Zaha Hadid Architects has constructed a city in the metaverse that gives users the ability to purchase land with cryptocurrency and immerse themselves amongst the virtual built environment via an avatar.
Dubbed the Liberland Metaverse, the city is accessed via cloud-based platform Mytaverse. The city’s boundaries are based on the Free Republic of Liberland, a stretch of land that sits between Croatia and Serbia claimed by Czech Republic Politician Vít Jedlička. The micronation is not recognised by the United Nations, despite having its own community, flag, national anthem and cryptocurrency.
The virtual city is imagined as a template for the future city of Liberland, with those who buy land in the metaverse to hold a stake in a physical plot. According to the website, Liberland Metaverse is designed as a virtual industry synergy and networking hub for Crypto projects, crypto companies and crypto events.
"While the Liberland Metaverse is meant to spearhead the development of Liberland as a libertarian micronation it will also function as a free standing virtual reality realm in its own right," says Zaha Hadid Architects Principal, Patrik Schumacher, in an interview with Dezeen.
"The ambition is for it to become the go-to site for networking and collaboration within the burgeoning web 3.0 industry, it's the metaverse for metaverse developers and the crypto ecosystem at large."
Zaha Hadid has designed a number of buildings including a city hall, plaza and exhibition centre which will hold virtual events. The buildings feature ZHA trademarks with gentle curves and rounded corners. The city hall is imagined in the shape of a horseshoe, and is surrounded by a terraced walkway.
Schumacher believes that Liberland Metaverse and other virtual cities will serve as a catalyst for increased use of parametricism, a form of computer software he utilised to devise the city.
"The key advantages of virtual environments are their global accessibility and their adaptive, parametric malleability," he says.
"The architectural and urban paradigm that is most congenial to this idea of a differentiated, evolving, multi-author urban field is parametricism. We therefore predict that the development of the metaverse will boost parametricism."
Schumacher says that the design and rendering of the city gives the most lifelike representation of the future society.
"We believe this (ZHA’s designs), at least in the initial stages of metaverse development, allows for the fullest exploitation of the city analogy, utilising our innate and learned intuitive cognitive capacities with respect to orientation, wayfinding and the reading of subtle aesthetic social atmospheres and situations," he continued.
"This realism in our cyber-urban conception also allows for the later physical realisation of the designed metaverse spaces in the physical Liberland, to any desired extent."
