Screenshot in Horizon Workspaces with pointing finger

Working in the Metaverse

Ian Smith
Ian Smith

I recently acquired an Oculus Quest 2 VR headset, and I’ve been reacquainting myself with the Metaverse.

Back in 2006, I became really excited about the possibilities that arose from using interactive 3D environments for work. I worked for IBM at that time, and we did some fascinating experiments in Second Life. I remember seeing everything from slide presentations to a 3D representation of a data centre which had live links to the real thing. You could fly around in it, and see which servers were misbehaving.

However, perhaps the technology was not quite mature enough at that stage, and it didn’t catch on in a big way. What this experience did make clear to me was that the potential impact of virtual worlds on work was colossal. Fast-forward to 2021, and Facebook has changed its name to Meta and announced a considerable investment in creating “the Metaverse”. Microsoft announced their version of it in March 2021, known as Mesh. They are now rolling out Mesh for Microsoft Teams.

Recently, I’ve been exploring VR work environments with Dan Hammond of Squadify. We’ve been trying out Horizon Workrooms from Meta. It was fun. We made a video.

So, is this the metaverse? Well, no, it probably isn’t. It’s not universally connected, for a start. You can’t walk out of the door of your Workroom and enter the Street, as Hiro Protagonist does in Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel where the term “metaverse” was first coined. The Street is a universal highway, from where Metaverse users can access each company’s virtual premises. Today, we must create a new avatar for each virtual environment that we use, and there is next to no interoperability, although that is part of the dream put forward by Mark Zuckerberg in Meta’s launch video.

However, what we did learn in Horizon Workrooms was that there is considerable potential here to change how we work together, especially remotely. Teams can feel as though they are present in the same place, rather than geographically dispersed, with interaction confined to the rectangular windows of a Zoom call.

It’s clunky, it’s a bit unreliable, and battery life isn’t the best. However, these are problems that will be solved by the advance of technology. Despite these issues, VR and the Metaverse feel very much as though they will play a very significant role in the future of work and of teamwork.

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