The Metaverse Metropolis Symposium

About

The Metaverse Metropolis is an initiative of the Jacobs Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech exploring the implications of augmented reality (AR) and spatial computing at urban scale. With the unveiling of Apple’s Vision Pro, AR is at long last poised to enter the mainstream — but are cities ready for it? Just as the smartphone enabled the rise of disruptive platforms such as Uber and AirBnB, what threats, opportunities, and externalities will AR pose to cities?

For the last six months, The Metaverse Metropolis has strived to answer these questions, convening more than a dozen current- and former public officials and civic leaders from New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Miami, Pittsburgh, and beyond to learn from designers, start-ups, legal experts, and others about the past and present of AR along with potential trajectories. By starting now and working together to define our desired outcomes of any real-world metaverse, we can begin to lay the foundations for a new generation of computing that is inherently urban.

The Metaverse Metropolis Symposium will convene public officials, technologists, futurists, architects, and urbanists to publicly discuss these issues and implications in preparation for an afternoon workshop in which participants will be called upon to “threatcast” stories from the metaverse.

Registration for the event is free; lunch will be provided for participants. Please email Greg Lindsay at greg.lindsay@cornell.edu to confirm your workshop participation and attendance.

Panelists

• Seleta Reynolds | Chief Innovation Officer, Los Angeles Metro
• Nigel Jacob | Chief Innovation Officer, Boston Society for Architecture
• Matt Miesnieks | CEO, Living Cities
• Jonathan Askin | Director, Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy Clinic
• Idris Brewster | Executive Director, Kinfolk Foundation
• Diana Lind | author, Brave New Home
• Alina Nazmeeva | Alfred A. Taubman Fellow, University of Michigan
• Greg Lindsay | Urban Tech Fellow, Jacobs Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech
• Brian David Johnson | Director, Arizona State University Threatcasting Lab

Agenda

9:00 - 9:30 AM: Registration

9:30 - 10 AM: What is the Metaverse Metropolis? Hosts Greg Lindsay and Brian David Johnson host a brief fireside chat outlining the aims of The Metaverse Metropolis initiative and introducing the social, cultural, legal, and economic challenges and opportunities urban AR poses for cities.

10:00 - 10:45 AM: Preparing for Disruption. Thousands of Pokémon Go players stampeded through parks, trespassed en masse, and may have injured nearly 30,000 people due to distracted driving in the game’s first five months alone. Prior to that, the rise of platforms such as Uber and AirBnB posed challenges to how public officials see and manage their cities. What have cities learned after a decade of disruption? How will urban AR pose new wrinkles to prior laws and customs? And how should the public generally prepare for technologies that have not fully arrived?

10:45 - 11:00 AM: Break

11:00 AM - 12 PM: The Augmented City. What is urban AR for? How are cities, artists, and activists already exploring the medium's potential for discovery and connection. How should cities fold AR into the practice of "digital placemaking?" How will it offer inhabitants new ways of seeing their city? And what skills, roles, resources, and partners will civic institutions need to harness its full potential?

12 PM - 12:45 PM: Lunch

12:45 -1:00 PM: Introduction to Threatcasting/Futurecasting. Workshop participants will be introduced to "threatcasting" and "science fiction prototyping" and given instructions for the afternoon's workshops.

1:00 - 2:45 PM: Threatcasting Round #1

2:45 - 3:00 PM: Break

3:00 - 4:45 PM: Futurecasting Round #2

4:45 - 5:00 PM: Closing Remarks