Social housing and the metaverse: a future vision
From holding conference sessions inside video game platform Fortnite, to virtual reality show homes and rent paid in cryptocurrency, Kate Youde asks if it is time for social landlords to dive into the metaverse
When TPAS Cymru, the Welsh arm of the tenant engagement charity, sought the views of students on renting in the private sector, it decided to run the meeting a little differently: it took participants to the beach. Not on the rugged Welsh coast, but between the palms and sun umbrellas of Sweaty Sands.
At that time in 2020, this beach town was a location in Fortnite, the online video game with more than 350 million registered players that is sometimes referred to as a metaverse platform. The meeting was not a success, says David Wilton, chief executive of TPAS Cymru, because the students regarded Fortnite as “a platform for kids”. However, he sees scope for future metaverse tenant engagement, providing the platform is easy to use and has “credibility” among participants. But what other opportunities might the sector find with the metaverse and, for the Luddites among us, what is it?
American author Neal Stephenson coined the term metaverse in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash to describe a “computer-generated universe” in which people communicate via avatars. Today, definitions vary but, simply put, it is an evolution of the internet.
READ MORE
The future
The Citi GPS report, Metaverse and Money: Decrypting the Future, says: “The metaverse is partly a dream of the future of the internet and partly a way to encapsulate current trends in online infrastructure, including the growth of real-time 3D worlds. VR [virtual reality] and AR [augmented reality] technology should benefit many sectors, resulting in potentially more efficient processes, enhanced training and improved collaboration.”
The report suggests that the metaverse will change the way we do activities, including commerce, education, and sales and marketing, and estimates the market for the metaverse economy could be as much as $13tn (£11.6tn) by 2030 if there is significant investment.
And landlords are starting to adopt VR technology. “Real world, real life matters most to customers, but the metaverse is becoming part of people’s real world and real life, or certainly will do over the coming years and decades, so it’s definitely something we need to explore,” says Neil Ingham, who at the time of speaking to Inside Housing was director of communications at Pobl, although he has since left this role.
Pobl is testing whether it can sell homes using the metaverse. The 13,500-home Welsh landlord is opening a sales hub at Gwynfaen, a mixed-tenure development of 144 net zero-carbon homes overlooking the Loughor Estuary, in January. This office, which will be used to sell homes on four Pobl developments in South West Wales, will have a large touchscreen that prospective buyers can use to explore the schemes without stepping onto a muddy building site. VR tours of Gwynfaen and Gowerton will be available at the start, with those for Coed Darcy and Beacon Hill to follow later.
“Real world, real life matters most to customers, but the metaverse is becoming part of people’s real world and real life”
Mr Ingham says Pobl, working with digital agency iCreate, has built this VR experience “into a metaverse-type environment that people can log into from any device”. This means people in different locations can explore a development together in avatar form.
The final stage, which Pobl hopes to launch within the next couple of years, will allow for personalisation and for people to “take ownership” of a home, even if they have yet to buy it. “You can start to customise it and use different paint palettes, change the front door and put up your favourite painting… and start to feel what it might be like to live there,” says Mr Ingham. “Giving people a virtual environment in which they can explore that space, start to plan what they might do with it, we see real benefits to that,” he says. “It also facilitates a potential move away from physical show home sales office environments.”
Mr Ingham thinks that, aside from the spending on the touchscreen device, the cost of making an immersive VR environment is double that of CGI images, and then taking that to a metaverse-style environment is another doubling. He says Pobl can take on those “one-off digital costs” because it applies the same home types on all developments so it is easy to create virtual replicas for new schemes. He sees potential for using the technology to let empty social homes and to create tenancies as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). These are unique digital assets stored on the blockchain (a decentralised digital ledger).
Using a digital wallet tied to the blockchain would allow for transactions and information sharing while the customer keeps control of their data, which could eliminate risk and cut costs.
There could come a point where a tenant pays rent in cryptocurrency, says Mr Ingham, provided the regulatory context is appropriate. This could come with risks and costs: cryptocurrency is a volatile investment with a series of price crashes making headlines in recent months, and ‘mining’ it uses vast amounts of energy.
Residents could also meet their neighbourhood officer in a metaverse version of their physical home, which would reduce travel costs.
VR use in regeneration
Another use is regeneration and masterplanning. Housing association RHP used VR at Ham Fair in 2019 to help residents visualise the proposed regeneration of the Ham Close Estate, where it was seeking planning permission to replace 192 homes with 452 new ones. More than 100 people used four VR headsets to tour homes RHP completed as part of a similar regeneration scheme at Fountains Close in Butts Farm, Hounslow.
Virtually There
Every time filmmaker Leon Oldstrong runs his workshop for children about the dangers of knife crime, it is “like a gut punch” because he always gets a question he hasn’t heard before. The former primary school teacher was inspired to make a 25-minute virtual reality film that depicts the fatal stabbing of a young man, after his then-teenage brother was stabbed seven times in Peckham in 2017. He suffered a punctured lung but survived.
“Young people share videos of actual stabbings on Snapchat. I thought if this is to have an impact, I have to make them feel that and virtual reality is the closest we have to that,” says Mr Oldstrong, director at Solaris2 Media.
Since June 2021, Swan – the first association to work with Mr Oldstrong – has run Virtually There sessions for 11 to 16-year-olds at three schools in Basildon, Essex, and one with the Osmani Trust youth group for 15 to 19-year-olds at the Reach community hub in east London.
“The messages are hitting home.” says Leah Douglas, community development manager at the 11,500-home landlord, which pays £1,500 per session, including use of the VR headsets. “The delivery method – virtual reality – is the thing that’s got the kids talking in the playground. So although we’re delivering this to one session of children at a time, the messages roll out across the playground.”
“We wanted to show residents on the Ham Close Estate what sort of quality of home they could expect to get as part of the regeneration,” says David Done, chief executive of RHP. “And it worked brilliantly.”
He says the 11,000-home organisation will use the technology for future regeneration schemes and will be “trying to understand” more about its potential.
Social landlords should think about the quality of their internet infrastructure to ensure tenants are not excluded from experiences in the metaverse, according to Ben Bilsland, partner and technology senior analyst at tax, audit and consulting firm RSM. He says we will be at the metaverse when “the quality and the cadence of our digital interactions are of equal value to us as our physical interactions”, which he reckons is 10 to 15 years away, when avatars will be “so sophisticated that there’ll be technology that reads our reactions and our faces”.
“Giving people a virtual environment in which they can explore that space, we see real benefits to that”
Creative use of VR, AR and “metaverse meeting spaces” could help widen tenant engagement, which is currently “skewed towards older retirees”, says Mr Wilton of TPAS Cymru. “It won’t be for all and it won’t replace traditional meetings or tenant conferences, but if we’re going to do anything about making those voices a bit more diverse, we have to try these things,” he says.
The pandemic accelerated digital engagement, Mr Wilton says, and showed the desire to meet remotely. “Clients weren’t always happy about people having a glimpse into their home,” he says, “whether it was [because of] embarrassment or privacy.” TPAS Cymru spent time showing people how to blur their surroundings or use artificial backgrounds on Zoom.
Mr Ingham summarises: “Home is a really emotional place, so it might seem like the last thing you would want to bring into the metaverse. But, in a sense, that’s the best reason that it could exist in the metaverse, because our tenants don’t want the housing association in their house unless they really need us.”
Sign up to our Best of In-Depth newsletter
We have recently relaunched our weekly Long Read newsletter as Best of In-Depth. The idea is to bring you a shorter selection of the very best analysis and comment we are publishing each week.
Already have an account? Click here to manage your newsletters.
