Meetings in the metaverse: The future of work
Immersive technology could add a new dimension to the hybrid work model
IT’S Monday morning and time for the weekly team meeting. Sammy King takes his virtual reality headset out of the drawer in the desk of his home office and straps it onto his head. With just a few clicks he finds himself transported in avatar form to a virtual meeting room, where he’s sitting at a long table. He can see that a few of his colleagues – or at least their avatars – have already arrived. He chats to one of them, who’s sitting next to him and whom he hasn’t seen for a while. Across the table a few other colleagues are also having a conversation as they wait for the meeting to start. The avatars of others in the team are appearing, as if by magic, in the remaining empty seats.
Colleagues who don’t have access to the VR tech have dialled in on video and can be seen on a screen at the side of the meeting room – just like colleagues dialling in on a video call in a real-life meeting. At the head of the table, there’s a large whiteboard and, as the meeting progresses, team members are able to share files or slides or their own laptop screen for everyone to see…
This may sound a little like science fiction, but it’s very much (virtual) reality. Sammy King works at Meta and his weekly meeting takes place using the company’s Horizon Workrooms virtual conferencing technology. It gives a sense of what office life could be like when the metaverse is fully realised – while also demonstrating a current alternative to the Zoom meetings that have become a regular feature of life for remote and hybrid workers.
King describes these meetings as “a bizarre but amazing experience”. Unlike a traditional videoconference, in which only one person can speak at a time, the Horizon Workrooms spatial audio tech allows participants to talk amongst themselves as if they are in a real office. The VR platform also gives participants the sense of essentially being inside their computer screens, rather than just looking at them.
“You get this really amazing sense of presence, which is very difficult to articulate,” says King. “Over the last two years we’ve got used to talking to people on screens but now suddenly you can feel like you’re in close proximity to people even though you’re all working in different places. It’s a real game changer.”
Meta is far from alone in offering a gateway to a virtual working world. Others include Glue, Connec2, Immersed and PixelMax. “We’re approaching a threshold where the technology begins to truly replicate the experience of being together in the office,” says Pushpak Kypuram, Founder-Director of India-based immersive platform NextMeet. Microsoft plans to introduce 3D avatars to Teams via its Mesh virtual experience platform.
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Regus recently commissioned a survey of company leaders and office workers to gauge their views on the metaverse. Nearly two-thirds (65 per cent) of business leaders said they believed their company would embrace working in the metaverse, and a similar number agreed that the metaverse is the natural progression for hybrid working.
Asked which aspects of office life would be likely to improve in the metaverse, office workers polled by Regus ranked communication between team members (44 per cent) and teamwork (41 per cent) highest. Leaders considered teamwork (43 per cent) would benefit most, followed by creativity (41 per cent).
In other words, the metaverse would constitute a kind of Zoom on steroids, offering a more realistic and immersive version of online teamwork for when hybrid and remote workers are unable to be in the same room together.
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UK-based PixelMax designs immersive virtual workplaces specifically aimed at enhancing team cohesion and workplace collaboration. This includes the ability to randomly ‘bump into’ colleagues’ avatars as well as being able to walk around the office floor, see where colleagues are and drop by for a chat.
At the end of 2021, US startup Offbeat Media Group opened a “Virtual Clubhouse” for its fully remote team, offering a variety of experiences including concerts and social happenings. According to co-founder and CEO Shep Ogden, the Clubhouse has become an ideal place for employees to celebrate birthdays or just hang out.
A good proportion of both workers and business leaders believe that onboarding and training will benefit from the metaverse. When new recruits join a company, face-to-face time is essential as they begin the onboarding process, getting up to speed with the culture, brand and values of the business. Online video options have attempted to fill this space but they lack a sense of true interaction.
As a result, companies such as Accenture, Walmart and Bank of America are increasingly using VR for both onboarding and training. Even before the pandemic, Accenture was exploring the use of extended reality in different contexts and had begun employing VR in setting tasks for its graduate assessment days. Last year, the company purchased 60,000 Oculus VR headsets to use for onboarding, and joiners now spend their first day at the company in its One Accenture Park campus, part of its “Nth floor” corporate metaverse, which the company has developed with Microsoft. This fiscal year, 150,000 new hires will be working in the metaverse on their first day.
Accenture’s virtual space is also used for soft skills training. “Learnings in VR offer the same benefits as traditional digital learning, such as scalability, no travel costs, and availability anytime, anywhere,” says training consultant Hannah Rauth. “But additionally, VR creates immersive learning experiences where learners are as close to the ‘real world’ as they can get. Real-life scenarios, such as performance discussions or salary negotiations, are simulated, and learners can practise and apply their skills.”
In December last year, the Hong Kong office of PwC purchased a plot of virtual land in The Sandbox, a 3D virtual world created for gamers by software company Animoca Brands. PwC says it will use the space to set up “a Web 3.0 advisory hub to facilitate a new generation of professional services, including accounting and taxation”. It’s not alone in establishing a presence in the metaverse: the likes of Atari, Samsung, Adidas and Miller Lite, not to mention Snoop Dogg, are all part of this new virtual land grab.
(Whether this is the beginning of a significant new area of business for realtors or simply the beginnings of a bubble that will burst remains to be seen – it’s worth noting that land in the metaverse is potentially infinite, unlike land in the real world.)
But where will workers access this world? A flexible workspace offers the ideal location for those who want to combine the benefits of the metaverse with the advantages of a real-life office space. More than half of workers (54 per cent) and company leaders (56 per cent) in Regus’s survey said they believe that shared office spaces will be key to giving businesses access to the metaverse in the years to come.
Yet we’re unlikely to be spending all of our time in a virtual world cut off from reality – something that was a worry for our survey subjects, and more so for workers than for their bosses.
Henry Stuart, co-founder and CEO of Visualise, a leading VR production company, whose daily work life revolves around VR, says he couldn’t currently envisage spending whole days in a virtual office. For one thing, he says, VR devices are heavy. “The headsets have still got a long way to go before they win everyone over,” he adds. “And even if they get better, I don’t know anyone who would want to wear one all day long. I wouldn’t feel comfortable not knowing what’s going on around me for such a long period of time.”
For metaverse workers on the move, another potential issue is the level of bandwidth needed for sophisticated VR and AR applications. This is likely to be resolved when 5G mobile connectivity is fully rolled out, bringing superfast download speeds and low latency.
This article is an extract from a paper produced by Regus, part of workspace group IWG
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