Metaverse Fashion Week is gearing up for its second annual event, and this year is different from the last in a number of ways. The fashion event, which brings together virtual and physical fashion leaders, will be hosted across multiple metaverse platforms, showcasing an impressive roster of luxury brands like Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Balmain, Coach, and Tommy Hilfiger, as well as digital fashion mainstays like DressX and The Fabricant.
The event will be held in Decentraland, as it was last year, as well as Spatial, another metaverse platform, and via Over, a decentralized augmented reality (AR) layer that displays virtual assets on top of the real world. While true interoperability is not yet possible, the fact that Metaverse Fashion Week’s organizers and high-profile companies involved are attempting to conduct a live event across multiple platforms simultaneously marks a definitive step forward for proponents of an open, decentralized, and interoperable metaverse.
Although people cannot currently jump across different metaverse platforms seamlessly, the intention of interoperability is to showcase the possibilities of inter-metaverse collaboration. This year’s Metaverse Fashion Week aims to unite designers and expand the aesthetic possibilities for all of the event’s creators, while also highlighting the potential of cross-platform collaboration.
Portals placed throughout Decentraland and Spatial will shuttle MFW’s attendees back and forth between platforms over the course of the week’s programming. In addition, new companies like Lighthouse, which likens itself to the first-ever metaverse search engine, hope to facilitate the easy and productive navigation of a sprawling multi-platform experience.
Launched in December, Lighthouse aims to solve a problem that has plagued metaverse platforms since their inception: despite being touted as the future of online togetherness, many metaverse platforms tend to feel, in practice, enduringly and crushingly lonely. By allowing users to see where all of their contacts are located in real-time within both Decentraland and Spatial, and porting to any of those locations instantly, MFW visitors will be able to organize contact information gathered from other attendees via a networking feature.
The existence of such a third-party service as Lighthouse will also aid metaverse platforms by providing them with new types of metrics—such as when and where users jump from one metaverse platform to another. Lighthouse is currently indexing 26 metaverse platforms, including Decentraland, Spatial, and The Sandbox, and is also developing a trending areas function that will allow users to see where the party’s at across all metaverse locales.
According to Jonathan Brun, Lighthouse’s co-founder and CEO, metaverse experiences and the external infrastructure supporting them have made major strides in just one year. He believes that Metaverse Fashion Week 2023 will be a more seamless experience, and that the company will be able to keep more people engaged in the metaverse due to the ease of use and interconnectivity provided by Lighthouse.
