When Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta in 2021, he My dear The metaverse could reach a billion people within a decade. Not long after, Bill Gates foretold that within two or three years “most virtual meetings will move from 2D camera image grids, which I call Hollywood Squares model, although I know it probably takes me back to the metaverse, a 3D space with digital avatars.”
In fall 2022, Microsoft Announced a partnership with Meta that would bring Mesh, a mixed reality collaboration platform, and its suite of Microsoft 365 apps to Meta’s Quest products. Meta has launched Horizon Workrooms for meeting purposes. IT company Accenture bought 60,000 Oculus headsets to train new workers in October 2021 and built its own metaverse, called Floor Nwhich included digital twins of some of its offices, complete with cafeterias and legless avatars.
Yet nearly three years later, the average office worker isn’t strapping a headset on their face to meet with colleagues. While nine in ten companies can identify use cases for extended reality in their organization, only one in five has invested in the technology, according to research surveying 400 large companies across multiple industries published by Omdia in February.
But this doesn’t mean the vision is dead. Rather, experts say, companies are looking for the best use cases for the metaverse. They add that the metaverse itself (which right now isn’t a monolith but a concept fragmented across multiple virtual worlds and platforms) will need some tweaking to work well for different types of employees, and the technology people use to access it needs 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 workers feel in the metaverse and taking steps to combat the loneliness some experience when they enter virtual spaces that can’t match physical meetings. Current technology “removes people too far from their reality, and people don’t want that for long periods of time,” van Zelderen says.
Instead, he says, the metaverse should “enhance our reality rather than replace it.” That is, it should do more than replicate the physical office. People could use technology to meet in intriguing virtual locations, such as mountaintops or Mars, or design virtual workplaces to meet the specific needs of their teams, he adds.
“We have the opportunity to be who we want to be, to work where we want to be, to meet in the way we want to,” says van Zelderen. “It shouldn’t be up to supervisors or technology developers to dictate how we want to experience the metaverse – people should be given more freedom to choose and create their work environment.”
For their part, companies are likely to be selective about how they use virtual spaces. “Companies are trying to identify where VR really adds value,” says Rolf Illenberger, CEO and founder of VRdirect, which focuses on VR software for businesses. “There’s no point in using a new technology for something that works perfectly on a video call.”
Additionally, willingness to embrace VR technology remains a hurdle, with some people finding headsets unnatural and the technological learning curve steep. Even Apple’s Vision Pro headset, which made great strides in functionality, is No more than 500,000 devices are expected to be sold in the US this year.
“Virtual reality hasn’t taken off in the last decade to the extent that people imagined it would,” says JP Gownder, vice president and principal analyst on the Future of Work team at research firm Forrester. “It’s been plagued by failures and expectations that outstripped reality for a long time. There seems to be some level of human pushback on the technology.” Sleeker, better hardware that resembles a pair of glasses could be the key to wider adoption, but the technology hasn’t met those needs yet.
Illenberger says he sees companies using VR more frequently for safety training and in fields where workers take a more hands-on approach to product development, such as engineering and automotive manufacturing. UPS has used VR technology to train driversFidelity has used virtual reality to remote onboarding of employees, and Walmart has used virtual reality to train their store workers.
But for some, the value of gathering in the metaverse alone has proven valid. Madaline Zannes, a Toronto-based lawyer, has law office In the metaverse, he meets with colleagues and clients in his five-story building in the virtual world Somnium Space.
While having a presence in the metaverse has been a great marketing and networking tool for his firm, which focuses on corporate law and Web3, Zannes says it also helps foster “a more emotional connection with everyone,” due to the immersive nature of the platforms he 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 limited to a square on a video call in a large group.
The development and adoption of the metaverse has largely been delayed because business travel has resumed since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. And a year after most people first heard the term metaverse, they were introduced to ChatGPT. AI became the shiny new object that caught the attention of CEOs, even if they aren’t actively training workers to use it. However, Gownder says, another shock to the business world along the lines of the pandemic could spur faster investment and development of virtual technology for work.
While Web 2.0 has become a nightmare of misinformation and privacy, there is still time to save the metaverse from that fate, as my colleague Megan Farokhmanesh has written. But making it work for employees will require developers to cater to their needs. Until then, people will either stick to working in physical offices or embrace technology even more. Hollywood Squares model.