Metaverse is a danger to human social abilities, Abba Voyage producer tells MPs

The metaverse is a priority as a result of it can encourage extra display time and injury human connections, the producer of the Abba Voyage present advised MPs.

Svana Gisla advised the Digital, Tradition, Media and Sport Committee the know-how “scares” her and doesn’t characterize an apparent enchancment on digital experiences.

She advised MPs Abba Voyage, a bodily live performance that includes 4 3D digital variations of the group’s youthful selves singing and dancing to a few of their hits, was purposely designed to be a big group expertise quite than a totally digital or digital streaming occasion on cellular gadgets or headsets.

The live performance takes place in a purpose-built 3,000 seater area in east London.

Fb founder Mark Zuckerberg has branded the metaverse – a digital world accessed through digital actuality headsets the place customers can entry all their important companies in addition to work and socialise with others all over the world – the way forward for the web.

However Ms Gisla stated group experiences are extra pure for people as “we are pack animals” and, due to the rise of know-how and cellular gadgets, “it’s only very recently that we’ve been encouraged not to be”.

“The metaverse scares me in that way because I feel like just because the technology is available doesn’t mean we have to use it,” she stated.

“It doesn’t mean it’s good for us, it doesn’t mean it’s improving anything, and I don’t see any improvement in putting (in) more screens and getting our younger generations to dive deeper into the loneliness of being inside a screen all day. That’s just my personal take on it.”

“We made the choice not to go digital with this show. We had lots and lots of people telling us we were mad to be spending all this money and creating the show for people to have to travel to a location 3,000 at a time to experience it,” Ms Gisla stated.

“They didn’t understand why we weren’t showing millions of people around the world. But the answer to that, for us, was very simple – we wanted an emotional experience.

“We like human emotion and we worry and I worry that, with technology, it’s made us very insular. It’s a very lonely existence to live with technology. It’s actually made to separate people and connect them one-to-one with a device.

“We see it in our children, we see it in our grandchildren – their social skills are not there and the interactive, emotional experience of being with people and experiencing things is getting lost.”

Ms Gisla stated images and filming are banned at Abba Voyage as a result of the present desires its viewers to be “present” and to remind them “you can experience things without putting your phone in front of your eyes”.

“Things do happen if you don’t post them on Instagram. They still happened,” she stated.