with Cluster Metaverse Lab
Life Experience Exchange Metaverse
Turning a Life’s Fork in the Road into a Place You Can Walk Through
Try building a turning point of your own life as a metaverse space. Then invite someone who matters to you, and retell the story while walking through it together. We have been accumulating this practice.
When people tell the story of their lives, they always remember it together with places — "that spring," "that room," "that walk home." So what if we rebuilt those places themselves? The "Life Experience Exchange Metaverse" is a practice-based research project that began from that idea.
Background
Retelling the turning points of one's life has so far taken place mainly through words — in counseling and in dialogue. With the metaverse, it should be possible to give a narrative spatial form, step bodily into that place, and retell the story while walking through it with someone who matters. The project is a joint research effort with the Metaverse Lab of Cluster, Inc., which operates the metaverse platform "cluster."
Research Question
When people express a turning point in their life as a metaverse space and talk about it while walking through it with others, what changes does this bring to how they make sense of the experience — to their narrative self?
Methods
First, we listen carefully, through interviews, to a person's account of a turning point in their life. Next, based on that narrative, we build a space (a "world") in the metaverse together. Finally, the person invites family or friends into the finished world and, walking through it like a tour, talks with them about the experience of that time. We document this cycle — narrative becoming space, and space giving rise to new narrative — through participant observation and interviews.
Findings
This practice has produced moments that are hard to forget. One participant, separated from a parent in early childhood, was reunited with her actual mother inside the world she had built to express her own upbringing, and the two of them walked through that space together, retelling memories of the past. A past too heavy to face through words alone can sometimes be seen from a different angle when you can stand in "that place" together. This is a phenomenon distinctive to the metaverse, where you can enter a story with your whole body. Dozens of worlds in which users express turning points in their lives have already been gathered, including one in which a pilot of the Avatar Robot Cafe (DAWN ver.β) expressed the journey of reconnecting with society from a life of being unable to leave home. At exhibition events, we have also set up a corner where visitors can walk through and re-experience "someone else's life."