When Mark Zuckerberg in 2021 he changed the name of Facebook to Meta, estimated metaverse could reach a billion people within a decade. Bill Gates soon Planned that within two or three years, “most virtual meetings will move from 2D camera grids, which I call Hollywood Squares model, although I know that probably defines me — to the metaverse, the three-dimensional space with digital avatars.”
In the fall of 2022, Microsoft announced partnership with Meta that will bring Mesh, a mixed reality collaboration platform, and its suite of Microsoft 365 apps to Meta’s Quest products. Meta launched Horizon Studios for meeting purposes. IT company Accenture purchased 60,000 Oculus headsets train up-to-date employees in October 2021 and build your own metaverse, called Nth floorwhich included digital equivalents of some offices, along with cafes and avatars without legs.
Yet, nearly three years later, the average office worker doesn’t put on a headset to meet with their coworkers. While nine out of 10 companies can identify utilize cases for augmented reality in their organization, only one in five has invested in the technology, according to a survey of 400 immense companies across industries published by Omdia in February.
But that doesn’t mean the vision is dead. Experts say companies are looking for the best utilize cases for the metaverse. They add that the metaverse itself — not a monolith at this point, but a concept spread across multiple virtual worlds and platforms — will need some tweaking to work well for different types of workers, and the technology people utilize to access it will need to improve.
The metaverse needs to be built in a way that focuses on the needs of real people, says Anand van Zelderen, a researcher in organizational behavior and virtual reality at the University of Zurich. That means assessing how employees feel in the metaverse and taking steps to combat the loneliness some experience when entering virtual spaces that can’t match physical encounters. Current technology “is taking people out of their reality too much, and people don’t want that for long periods of time,” van Zelderen says.
Instead, he says, the metaverse needs to “enrich our reality, not replace it.” That means doing more than just replicating the workplace office. People could utilize technology to meet in intriguing virtual locations, like mountaintops or Mars, or design virtual workspaces to meet the specific needs of their teams, he adds.
“We have the opportunity to be who we want to be, work where we want, meet how we want,” van Zelderen says. “It shouldn’t be up to our superiors or technology developers to dictate how we want to experience the metaverse—let’s give people more freedom to choose and build their work environments.”
Companies, for their part, are likely to be selective in how they utilize virtual spaces. “Companies are trying to identify where VR actually adds value,” says Rolf Illenberger, CEO and founder of VRdirect, which focuses on enterprise VR software. “It doesn’t make sense to use new technology for something that’s fine on a video call.”
In addition, the willingness to adopt VR technology remains a hurdle, as some find wearing headsets unnatural and the learning curve for the technology is steep. Even Apple’s Vision Pro headsets, which have made great strides in functionality, are Sales of more than 500,000 devices are not expected this year in the USA.
“VR hasn’t really come along in the last decade in the way that people thought it would,” says JP Gownder, vice president and principal analyst on the Future of Work team at Forrester. “For a very long time, it was full of failures and expectations that were higher than reality. There seems to be a certain level of rejection from people.” Sleeker, better hardware that looks like a pair of glasses could be key to broader adoption, but the technology hasn’t yet met those needs.
Illenberger says he sees companies using VR more for safety training and in areas where employees have a more hands-on approach to product development, such as automotive engineering and manufacturing. UPS used VR to machinistsFidelity has used VR technology to remote implementation employees, and Walmart has used VR to train employees in their stores.
But for some, the value of meeting in the metaverse itself has been proven. Toronto lawyer Madaline Zannes has law firms in the metaverse. He meets with colleagues and clients in his five-story building in the virtual world of Somnium Space.
While being in the metaverse has been a great networking and marketing tool for her firm, which focuses on commercial law and Web3, Zannes says it also helps her build “a more emotional connection with everyone” because of the immersive nature of the platforms she uses. People can move around or express emotions, and being able to tap someone on the shoulder and start a conversation is much more personal than being confined to a square on a immense group video call.
The metaverse’s continued growth and adoption have been delayed largely by the resumption of business travel since the Covid-19 pandemic hit. And a year after most people first heard the term metaverse, they’ve become familiar with ChatGPT. AI has become the shiny up-to-date object that grabs the attention of CEOs—even if they’re not actively training employees to utilize it. But another pandemic-style shock to the business world could spur faster investment and development in virtual technology for work, Gownder says.
Even if Web 2.0 has descended into a nightmare of misinformation and privacy, there is still time to save the metaverse from such a fate, as my colleague Megan Farokhmanesh has written . But to make it work for workers, developers will have to meet their needs. Until then, people will either get their asses back in physical offices or continue using Hollywood Squares Model.