Brought to you by Metropolis, Deep Green is a podcast about how the built environment impacts climate change and equity. Buildings are some of the biggest things we make as human beings. We explore how through understanding buildings, cities, and all the things that go into them, we can do better for the environment and all life on this planet.
Even if you don't care about technology, it's likely you've heard something about the metaverse. It's a sort of 3-dimensional, immersive internet that would take lots of technologies that exist already today, like video games, VR, and NFTs, and find a way to connect all of them.
While our team was reporting on this new phenomenon for our January/February 2022 issue, we began to wonder about the carbon footprint of the metaverse. There is no metaverse without the cloud, which actually lives in buildings—steel and concrete buildings called data centers. If more people get in the metaverse, more stuff gets on the cloud, more data centers—you get the picture. There's got to be a way to start addressing this before the problem gets out of hand.
Can we build an online world that doesn't destroy the real one? In this episode, reporter Audrey Grey speaks to Drs. Julie Kriegh and Hyun Woo "Chris" Lee, UW College of Built Environments colleagues, who were part of a team imagining a completely different future for data centers.
Resources:
The Design Guide to the Metaverse: metropolismag.com/viewpoints/metaverse-design-guide/
Connect with Metropolis:
metropolismag.com
Instagram: @metropolismag
Facebook: facebook.com/MetropolisMag/
Deep Green is a production of SANDOW Design Group.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.