When Mark Zuckerberg When Facebook rebranded as Meta in 2021, he estimated that the metaverse could reach a billion people in a decade. Not long after, Bill Gates predicted that within two or three years, “most virtual meetings will move from 2D camera image grids, which I call the Hollywood Squares model, though I know that probably dates me — to the metaverse, a 3D space with digital avatars.”
In late 2022, Microsoft announced a partnership with Meta that would bring mixed reality collaboration platform Mesh and its suite of Microsoft 365 apps to Meta’s Quest products. Meta has launched Horizon Workrooms for conferencing. IT company Accenture purchased 60,000 Oculus headsets in October 2021 to train new employees and built its own metaverse, called Nth floor, featuring digital twins of some of its offices, complete with cafes and legless avatars.
Yet, nearly three years later, the average office worker doesn’t strap on a headset to meet with colleagues. While nine out of 10 companies can identify use cases for extended reality in their organizations, only one in five has invested in the technology, according to a survey of 400 large companies across multiple industries published by Omdia in February.
But that doesn’t mean the vision is dead. Instead, experts say, companies are looking for the best use cases for the metaverse. They add that the metaverse itself — not currently a monolith, but a concept fragmented across multiple virtual worlds and platforms — needs a makeover to work well for different types of workers, and the technology people use to access it needs to improve.
The metaverse needs to be built in a way that puts the needs of real people first, says Anand van Zelderen, a researcher in organizational behavior and virtual reality at the University of Zurich. That means evaluating how employees feel in the metaverse and taking steps to combat the loneliness some experience when they enter virtual spaces that can’t quite match physical encounters. Current technology “takes people too far out of their reality, and people don’t want that for long periods of time,” van Zelderen says.
Instead, he says, the metaverse should “amplify our reality, rather than replace it.” That means it should do more than replicate the physical office. People could use the 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, to work where we want to be, to meet each other in the ways we want,” van Zelderen says. “It shouldn’t be up to supervisors or tech developers to dictate how we experience the metaverse — give people more freedom to choose and create their work environments.”
Companies, 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 enterprise VR software. “There’s no point in using a new technology for something that’s perfectly fine in a video call.”
Moreover, willingness to adopt VR technology remains a hurdle, as some people find wearing headsets unnatural and the technology’s learning curve is steep. Even Apple’s Vision Pro headsets, which made huge leaps in functionality, are expected to sell no more than 500,000 units in the U.S. this year.
“VR hasn’t taken off in the last decade as much as people imagined,” says JP Gownder, vice president and principal analyst on the Future of Work team at research firm Forrester. “It’s been a failure for a long time and has had expectations that have exceeded reality. There seems to be a degree of human rejection of the technology.” Sleeker, better hardware that resembles glasses could be the key to wider adoption, but the technology has yet to meet those needs.
Illenberger says he’s seen companies increasingly use VR for safety training and in industries where employees take a more hands-on approach to developing products, such as engineering and automotive manufacturing. UPS has used VR technology to train drivers, Fidelity has used VR to remotely onboard employees, and Walmart has used VR to train employees in its stores.
But for some, the value of coming together in the metaverse has proven itself. Madaline Zannes, a Toronto lawyer who runs a law firm in the metaverse, meets with colleagues and clients in her five-story building in the virtual world of Somnium Space.
While having a presence in the metaverse is a great networking and marketing tool for her firm, which focuses on corporate law and Web3, Zannes says it also helps her create “more of an emotional connection with everyone” because of the immersive nature of the platforms she uses. People can move around or show emotion, 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 video call in a large group.
Further development and adoption of the metaverse has largely slowed as business travel resumed since the onset of Covid-19. And a year after most people first heard the term metaverse, they were introduced to ChatGPT. AI became the new shiny object that caught the attention of CEOs, even if they weren’t actively training employees to use it. However, Gownder says another shock to the business world along the lines of the pandemic could lead to faster investment and development in virtual work technology.
Even as Web 2.0 descends into a disinformation and privacy nightmare, 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 employees, developers need to meet their needs. Until then, people will either stick their butts in physical offices or Hollywood Squares fashion model.
