When Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook to Meta in 2021, he estimated that the metaverse could reach one billion people in a decade. Not long after, Bill Gates predicted that within two or three years, “most virtual meetings will move from grids to 2D camera images—what I call Hollywood Squares model, although I know that probably dates me from the metaverse, a 3D space with digital avatars.
In fall 2022, Microsoft announced a 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 launches Horizon Workrooms for meetings. IT company Accenture bought 60,000 Oculus headsets to train new workers in October 2021 and built its own metaverse called the Nth floor, which includes digital twins of some of its offices, complete with coffee shops and legless avatars.
And yet, almost three years later, the average office worker isn’t putting headphones on his face to meet his colleagues. While nine out of 10 companies can identify use cases for augmented reality in their organization, only one in five have invested in the technology, according to research covering 400 large companies across multiple industries published by Omdia in February.
But that 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—not a monolith at this point, but a concept fragmented across multiple virtual worlds and platforms—will need some reworking to work well for different types of employees, and the technology people use to access her, she needs to improve.
The metaverse must be built in a way that centers the needs of real people, says Anand van Zelderen, a researcher in organizational behavior and virtual reality at the University of Zurich. This means assessing how workers in the metaverse feel and taking steps to combat the loneliness some experience when entering virtual spaces that cannot match physical encounters. Current technology “takes people out of their reality too much, and people don’t want that for long periods of time,” says van Zelderen.
Instead, he says, the metaverse should “enhance our reality, not replace it.” This means it needs to do more than copy the personal office. People could use the 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, work where we want to be, meet in ways we want,” says van Zelderen. “It shouldn’t be up to executives or technical developers to dictate how we want to experience the metaverse – give people more freedom to choose and build their work environment.”
Businesses, for their part, are likely to be selective in 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 enterprises. “It doesn’t make sense to use a new technology for something that is perfectly suited for a video call.”
Additionally, the willingness to adopt VR technology remains a barrier, as some people find wearing a headset unnatural and the technology learning curve is steep. Even Apple’s Vision Pro headphones, which took a big leap in functionality, aren’t expected to sell more than 500,000 units in the US this year.
“VR hasn’t developed in the last decade to the extent that people imagined it could,” said JP Gownder, vice president and principal analyst in the Future of Work team at research firm Forrester. “It is full of failure and expectations that have exceeded reality for a very long time. There seems to be some level of human rejection of technology. Sleeker, better hardware that resembles a pair of glasses may be the key to wider adoption, but the technology is not yet meeting those needs.
Illenberger says he sees companies using VR more often for safety training and in fields where workers are taking a more hands-on approach to product development, such as engineering and automotive manufacturing. UPS uses VR technology to train drivers, Fidelity uses VR to remotely engage employees, and Walmart uses VR to train workers in its stores.
But for some, the value of collecting only in the metaverse has been proven. Madalyn Zanes, a Toronto-based lawyer, has law firms in the metaverse. She meets with colleagues and clients in her five-story building in the virtual world Somnium Space.
While a presence in the metaverse is a great networking and marketing tool for her firm, which focuses on business law as well as Web3, Zannes says it also helps foster “a more emotional connection with everyone” because of the immersive nature of the platforms it uses. People can move around or emote, and being able to tap someone on the shoulder and start a conversation is much more personal than being confined to a square during a large group video call.
Further development and adoption of the metaverse has largely slowed as business travel has resumed following the onset of Covid-19. And a year after most people heard the term metaverse for the first time, they were introduced to ChatGPT. AI has become the new shiny object that has caught the attention of CEOs—even if they aren’t actively training workers to use it. However, Gounder says another shock to the business world along the lines of the pandemic could spur faster investment and development of virtual work technologies.
Even as Web 2.0 becomes a disinformation and privacy nightmare, there’s still time to save the metaverse from a similar fate, as my colleague Megan Farokhmanesh has written. But to make it work for employees, developers will need to meet their needs. Until then, people will either stick their butts into physical offices or embrace even more Hollywood Squares model.
