The Metaverse: An Urban RevolutionEffect of the Metaverse on the Perceptions of Urban Audience

Cities are the most important places wherein contemporary human beings settle. For this reason, the changes affecting the urban landscape can influence the lives of most people. As the new media, the Metaverse can enable people to be present in the 3D virtual world through mediums. Since this technology will provide unparalleled communicative amenities, which did not use to be available to humans, it is expected to pave the way for dramatic changes in all human relations in societies. Given that the Metaverse seeks to reconstruct the world, the urban landscape, which is a product of the perceptual interactions between humans and the city, seems to be influenced by its emergence. This study seeks to answer this question: “What effects will the emergence of virtual cities versus physical ones, have on the perceptions of these cities, or more precisely, the urban landscape?” For this purpose, this study employs a qualitative method and uses bibliographic data to explain the concept of landscape from the perspective of experts and describe its various aspects. This study also attempts to introduce the fundamentals of the media and explain its impact on the urban landscape. The findings of this study show that the media, as an intervening tool, seeks to create a purposeful image of reality in the minds of the audience, and the Metaverse, as a tool presenting the world in three dimensions, can create more believable images than reality. This increases the likelihood of its reception by the audience more than ever. Thus, this media can present an image of the city that adds to the accumulations of the schemata of the audience. Therefore, in their confrontation with urban symbols, the schemata represent an association driven from the experiences in a reconstructed virtual world. Since in this process, the perceptions of the audience change, it can be acknowledged that the Metaverse can affect the urban landscape.