What is furniture in the metaverse for?

Since its beginning in the science fiction field, the Metaverse has been presented as the digital copy of the world. Snow Crash’s Metaverse (Stephenson, 1992) is a powerful metaphor for urban sociality, but, at the same time, it is also a dystopia. Duplicating the real world digitally, in fact, means facing and solving all its contradictions. The literary model has inspired many social platforms that have taken the concept of doubling reality literally. In the leading platforms born as metaverses for social gatherings, such as Second Life, Horizon, Decentraland, and VRChat, virtual architecture and design frequently model themselves on the real ones. Similarly, actions performed by people mirror the real world. Given that the virtual world has neither gravity nor climate influences and the users do not have a flesh body, the needs in space are inevitably different. From the design perspective, this approach seems to waste opportunities: it roots in the usual rather than fully exploiting the potential of the new. The essay aims to analyse from a spatial design perspective the reasons that fueled the frequent tendency of the mimesis of reality in a context entirely different in needs and potentials. The research delves into the correlation between spaces, technologies, and actions in the metaverses born as extensions of real-life phases through case studies and literature. In the virtual world, actions are reshaped according to the connotations of the space and the technology involved. The more technology includes the real body in the virtual movement, the more concrete the actions become. Therefore, the crucial question is: what is the point of recreating the world in an infinite-potential platform if it is lived the same way as the real one? In a context with different potentials, actions should have different connotations to give additional value to what they have in the real world.