How Can We Get Ready for the 'Metaverse'?

By Mikkel Krenchel and Ian Dull

The “metaverse” is likely to be the word of the year in tech. And Facebook (now “Meta”) has put it there.

With a string of bigger and bigger announcements, a smart glass launch with RayBan, and the corporate name change to “Meta,” the past few months have shown a company leaning deeper and deeper into what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “the successor to the mobile internet.” Facebook’s metaverse vision is taking shape around a combination of new technologies like virtual and augmented reality (AR) and existing ones like smartphones, paired with new ecosystems of content — to blend our social worlds more fully with the virtual.

But how do we get there? Zuckerberg has talked extensively about all of the pieces that have to fit seamlessly together to create the metaverse, most of them technological or about content and creators. Yet we would argue one of the biggest areas for innovation has flown mostly under the radar — getting new social norms in place. That points to a bigger sea change in how tech companies reach their visions.

Take the RayBans for example. The RayBan/Facebook Stories collaboration is a clear first step for both companies towards ambitions in wearable tech and augmented reality. While many critics compared the glasses to similar products from Snap and Bose — or weighed Facebook’s fortunes versus Google’s doomed Glass — we were caught by its subtler, yet more thought-provoking innovation: how to make new wearable tech feel, well, normal.

Putting them together with just a few simple features isn’t too much of a leap for most of us to handle. It’s an approach to innovation that may seem counterintuitive, especially after years of buzzy launches like the “Meta” name change, and an industry with a penchant for mic-drop moments. But the bigger the innovation really is, the harder tech companies need to work to make it feel small.

Research we have conducted has observed the phenomenon of how people adopt new technologies, from putting computing power in the cloud, to talking to smart assistants, to wearing smart glasses. What we’ve found is that in order to introduce groundbreaking new technology platforms, you have to innovate the social norms first, and the technology second.

Here the doomed launch of Google Glass is instructive. Privacy is the most common refrain for Glass’s failure. But the real reason it flopped was that social norms were not ready for such a breakthrough. Google tried to reinvent the meaning of glasses in society practically overnight by putting a computer on everyone’s face and enabling photography, video, and a display, capable of capturing and showing all manner of information unbeknownst to observers.

Understandably, those on the receiving end of the glasses were less keen to be filmed, or left wondering what information the wearer was looking at and what other features this device might have. Put simply, the glasses seemed scary — and thus socially unacceptable — because no one knew what to make of them. Glass-wearers became outcasts, and Glass flopped.

We fear that which we don’t understand. If a technology is familiar (smartphones), surprise and bombast work perfectly. If it is unfamiliar (smart glasses), you have to go for normalness.

Raymond Loewy, writing back in the mid-20th century, called this the MAYA Principle — “Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable.” For innovators, don’t introduce too much change, too quickly, or otherwise it will send up red flags with the public. What matters most to consumers is making new technology familiar, simple, and not too feature-rich.

Consider how the sidewalks of America’s cities are now littered with electric scooters, bikes, and other shareable mobile devices. Like a Richard Serra sculpture, they disrupt normal traffic patterns of passersby. But by altering the urban fabric too abruptly — by not socializing the use of these devices first — they earned heaps of backlash from angry urbanites.

Whether it’s wearing a mask in public or donning the next smart glasses, any new behavior or technology challenges existing social norms. We react by changing the norms (like making masks a fashion accessory) or rejecting the behavior (nicknaming Glass-wearers, “Glass-holes”). Change too many norms at once or change norms too quickly and expect backlash from an unready public.

That brings us back to the “metaverse” — and the dizzying array of other new and unfamiliar technologies Silicon Valley has also promised in the coming years. Brain-computer interfaces, gestural computing, autonomous vehicles, and more. Each of them has the potential to reshape society. That puts social norms to the fore.

If you buy a smartwatch, nobody else is part of the user experience. With AR glasses, however, virtually everyone in one’s vicinity could be caught on camera and made part of one’s new mixed reality — or metaverse. And unlike a wristwatch, glasses on one’s face are impossible not to notice, worry about, and react to, making social norms all that more important to innovate first.

As such, these kinds of unfamiliar technologies will require a more delicate and subtle rollout. That may take the air out of glitzy product launches. Yet it creates whole new vectors for innovation too: What will make a self-driving truck feel like a trucker on the highway? How can we make sure implantable neuro-technology feels fair and non-threatening to people without it?

In that way, Facebook’s investment in the metaverse and the rollout of its fashionable eyewear may mark a watershed moment for Big Tech. Rather than move fast and break stuff, the new rule of thumb is to move incrementally and break as little ground as possible.

That is because when it comes to groundbreaking innovation, getting social norms right is more important than the tech itself.

Ian Dull and Mikkel Krenchel are partners at ReD Associates.

[Banner image by Julien Tromeur, via Unsplash]