Designing for the Metaverse: What We Can Learn from Sci-Fi Movies
Every digital entrepeneur building virtual real estate is quoting a film. Usually one they half-remember.
Science fiction gave digital design its vocabulary long before the technology arrived: the floating panel, the volumetric ad, the avatar you assemble like an outfit. That last word is not a metaphor — avatar in its digital sense was coined by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash, the same novel that gave us metaverse, a decade before anyone tried to sell us one. Gibson had done the same for cyberspace, coined in a short story in 1982 — the year Blade Runner opened — and made famous by Neuromancer two years later.
We inherited those worlds selectively. We took the images and left the arguments behind. Nearly every one of these films was a warning, but we mined them for mood boards instead: the rain-slicked street without the ruined ecology that produced it, the seamless interface without the question of who built it and why.
Then the metaverse arrived, and failed. Meta's Reality Labs has now accumulated roughly $88 billion in operating losses since late 2020, against quarterly revenues in the low hundreds of millions, and the company cut around 1,500 jobs from the division in January 2026 as it pivoted toward AI. A company renamed itself after a Stephenson coinage and spent the GDP of a small country discovering that people did not want to live there.
Whenever we talk about sci-fi writers, they are very commonly associated with prophets. I'm guilty of it myself — I'll look at Herbert's Dune and marvel at how his reflections on humans and machines read as more relevant now than when he published them sixty years ago. But without discrediting any of them, it's worth saying plainly: these people don't dabble in witchcraft. They think about ethics, technology and politics, and they follow the argument to its logical conclusion. The fault is ours. The digital industry ran off with the aesthetic under its trenchcoat, left everything that felt remotely pessimistic behind, and called that part dystopian fiction.
Three films built most of what we called the metaverse, and each came with an instruction we ignored. Now that the pitch decks are gone and the illusion is glitching, let's look at what we should have learned from the movies we watched but never listened to.
Blade Runner (1982)
Ridley Scott's city is the most borrowed image in digital design. Moody rain, neon lights, holographic advertising the size of a building. Hell, I have created countless blue and purple coded Pinterest Boards. We were so quick to borrow the surface, and almost never the argument underneath it: this is a city drowning in commercial signal, where the light is beautiful because it is selling you something.
Real design lesson, though. Environments feel alive when light behaves as if it has a source and materials look like they have a history. We want to feel the storytelling just as much as we need to see it. The question is what all this atmosphere is in service of. Blade Runner's lighting was a warning. Ours tends to be a storefront — and a storefront is exactly what most branded virtual spaces turned out to be, which is exactly why nobody stayed in them.
The Matrix (1999)
The Wachowskis gave us the aesthetic of legible data — falling green code, interfaces that read as pure information. It has aged into a cliché in cinematic language (and a visual companion to any fictional hacker for some reason), but the underlying principle holds: an interface earns its place by disappearing, by being ubiquitous, dynamic, ever-changing. Transparent panels, contextual menus, voice input.
The film, however, is also a story about a comfortable interface concealing whose interests it serves. A love letter to all the individuals who strive to gain their agency back. Anyone designing immersive systems should sit with that for longer than a moment. The metaverse was never short of seamlessness; its offer was freedom and its product was control.
Ready Player One (2018)
Spielberg's OASIS is where the industry got its picture of the metaverse: infinite worlds, endlessly customisable bodies, a culture built out of references. Its promise is genuine. Letting people choose how they appear is not decoration, it is the whole point. Self expression is both the medium and the goal.
Its warning is genuine too. The OASIS is where people go because the physical world has been abandoned. Spielberg's characters are retreating into the OASIS. The industry took that as a business model rather than a diagnosis, and built a place to live rather than a place to visit. A virtual space is only inclusive if it is not the only room left — and it is only appealing if it isn't the last room available. I had a whole creative workflow built around Ready Player Me, for young people to build their own avatar and animate their own co created music visualiser. Ready Player Me was officially discontinued and shut down its public platform on January 31, 2026. Self expression was never the point.
What this means in practice
Build for story, not for traffic. Narrative is what makes an environment worth returning to. Quests, authored worlds, things made by users for each other — these are the things that create meaning.
Science fiction is useful to designers not because it’s optimistic, but because it is a marvelous study in human nature. I often see it as a subcategory of speculative design: it presents us a scenario where we have technology together with its social cost, the economical ramifications, and its power dynamic, and then asks whether we would accept the trade.
The lesson is not that the metaverse was a bad idea. It is that the people who built the metaverse promised us the heart of it but left us with a poorly executed stage outfit that no one wants to wear.
