AI, the beauty of places, and the metaverse: beyond “geometrical fundamentalism”

Abstract

As the tech world moves increasingly toward an AI-generated virtual universe — the so-called “metaverse” — new paradigms define the impacts of this technology on its human users. AI and VR, like the Internet before them, offer both remarkable opportunities and pitfalls. Virtual Reality constitutes a new kind of human environment, and experiencing it relies upon human neurological mechanisms evolved to negotiate — and survive in — our ancestral physical environments. Despite the unrestricted freedom of designing the virtual universe, interacting with it is affected strongly by the body’s built-in physiological and psychological constraints. The eventual success of the metaverse will be determined by how successfully its designers manage to accommodate unconscious mechanisms of emotional attachment and wellbeing. Some fundamental misunderstandings coming from antiquated design models have influenced virtual environmental structures. It is likely that those design decisions may be handicapping the metaverse’s ultimate appeal and utility.

The Impacts of Online Experience on Health and Well-Being: The Overlooked Aesthetic Dimension

“…Applications of both verbal and visual AI overwhelmingly verify what we already know from biophilia, design coherence, emotional affordances, fractals, symmetries, visual attention scans, etc. [79][80][81][82][83]87] The software, in its various applications, simply validates the informational content that is embedded in traditional and vernacular architecture. Beauty in nature arises when form merges with function, which transfers into the exceptional qualities of traditional architecture to generate well-being.…”

“…The current traditional architects always focus on objective beauty [85,86]. We argue that the widely perceived failure of objective beauty in virtual worlds was due to ignorance of the methods for producing it and propose developing a pattern language for designing the metaverse [87]. Professionals working to create an attractive virtual world simply copied the dominant aesthetic from physical buildings without realizing that it does not lead to visceral beauty but often its opposite [88].…”

“…We have also previously discussed the success of the Roku City screensaver [87]. The presence of rows of coherent and detailed human-scale façades in this environment, ranging from Art-Deco to Neoclassical, represents an area that users want to inhabit, despite the presence of some unnatural features, like the purple-blue light that bathes the scene.…”

“…But note that our references come from the scientific literature-all of them outside architectural academia. The documented research contrasts starkly with current architectural thinking [87]. This striking disparity underlines the little-known fact that architecture students are not trained to do research, do not know the fundamentals of critical investigation and scientific reasoning, and misuse the term "research" to describe the results of artistic variation [36,70,117].…”

“…At the same time, the prospect of escaping physical reality-along with the responsibilities for negotiating the real world-for a virtual alternative can grow into a serious problem. We accuse architects and planners of having made the physical built environment so dystopic and flawed that being able to escape from it seems like an attractive idea [87]. Our long-term hope, however, is for this escape to trigger a massive reconsideration of how to create an objectively beautiful physical environment.…”