METAVERSE: THE ARCHITECTURAL SPEECH OF DIGITAL REPRESENTATION

In 1997 Nirvana, a film by Gabriele Salvatore, imagines a world parallel to real life, completely digital, in which the characters of the film moved, alternating between virtual and real life. The first real MUVE, multi-user virtual environment, was Second Life, created in 2003, by the American company Linden Lab. It consists of a digital platform, equipped with a virtual currency, with applications for entertainment, art, education, music, architecture etc., in which to lead a life parallel to the real one. In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook to become a Metaverse company. On this platform, land is being sold to create virtual buildings, urban environments and meeting places between users are planned, digital representation will certainly play an important role in the Metaverse, given that the creators of the most powerful virtual reality engine, Unreal, has decided to invest one billion dollars in this platform and experiment with new technologies for the three-dimensional digital representation of living environments. Therefore, all the space of the Metaverse must be designed. Will architects and urban planners be ready to represent their virtual architectural creations in the Metaverse? In this paper we want to investigate the state of the art of digital representation as a bridge between the virtual world of the Metaverse and the physical world of reality, analyzing solutions that interface the possible virtual architectural scenarios in the Metaverse to “test drive” unbuilt buildings.