The initiative comes from an association helping people in precarious situations.
While McKinsey published a report on the economic opportunities of the metaverse on Wednesday, a fictitious homeless person named Will has been venturing into one of its virtual worlds since the end of March. Objective, to question the users of these platforms on the importance of the links created in real life, and on the exclusion that the metaverse platforms could reinforce.
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The project was born from the collaboration of Entourage, an association for the protection of vulnerable and isolated people, and the communication agency TBWAParis. The idea was to grasp a crying paradox in our society: “we have never been so connected and yet never so isolated behind our screens. A paradox that risks becoming even more accentuated with the development of the metaverse, this virtual and immersive world, considered the future version of the Internet, and its emergence in our lives.“Notes Entourage in its press release.
A response to isolation in front of screens
Today, there are nearly 300,000 homeless people in France, but isolation is not limited to this figure. “VSHow many people have a single conversation or social interaction per month?says Frédéric Jacquard, Director of Customer Service and Marketing at TBWA. “I knew a homeless man who had his tent near a pharmacy that had free WiFi. As a result, all day he was bewildered by games. It was like an escape from reality for him.»
Will is therefore thevisible incarnation of the invisibleaccording to Jean-Marc Potdevin, co-founder of the Entourage association. The character is the spokesperson for the excluded, numbering six million according to the Entourage association. Will was designed within the street committee, made up of former homeless people. The latter were able to project what they had experienced: “isn’t he going to get beaten up there?asked one of them.
“Will embodies them: it’s more than a publicity stunt, Will, we can bring him to life, invite him on TV sets! He’s a citizen action characterunderlines Jean-Marc Potdevin. In one of his speeches, Will denounced the absence of the issue of the homeless in the political debates on the eve of the second round of the presidential elections. “Major exclusion is everyone’s business“, according to the founder of Entourage.
An alert in a mercantile system
“We tried to define what a positive tech was at the beginning of Entourage»: these remarks by Jean-Marc Potdevin are topical as the general public discovers the abuse and violence on the metaverse. According to Frédéric Jacquard, there were 20,000 individuals per day on the Decentraland metaverse in March 2022. To date, there would be around a hundred platforms claiming to be from the metaverse, a large part of which are at the experimental stage.
“ Will’s virtual clothes cost 15 euros, that’s the only expense we made» declares the founder of Entourages. This expense is far from the pharaonic sums invested by other users of the Decentraland or The Sandbox platforms. “A man spent a real fortune to buy [une villa], just to become a celebrity’s virtual neighbor. There are plenty of examples like that… Like [un yacht que]one person paid $650,000“, said the virtual homeless Will in a video published on March 31, the date of the end of the winter break.
At a time when VivaTech, a European event dedicated to start-ups and new technologies, is being held, Will is fueling the discussion around the metaverse, which is not singular but plural.