Metapolis

Studio Patrik Schumacher

Tutors Jose Pareja, Philipp Siedler

Team Eyamuna Anbalagan Gomathy, Gulzar Ahmed Khan, Harunn Gokul Nandakumar, Shivam Garg, Xueqing Ding 

We named our project MetaPolis inspired by the word polis which in Greek means a city or state characterised by a sense of community. In our design for a city for the metaverse based on the Web 3.0 platform, we explore the concepts of dynamism, virtual navigation systems, and a communal engagement of real-time users to form decentralised decision-making plural system. In addition to the community creation, our project focuses on developing a fully functional module for revenue generation. MetaPolis is relatable to real-world scenarios, the soul idea and/or parametric urbanism. Some of the main buildings, for example in the central plaza, NFT museums, crypto squares and residences, form the basis of not only how these are conceived in the metaverse, but also suggest how different they would be from the physical-world scenarios. 

The main concern about the existing platforms tends to be that the physical world is completely ignored when building an immersive virtual world. Our design for the Kiosk aims to bridge the gap between the virtual and the physical by creating cyber and physical spaces. Such Kiosks exist in the physical world where the users can visit and connect with the virtual users. The Kiosks are set up in multiple busy locations across London. A user entering the Kiosk will only see a black XR room, and with the use of virtual reality technologies they would be able to see the user login in from home in the vicinity of his area and the user from the kiosk will be able to see the virtual user through their VR. 

MetaPolis is designed to provide a rich testing ground for architects and planners for experimenting with applying architectural and urban planning theories and relating them to real-life situations. We see further potential for investigation in creating many more new types of Hybrid Incubator spaces that could be accessed both physically and virtually.