It is in the pipeline.

So we started off with a technical partner called Myverse and hosted a platform there relying on Epic Games and the Unreal Engine ecosystem. We have since redeveloped the whole platform under our own auspices. So we own our own platform, but it is based on Unreal Engine and also some other web companies and AWS server presences. We have done that and we are collaborating with Epic through the firm on a number of other parallel projects. The metaverse I was talking about is called Mettopia, and it is addressing the community of designers. We already have a fantastic lineup of top architectural firms, industrial designers, fashion designers, and we are communicating with a lot of automotive brands and interesting institutions. I think this will be the first truly compelling metaverse, not just a curiosity or a video game, but it really substitutes for many of the venues we currently use to project ourselves and communicate within the discipline. Clients can use it to show off their works and maybe sell projects. So the key collaborating firm is Epic.