Friendship in the Metaverse: How Virtual Reality is Changing the Nature of Friendships
The nature of friendships is changing. It always has been, of course. And it always will, because relationships are formed and conducted inside the world that happens around us. Our environments — our outside stimuli — are everything in our human interactions. Make a fire? Sit around it together. If something happens within that environment, you experience it together. The way the world changes will always have huge implications on the way in which we make and retain friendships.
These changes have, however — in line with rapid technological developments, been accelerating. A big part of this is that in the metaverse, people can be in the same space but experience it in radically different ways.
This is new. It is no longer only joint stimuli and environments that are changing. Instead, the very way we experience and process these stimuli — what these stimuli even are — is different. The metaverse means we can now experience the same interactions in wildly different environments and scenarios. And that has huge implications for the way in which we experience and interpret relationships.
It’s important not to consider these changes as merely being visual stimuli — the future offers more than that, with touch now, and other senses sure to be developed at some point in the future (smell might be a tough one to crack!). But even if we focus on the near term of purely visual input, the metaverse provides opportunities for friendships to blossom, grow and change in ways that simply haven’t been possible before.
Take, for example, the way in which people now meet up online. There are many thousands of different ways in which we can communicate and form relationships online. This is very different to even the recent past, where meeting someone online meant either chatting via text or meeting up in a virtual world that was heavily based on text chat. The metaverse changes that. People can join spaces in VR, AR, from a mobile device, and yes through voice and text — exploring a space together through altogether different mediums. The ways in which we can be represented within those spaces is endless. We can be as close to our ‘real life’ selves, or as far away from it, as we can possibly imagine.
Even at its early stages, VR is presenting ways to socialise that’s far more than just ‘chat’. A great example of this is the ‘Horizon Block Party’. Oculus users will be able to enjoy incredible shared experiences including music performances, sporting events, films and much more!
So in this way, the metaverse brings us to a new frontier for friendship. We already know from research carried out in other fields that our brains are wired to respond positively towards immersive experiences; but do we automatically connect with people who share them with us too? And if those experiences are different, how does that change the connection?
Is there anything that does not change? Possibly, yes. The great Thomas Dreier said that “The World is a great mirror. It reflects back to you what you are … the world is what you are.” In this interpretation, the one constant is you. And that has always been its own device, interpreting different interactions in its own ways. The metaverse augments that experience by making outside stimuli as idiosyncratic as our own internal experiences. And that makes the possibilities of the metaverse, and how they may develop, almost infinite.
Relationships formed through wildly individual shared experiences are no less ‘real’ than traditional types of relationships. But they are certainly new, they are forming before our very eyes, and they are going to be the norm.
That’s it why Victoria VR is not built to be another Play-to-Earn game but rather Live-and- Earn. Users will be able to not only play but also make business, educate themselves or in this case meet new friends or even meet their love.
About Victoria VR — https://www.victoriavr.com
Victoria VR is a revolutionary Blockchain-based Virtual Reality Metaverse. Powered by Unreal Engine and featuring realistic, highly detailed graphics, it combines a massively-multiplayer-online role-playing game (MMORPG) with a unique Social Experience Playground.
Like never before, players will be immersed in a virtual reality world where they get to live their digital life. Whether you want to Play games, Develop your digital real estate (VR Land), Own a business, Work up or Get some entertainment, your imagination is the only limitation.
